Cornell University Press: 1150 books
To Kill Nations
American Strategy in the Air-Atomic Age and the Rise of Mutually Assured Destruction
Language: English
Release Date: April 22, 2015
Between 1945 and 1950, the United States had a global nuclear monopoly. The A-bomb transformed the nation’s strategic airpower and saw the Air Force displace the Navy at the front line of American defense. In To Kill Nations, Edward Kaplan traces the evolution of American strategic airpower and...
Bread and Circuses
Theories of Mass Culture As Social Decay
Language: English
Release Date: November 1, 2016
Lively and well written, Bread and Circuses analyzes theories that have treated mass culture as either a symptom or a cause of social decadence. Discussing many of the most influential and representative theories of mass culture, it ranges widely from Greek and Roman origins, through Marx, Nietzsche,...
Language as Hermeneutic
A Primer on the Word and Digitization
Language: English
Release Date: January 15, 2018
Language in all its modes—oral, written, print, electronic—claims the central role in Walter J. Ong’s acclaimed speculations on human culture. After his death, his archives were found to contain unpublished drafts of a final book manuscript that Ong envisioned as a distillation of his life’s...
Joyce
The Return of the Repressed
Language: English
Release Date: March 15, 2018
Did James Joyce, that icon of modernity, spearhead the dismantling of the Cartesian subject? Or was he a supreme example of a modern man forever divided and never fully known to himself? This volume reads the dialogue of contradictory cultural voices in Joyce’s works—revolutionary and reactionary,...
Surprise
The Poetics of the Unexpected from Milton to Austen
Language: English
Release Date: September 25, 2015
Today, in the era of the spoiler alert, "surprise" in fiction is primarily associated with an unexpected plot twist, but in earlier usage, the word had darker and more complex meanings. Originally denoting a military ambush or physical assault, surprise went through a major semantic shift in the eighteenth...
by Dominick LaCapra
Language: English
Release Date: June 7, 2019
Language: English
Release Date: June 7, 2019
Perhaps the leading Western intellectual of his time, Jean-Paul Sartre has written highly influential works in an awesomely diverse number of subject areas: philosophy, literature, biography, autobiography, and the theory of history. This concise and lucidly written book discusses Sartre's contributions...
Russian Formalism
A Metapoetics
Language: English
Release Date: November 1, 2016
Russian Formalism, one of the twentieth century's most important movements in literary criticism, has received far less attention than most of its rivals. Examining Formalism in light of more recent developments in literary theory, Peter Steiner here offers the most comprehensive critique of Formalism...
Transfigured World
Walter Pater's Aesthetic Historicism
Language: English
Release Date: November 1, 2016
Exploring the intricacy and complexity of Walter Pater’s prose, Transfigured World challenges traditional approaches to Pater and shows precise ways in which the form of his prose expresses its content. Carolyn Williams asserts that Pater’s aestheticism and his historicism should be understood...
What Else Is Pastoral?
Renaissance Literature and the Environment
Language: English
Release Date: March 18, 2011
Pastoral was one of the most popular literary forms of early modern England. Inspired by classical and Italian Renaissance antecedents, writers from Ben Jonson to John Beaumont and Abraham Cowley wrote in idealized terms about the English countryside. It is often argued that the Renaissance pastoral...
Democratic Hope
Pragmatism and the Politics of Truth
Language: English
Release Date: July 22, 2015
Pragmatism, as Richard Rorty has said, "names the chief glory of our country's intellectual tradition." In Democratic Hope, Robert B. Westbrook examines the varieties of classical pragmatist thought in the work of John Dewey, William James, and Charles Peirce, testing in good pragmatic fashion the...
Constructive Illusions
Misperceiving the Origins of International Cooperation
Language: English
Release Date: August 21, 2014
Are the best international agreements products of mutual understanding? The conventional wisdom in economics, sociology, and political science is that accurate perceptions of others' interests, beliefs, and ideologies promote cooperation. Obstacles to international cooperation therefore emerge from...
Inequality in the Workplace
Labor Market Reform in Japan and Korea
Language: English
Release Date: February 6, 2014
The past several decades have seen widespread reform of labor markets across advanced industrial countries, but most of the existing research on job security, wage bargaining, and social protection is based on the experience of the United States and Western Europe. In Inequality in the Workplace,...
Border Work
Spatial Lives of the State in Rural Central Asia
Language: English
Release Date: April 15, 2014
In Central Asia's Ferghana Valley, where Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan meet, state territoriality has taken on new significance in these states' second decade of independence, reshaping landscapes and transforming livelihoods in a densely populated, irrigation-dependent region. Through an...
The Geopolitics of Spectacle
Space, Synecdoche, and the New Capitals of Asia
Language: English
Release Date: June 15, 2018
Why do autocrats build spectacular new capital cities? In The Geopolitics of Spectacle, Natalie Koch considers how autocratic rulers use "spectacular" projects to shape state-society relations, but rather than focus on the standard approach—on the project itself—she considers the unspectacular...