University Of Virginia Press imprint: 344 books

How did early Americans define themselves? The American exceptionalist perspective tells us that the young republic rejected Europeans, Native Americans, and African Americans in order to isolate a national culture and a white national identity. Imitativeness at this time was often seen as antithetical...

In Staging Creolization, Emily Sahakian argues that late-twentieth-century plays by French Caribbean women writers dramatize and enact creolization—the process of cultural transformation through mixing and conflict that occurred in the context of the legacies of slavery and colonialism.

This book shows how the ideals of gentlemanliness in England became the central theme, focus, and conceit for many post-World War II literary texts in representing the state of the nation even under historical duress.

The author posits that the middle-class private home was first invented for the poor; only after testing its social, moral, and aesthetic components did the middle class appropriate it for themselves. Thus, the late eighteenth century proves to be a watershed moment in the home's conceptual life, one that comprises a remarkably rich and complex set of cultural ideas and images.

This collection of essays by leading scholars and practitioners addresses a timely and essential question: How can we design, plan, and sustain built environments that will foster health and healing? With a salutogenic (health-promoting) focus, Healthy Environments, Healing Spaces addresses a range...

This book is a clearly written and highly original work of architectural theory by a scholar whose thinking is well-grounded in philosophy. Mitrovic's contention is that formalism and conceptualism should be equally considered by anyone judging the merits of architectural design.

Adopting the unique perspectives of Americans in Paris--including Jefferson, Paine, and Gouverneur Morris--during the French Revolution, Ziesche challenges the conventional view of the American and French Revolutions as polar opposites, finding many points of similarity between the French and American nation-building projects.

Pointing the way to a new history of the transformation of British subjects into American citizens, State and Citizen challenges the presumption that the early American state was weak by exploring the changing legal and political meaning of citizenship. The volume’s distinguished contributors cast...

Although "thou shalt not kill" is perhaps the most fundamental legal and moral principle, Mark Cooney finds a remarkable lack of consistency in the handling of homicide not only between but within the whole range of human societies. Equality before the law doesn't exist, but not for the reasons, such...

This collection of essays is a distillation of the scholarship of renowned literary genre theorist Ralph Cohen.

Upending conventional literary theory, Hefner argues American Modernism did not begin with the political left in the 1930s, but that writers were already experimenting with American language using cross-racial, cross ethnic, and cross-class vernacular in the popular writing of the 1920s.

Supreme Court justices have long relied on law clerks to help process the work of the Court. Yet few outside the Court are privy to the behind-the-scenes bonds that form between justices and their clerks. In Of Courtiers and Kings, Todd C. Peppers and Clare Cushman offer an intimate new look...

History titles focusing on Witchcraft and madness always do well in our Early Modern German series (price notwithstanding).

Countering the familiar narrative of a party-driven, Jacksonian democratic awakening, the contributors to this volume challenge the correlation of party with democratic participation and emphasize the proliferation of competing public voices in the buildup to the Civil War.