Cornell University Press imprint: 972 books
A Minor Apocalypse
Warsaw during the First World War
Language: English
Release Date: February 21, 2017
In A Minor Apocalypse, Robert Blobaum explores the social and cultural history of Warsaw's "forgotten war" of 1914–1918. Beginning with the bank panic that accompanied the outbreak of the Great War, Blobaum guides his readers through spy scares, bombardments, mass migratory movements, and the Russian...
Killing Others
A Natural History of Ethnic Violence
Language: English
Release Date: February 1, 2017
In Killing Others, Matthew Lange explores why humans ruthlessly attack and kill people from other ethnic communities. Drawing on an array of cases from around the world and insight from a variety of disciplines, Lange provides a simple yet powerful explanation that pinpoints the influential role of...
She Hath Been Reading
Women and Shakespeare Clubs in America
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2009
In the late nineteenth century hundreds of clubs formed across the United States devoted to the reading of Shakespeare. From Pasadena, California, to the seaside town of Camden, Maine; from the isolated farm town of Ottumwa, Iowa, to Mobile, Alabama, on the Gulf coast, Americans were reading Shakespeare...
Heroic Poets, Poetic Heroes
The Ethnography of Performance in an Arabic Oral Epic Tradition
Language: English
Release Date: March 15, 2018
An astonishingly rich oral epic that chronicles the early history of a Bedouin tribe, the Sirat Bani Hilal has been performed for almost a thousand years. In this ethnography of a contemporary community of professional poet-singers, Dwight F. Reynolds reveals how the epic tradition continues to provide...
Dangerous Sanctuaries
Refugee Camps, Civil War, and the Dilemmas of Humanitarian Aid
Language: English
Release Date: July 22, 2015
Since the early 1990s, refugee crises in the Balkans, Central Africa, the Middle East, and West Africa have led to the international spread of civil war. In Central Africa alone, more than three million people have died in wars fueled, at least in part, by internationally supported refugee populations....
Unending Design
The Forms of Postmodern Poetry
Language: English
Release Date: February 4, 2016
Drawing on the work of contemporary American poets from Ashbery to Zukofsky, Joseph M. Conte elaborates an innovative typology of postmodern poetic forms. In Conte's view, looking at recent poetry in terms of the complementary methods of seriality and proceduralism offers a rewarding alternative to the familiar analytic dichotomy of "open" and "closed" forms.
The Deed of Reading
Literature * Writing * Language * Philosophy
Language: English
Release Date: September 8, 2015
Garrett Stewart begins The Deed of Reading with a memory of his first hesitant confrontation, as a teenager, with poetic density. In that early verbal challenge he finds one driving force of literature: to make language young again in its surprise, coming alive in each new event of reading. But what...
When Victory Is Not an Option
Islamist Movements in Arab Politics
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2009
Throughout the Arab world, Islamist political movements are joining the electoral process. This change alarms some observers and excites other. In recent years, electoral opportunities have opened, and Islamist movements have seized them. But those opportunities, while real, have also been sharply...
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...