Duke University Press Books imprint: 2462 books
Wedded to the Land?
Gender, Boundaries, and Nationalism in Crisis
Language: English
Release Date: December 17, 2001
In Wedded to the Land? Mary N. Layoun offers a critical commentary on the idea of nationalism in general and on specific attempts to formulate alternatives to the concept in particular. Narratives surrounding three geographically and temporally different national crises form the center of her study:...
Transcendentalist Hermeneutics
Institutional Authority and the Higher Criticism of the Bible
Language: English
Release Date: November 15, 1990
American literary historians have viewed Ralph Waldo Emerson’s resignation from the Unitarian ministry in 1832 in favor of a literary career as emblematic of a main current in American literature. That current is directed toward the possession of a self that is independent and fundamentally opposed...
Masculine/Feminine
Practices of Difference(s)
Language: English
Release Date: April 28, 2004
Nelly Richard is one of the most prominent cultural theorists writing in Latin America today. As a participant in Chile’s neo-avantgarde, Richard worked to expand the possibilities for cultural debate within the constraints imposed by the Pinochet dictatorship (1973–1990), and she has continued...
The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages
On the Unwritten History of Theory
Language: English
Release Date: February 8, 2010
This collection of essays argues that any valid theory of the modern should—indeed must—reckon with the medieval. Offering a much-needed correction to theorists such as Hans Blumenberg, who in his Legitimacy of the Modern Age describes the "modern age" as a complete departure from the...
Cultures of the Death Drive
Melanie Klein and Modernist Melancholia
Language: English
Release Date: May 1, 2003
Cultures of the Death Drive is a comprehensive guide to the work of pioneering psychoanalyst Melanie Klein (1882–1960) and to developments in Kleinian theory to date. It is also an analysis and a demonstration of the distinctive usefulness of Klein’s thought for understanding modernist literature...
Postsocialism and Cultural Politics
China in the Last Decade of the Twentieth Century
Language: English
Release Date: April 25, 2008
In Postsocialism and Cultural Politics, Xudong Zhang offers a critical analysis of China’s “long 1990s,” the tumultuous years between the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown and China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001. The 1990s were marked by Deng Xiaoping’s market-oriented...
Colonial Fantasies
Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770-1870
Language: English
Release Date: September 10, 1997
Since Germany became a colonial power relatively late, postcolonial theorists and histories of colonialism have thus far paid little attention to it. Uncovering Germany’s colonial legacy and imagination, Susanne Zantop reveals the significance of colonial fantasies—a kind of colonialism without...
The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties
Authorship, Appropriation, and the Law
Language: English
Release Date: October 13, 1998
Logos, trademarks, national insignia, brand names, celebrity images, design patents, and advertising texts are vibrant signs in a consumer culture governed by a regime of intellectual property laws. In The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties, professor of law and cultural anthropologist Rosemary...
Class Fictions
Shame and Resistance in the British Working Class Novel, 1890–1945
Language: English
Release Date: November 21, 1994
Many recent discussions of working-class culture in literary and cultural studies have tended to present an oversimplified view of resistance. In this groundbreaking work, Pamela Fox offers a far more complex theory of working-class identity, particularly as reflected in British novels of the late...
by Ronald J. Fiscus, Stanley Fish
Language: English
Release Date: January 30, 1992
Language: English
Release Date: January 30, 1992
Few issues are as mired in rhetoric and controversy as affirmative action. This is certainly no less true now as when Ronald J. Fiscus’s The Constitutional Logic of Affirmative Action was first published in 1992. The controversy has, perhaps, become more charged over the past few years. With this...
by Frank Lentricchia, Stanley Fish, Fredric Jameson
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2000
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2000
Lucchesi and The Whale is an unusual work of fiction by noted author and critic Frank Lentricchia. Its central character, Thomas Lucchesi Jr., is a college professor in the American heartland whose obsessions and compulsions include traveling to visit friends in their last moments of life—because...
Subalternity and Representation
Arguments in Cultural Theory
Language: English
Release Date: December 22, 1999
The term “subalternity” refers to a condition of subordination brought about by colonization or other forms of economic, social, racial, linguistic, and/or cultural dominance. Subaltern studies is, therefore, a study of power. Who has it and who does not. Who is gaining it and who is losing it....
Divergent Modernities
Culture and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Latin America
Language: English
Release Date: June 22, 2001
With a Foreword by José David Saldívar
Since its first publication in Spanish nearly a decade ago, Julio Ramos’s Desenucuentros de la modernidad en America Latina por el siglo XIX has been recognized as one of the most important studies of modernity in the western hemisphere. Available...
Doing What Comes Naturally
Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary & Legal Studies
Language: English
Release Date: May 8, 1989
In literary theory, the philosophy of law, and the sociology of knowledge, no issue has been more central to current debate than the status of our interpretations. Do they rest on a ground of rationality or are they subjective impositions of a merely personal point of view? In Doing What Comes Naturally,...