Duke University Press Books imprint: 2462 books
A View from the Bottom
Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation
Language: English
Release Date: July 29, 2014
A View from the Bottom offers a major critical reassessment of male effeminacy and its racialization in visual culture. Examining portrayals of Asian and Asian American men in Hollywood cinema, European art film, gay pornography, and experimental documentary, Nguyen Tan Hoang explores the cultural...
Laughing at the Devil
Seeing the World with Julian of Norwich
Language: English
Release Date: July 16, 2018
Laughing at the Devil is an invitation to see the world with a medieval visionary now known as Julian of Norwich, believed to be the first woman to have written a book in English. (We do not know her given name, because she became known by the name of a church that became her home.) Julian “saw...
Matters of Gravity
Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century
Language: English
Release Date: July 21, 2003
The headlong rush, the rapid montage, the soaring superhero, the plunging roller coaster—Matters of Gravity focuses on the experience of technological spectacle in American popular culture over the past century. In these essays, leading media and cultural theorist Scott Bukatman reveals how popular...
Ethereal Queer
Television, Historicity, Desire
Language: English
Release Date: January 20, 2014
In Ethereal Queer, Amy Villarejo offers a historically engaged, theoretically sophisticated, and often personal account of how TV representations of queer life have changed as the medium has evolved since the 1950s. Challenging the widespread view that LGBT characters did not make a sustained appearance...
Lesbian Rule
Cultural Criticism and the Value of Desire
Language: English
Release Date: November 5, 2003
With hair slicked back and shirt collar framing her young patrician face, Katherine Hepburn's image in the 1935 film Sylvia Scarlett was seen by many as a lesbian representation. Yet, Amy Villarejo argues, there is no final ground upon which to explain why that image of Hepburn signifies lesbian or...
Bodies of Work
Civic Display and Labor in Industrial Pittsburgh
Language: English
Release Date: September 16, 2008
By the end of the nineteenth century, Pittsburgh emerged as a major manufacturing center in the United States. Its rise as a leading producer of steel, glass, and coal was fueled by machine technology and mass immigration, developments that fundamentally changed the industrial workplace. Because Pittsburgh’s...
On Henry James
The Best from American Literature
Language: English
Release Date: August 1, 2012
From 1929 to the latest issue, American Literature has been the foremost journal expressing the findings of those who study our national literature. American Literature has published the best work of literary historians, critics, and bibliographers, ranging from the founders of discipline to the best...
Sixteen Modern American Authors
A Survey of Research and Criticism since 1972
Language: English
Release Date: August 1, 2012
Praise for the earlier edition:
“Students of modern American literature have for some years turned to Fifteen Modern American Authors (1969) as an indispensable guide to significant scholarship and criticism about twentieth-century American writers. In its new form—Sixteenth Modern American Authors—it...
New World Drama
The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649-1849
Language: English
Release Date: September 1, 2014
In New World Drama, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon turns to the riotous scene of theatre in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world to explore the creation of new publics. Moving from England to the Caribbean to the early United States, she traces the theatrical emergence of a collective body in the colonized...
Manly Arts
Masculinity and Nation in Early American Cinema
Language: English
Release Date: March 6, 2006
In this innovative analysis of the interconnections between nation and aesthetics in the United States during the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, David A. Gerstner reveals the crucial role of early cinema in consolidating a masculine ideal under American capitalism. Gerstner describes...
by Lee D. Baker
Language: English
Release Date: March 3, 2010
Language: English
Release Date: March 3, 2010
In the late nineteenth century, if ethnologists in the United States recognized African American culture, they often perceived it as something to be overcome and left behind. At the same time, they were committed to salvaging “disappearing” Native American culture by curating objects, narrating...
Male Call
Becoming Jack London
Language: English
Release Date: August 26, 1996
When Jack London died in 1916 at age forty, he was one of the most famous writers of his time. Eighty years later he remains one of the most widely read American authors in the world. The first major critical study of London to appear in a decade, Male Call analyzes the nature of his appeal by closely...
Remote Avant-Garde
Aboriginal Art under Occupation
Language: English
Release Date: February 4, 2016
In Remote Avant-Garde Jennifer Loureide Biddle models new and emergent desert Aboriginal aesthetics as an art of survival. Since 2007, Australian government policy has targeted "remote" Australian Aboriginal communities as at crisis level of delinquency and dysfunction. Biddle asks how emergent...
Vampires, Mummies and Liberals
Bram Stoker and the Politics of Popular Fiction
Language: English
Release Date: July 22, 1996
Nearly a hundred years after its debut in 1897, Dracula is still one of the most popular of all Gothic narratives, always in print and continually adapted for stage and screen. Paradoxically, David Glover suggests, this very success has obscured the historical conditions and authorial circumstances...