University Of Virginia Press: 345 books
Stranger America
A Narrative Ethics of Exclusion
Language: English
Release Date: April 30, 2018
Contradictory ideals of egalitarianism and self-reliance haunt America’s democratic state. We need look no further than Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and victory for proof that early twentieth-century anxieties about individualism, race, and the foreign or intrusive "other" persist...
by Terry Eagleton
Language: English
Release Date: September 9, 2015
Language: English
Release Date: September 9, 2015
In his latest book, Terry Eagleton, one of the most celebrated intellects of our time, considers the least regarded of the virtues. His compelling meditation on hope begins with a firm rejection of the role of optimism in life’s course. Like its close relative, pessimism, it is more a system of...
Novel Ventures
Fiction and Print Culture in England, 1690-1730
Language: English
Release Date: October 16, 2017
The eighteenth century British book trade marks the beginning of the literary marketplace as we know it. The lapsing of the Licensing Act in 1695 brought an end to pre-publication censorship of printed texts and restrictions on the number of printers and presses in Britain. Resisting the standard...
American Imperialism's Undead
The Occupation of Haiti and the Rise of Caribbean Anticolonialism
Language: English
Release Date: September 2, 2016
As modern Caribbean politics and literature emerged in the first half of the twentieth century, Haiti, as the region's first independent state, stood as a source of inspiration for imagining decolonization and rooting regional identity in Africanness. Yet at precisely the same moment that anticolonialism...
by Jean-Yves Lacoste
Language: English
Release Date: March 4, 2014
Language: English
Release Date: March 4, 2014
"Christian philosophy" is commonly regarded as an oxymoron, philosophy being thought incompatible with the assumptions and conclusions required by religious faith. According to this way of thinking, philosophy and theology must forever remain distinct.
In From Theology to Theological...
Rethinking Sincerity and Authenticity
The Ethics of Theatricality in Kant, Kierkegaard, and Levinas
Language: English
Release Date: October 27, 2017
"This above all: To thine own self be true," is an ideal—or pretense—belonging as much to Hamlet as to the carefully choreographed realms of today’s politics and social media. But what if our "true" selves aren’t our "best" selves? Instagram’s curated portraits of authenticity often betray...
How Societies Are Born
Governance in West Central Africa before 1600
Language: English
Release Date: October 5, 2012
Like stars, societies are born, and this story deals with such a birth. It asks a fundamental and compelling question: How did societies first coalesce from the small foraging communities that had roamed in West Central Africa for many thousands of years?
Jan Vansina continues a career-long...
A Storm over This Court
Law, Politics, and Supreme Court Decision Making in Brown v. Board of Education
Language: English
Release Date: May 24, 2013
On the way to offering a new analysis of the basis of the Supreme Court’s iconic decision in Brown v. Board of Education, Jeffrey Hockett critiques an array of theories that have arisen to explain it and Supreme Court decision making generally. Drawing upon justices’ books, articles, correspondence,...
by John O. Jordan
Language: English
Release Date: February 23, 2011
Language: English
Release Date: February 23, 2011
Supposing "Bleak House" is an extended meditation on what many consider to be Dickens’s and nineteenth-century England’s greatest work of narrative fiction. Focusing on the novel’s retrospective narrator, whom he identifies as Esther Woodcourt in order to distinguish her from her younger, unmarried...
Mobilizing Opportunities
The Evolving Latino Electorate and the Future of American Politics
Language: English
Release Date: November 4, 2013
The growth of the Latino population is the most significant demographic shift in the United States today. Yet growth alone cannot explain this population’s increasing impact on the electorate; nor can a parsing of its subethnicities. In the most significant analysis to date on the growing political...
American Road Narratives
Reimagining Mobility in Literature and Film
Language: English
Release Date: June 29, 2015
The freedom to go anywhere and become anyone has profoundly shaped our national psyche. Transforming our sense of place and identity--whether in terms of social and economic status, or race and ethnicity, or gender and sexuality—American mobility is perhaps nowhere more vividly captured than in...
by Daniel Picouly, Jeanne Garane
Language: English
Release Date: January 11, 2016
Language: English
Release Date: January 11, 2016
October 15, 1793: the eve of Marie-Antoinette’s execution. The Reign of Terror has descended upon revolutionary France, and thousands are beheaded daily under the guillotine. Edmond Coffin and Jonathan Gravedigger, two former soldiers now employed in disposing of the dead, are hired to search the...
Willful Submission
Sado-Erotics and Heavenly Marriage in Victorian Religious Poetry
Language: English
Release Date: January 2, 2018
Victorian England: a Jesuit priest writes of wrestling with God at night, limbs entangled; an Anglican sister begs Jesus, her divine lover, to end her aching anticipation of their union; a clergyman exhorts nuns to study the example of medieval women who suffered on the rack in order to become "brides"...
Empiricist Devotions
Science, Religion, and Poetry in Early Eighteenth-Century England
Language: English
Release Date: April 5, 2016
Featuring a moment in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England before the disciplinary divisions that we inherit today were established, Empiricist Devotions recovers a kind of empiricist thinking in which the techniques and emphases of science, religion, and literature combined and...