Johns Hopkins University Press: 958 books
When Benjamin Franklin Met the Reverend Whitefield
Enlightenment, Revival, and the Power of the Printed Word
Language: English
Release Date: November 15, 2011
In the 1740s, two quite different developments revolutionized Anglo-American life and thought—the Enlightenment and the Great Awakening. This book takes an encounter between the paragons of each movement—the printer and entrepreneur Benjamin Franklin and the British-born revivalist George Whitefield—as...
Imagined Civilizations
China, the West, and Their First Encounter
Language: English
Release Date: August 15, 2013
Accounts of the seventeenth-century Jesuit Mission to China have often celebrated it as the great encounter of two civilizations. The Jesuits portrayed themselves as wise men from the West who used mathematics and science in service of their mission. Chinese literati-official Xu Guangqi (1562–1633),...
by Zachary S. Schiffman
Language: English
Release Date: November 1, 2011
Language: English
Release Date: November 1, 2011
How did people learn to distinguish between past and present? How did they come to see the past as existing in its own distinctive context? In The Birth of the Past, Zachary Sayre Schiffman explores these questions in his sweeping survey of historical thinking in the Western world. Today we automatically...
Optical Impersonality
Science, Images, and Literary Modernism
Language: English
Release Date: July 8, 2014
Western accounts of human vision before the nineteenth century tended to separate the bodily eye from the rational mind. This model gave way in the mid–nineteenth century to one in which the thinking subject, perceiving body, perceptual object, and material world could not be so easily separated....
To Touch the Face of God
The Sacred, the Profane, and the American Space Program, 1957–1975
Language: English
Release Date: January 15, 2013
"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth..."
In 1968 the world watched as Earth rose over the moonscape, televised from the orbiting Apollo 8 mission capsule. Radioing back to Houston on Christmas Eve, astronauts recited the first ten verses from the book of Genesis....
Maryland in Black and White
Documentary Photography from the Great Depression and World War II
Language: English
Release Date: October 15, 2013
Between 1935 and 1943, the United States government commissioned forty-four photographers to capture American faces, along with living and working conditions, across the country. Nearly 180,000 photographs were taken—4,000 in Maryland—and they are now preserved in the Prints and Photographs Division...
by Susan J. Wolfson
Language: English
Release Date: June 15, 2018
Language: English
Release Date: June 15, 2018
Reading is a weirdly phantasmic trade: animating words to revive absent voices, rehearing the past, fantasizing a future. In Romantic Shades and Shadows, Susan J. Wolfson explores spectral language, formations, and sensations, defining an apparitional poetics in the finely grained textures of writing...
Unclaimed Experience
Trauma, Narrative, and History
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2016
In Unclaimed Experience, Cathy Caruth proposes that in the widespread and bewildering experience of trauma in our century—both in its occurrence and in our attempt to understand it—we can recognize the possibility of a history no longer based on simple models of straightforward experience and...
by Peter Filkins
Language: English
Release Date: August 15, 2012
Language: English
Release Date: August 15, 2012
In the pivotal poem "Marking Time," which appears almost exactly halfway through Peter Filkins’s fourth collection of poetry, the speaker reflects on the death of a sibling and how time is marked by our memories. These memories, these moments—whether spent contemplating a painting by...
Precocious Children and Childish Adults
Age Inversion in Victorian Literature
Language: English
Release Date: July 2, 2012
Especially evident in Victorian-era writings is a rhetorical tendency to liken adults to children and children to adults. Claudia Nelson examines this literary phenomenon and explores the ways in which writers discussed the child-adult relationship during this period.
Though far from ubiquitous,...
by Howard D. Weinbrot
Language: English
Release Date: May 17, 2013
Language: English
Release Date: May 17, 2013
Literature, Religion, and the Evolution of Culture, 1660–1780 chronicles changes in contentious politics and religion and their varied representations in British letters from the mid-seventeenth to the late
eighteenth century. An uncertain trend toward tolerance and away from painful discord significantly...
by Paula R. Backscheider
Language: English
Release Date: March 29, 2013
Language: English
Release Date: March 29, 2013
Elizabeth Singer Rowe and the Development of the English Novel is the first in-depth study of Rowe’s prose fiction. A four-volume collection of her work was a bestseller for a hundred years after its publication, but today Rowe is a largely unrecognized figure in the history of the novel.
Although...
Bloody Murder
The Homicide Tradition in Children's Literature
Language: English
Release Date: March 1, 2013
Given the long-standing belief that children ought to be shielded from disturbing life events, it is surprising to see how many stories for kids involve killing. Bloody Murder is the first full-length critical study of this pervasive theme of murder in children’s literature. Through rereadings of...
by Douglas Anderson
Language: English
Release Date: June 1, 2012
Language: English
Release Date: June 1, 2012
Benjamin Franklin wrote his posthumously published memoir—a model of the genre—in several pieces and in different temporal and physical places. Douglas Anderson’s study of this work reveals the famed inventor as a literary adept whose approach to autobiographical narrative was as innovative...