Cornell University Press: 1150 books
by Sarah Beckwith
Language: English
Release Date: April 8, 2011
Language: English
Release Date: April 8, 2011
Shakespeare lived at a time when England was undergoing the revolution in ritual theory and practice we know as the English Reformation. With it came an unprecedented transformation in the language of religious life. Whereas priests had once acted as mediators between God and men through sacramental...
Dominion Undeserved
Milton and the Perils of Creation
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2009
That the writings of John Milton continue to provoke study and analysis centuries after his lifetime speaks no doubt to his literary greatness but also to the many ways in which his art both engaged and transcended the political and theological tensions of his age. In Dominion Undeserved, Eric B....
Not Quite Shamans
Spirit Worlds and Political Lives in Northern Mongolia
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2009
The forms of contemporary society and politics are often understood to be diametrically opposed to any expression of the supernatural; what happens when those forms are themselves regarded as manifestations of spirits and other occult phenomena? In Not Quite Shamans, Morten Axel Pedersen explores...
Living Buddhism
Mind, Self, and Emotion in a Thai Community
Language: English
Release Date: December 18, 2015
In Living Buddhism, Julia Cassaniti explores Buddhist ideas of impermanence, nonattachment, and intention as they are translated into everyday practice in contemporary Thailand. Although most lay people find these philosophical concepts difficult to grasp, Cassaniti shows that people do in fact make...
Dark Vanishings
Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2009
Patrick Brantlinger here examines the commonly held nineteenth-century view that all "primitive" or "savage" races around the world were doomed sooner or later to extinction. Warlike propensities and presumed cannibalism were regarded as simultaneously noble and suicidal, accelerants of the downfall...
Haunting Encounters
The Ethics of Reading across Boundaries of Difference
Language: English
Release Date: September 15, 2017
Acts of cross-cultural reading have ethical consequences. In Haunting Encounters, Joanne Lipson Freed traces the narrative strategies through which certain works of fiction forge connections with their readers across boundaries of difference. Freed uses the idea of haunting—an intense, temporary,...
Novels, Readers, and Reviewers
Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America
Language: English
Release Date: March 15, 2018
This book describes and characterizes responses of American readers to fiction in the generation before the Civil War. It is based on close examination of the reviews of all novels—both American and European—that appeared in major American periodicals during the years 1840–1860, a period in...
Japan Prepares for Total War
The Search for Economic Security, 1919–1941
Language: English
Release Date: March 22, 2013
The roots of Japan's aggressive, expansionist foreign policy have often been traced to its concern over acute economic vulnerability. Historian Michael Barnhart tests this assumption by examining the events leading up to World War II in the context of Japan's quest for economic security. Drawing on...
Sorry States
Apologies in International Politics
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2009
Governments increasingly offer or demand apologies for past human rights abuses, and it is widely believed that such expressions of contrition are necessary to promote reconciliation between former adversaries. The post-World War II experiences of Japan and Germany suggest that international apologies...
Promiscuous Media
Film and Visual Culture in Imperial Japan, 1926-1945
Language: English
Release Date: January 15, 2018
In Promiscuous Media, Hikari Hori makes a compelling case that the visual culture of Showa-era Japan articulated urgent issues of modernity rather than serving as a simple expression of nationalism. Hori makes clear that the Japanese cinema of the time was in fact almost wholly built on a foundation...
Samurai to Soldier
Remaking Military Service in Nineteenth-Century Japan
Language: English
Release Date: July 9, 2016
In Samurai to Soldier, D. Colin Jaundrill rewrites the military history of nineteenth-century Japan. In fifty years spanning the collapse of the Tokugawa shogunate and the rise of the Meiji nation-state, conscripts supplanted warriors as Japan’s principal arms-bearers. The most common version of...
The End of Satisfaction
Drama and Repentance in the Age of Shakespeare
Language: English
Release Date: April 17, 2014
In The End of Satisfaction, Heather Hirschfeld recovers the historical specificity and the conceptual vigor of the term "satisfaction" during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Focusing on the term’s significance as an organizing principle of Christian repentance, she examines the ways...
by Jan Assmann
Language: English
Release Date: November 14, 2011
Language: English
Release Date: November 14, 2011
"Human beings," the acclaimed Egyptologist Jan Assmann writes, "are the animals that have to live with the knowledge of their death, and culture is the world they create so they can live with that knowledge." In his new book, Assmann explores images of death and of death rites...
Objects of War
The Material Culture of Conflict and Displacement
Language: English
Release Date: May 15, 2018
Historians have become increasingly interested in material culture as both a category of analysis and as a teaching tool. And yet the profession tends to be suspicious of things; words are its stock-in-trade. What new insights can historians gain about the past by thinking about things? A central...