Rutgers University Press: 415 books
Abstinence Cinema
Virginity and the Rhetoric of Sexual Purity in Contemporary Film
Language: English
Release Date: March 8, 2016
From the perspective of cultural conservatives, Hollywood movies are cesspools of vice, exposing impressionable viewers to pernicious sexually-permissive messages. Offering a groundbreaking study of Hollywood films produced since 2000, Abstinence Cinema comes to a very different conclusion, finding...
The Holocaust Averted
An Alternate History of American Jewry, 1938-1967
Language: English
Release Date: April 3, 2015
The increasingly popular genre of “alternative histories” has captivated audiences by asking questions like “what if the South had won the Civil War?” Such speculation can be instructive, heighten our interest in a topic, and shed light on accepted history. In The Holocaust Averted, Jeffrey...
Looking Back on the Vietnam War
Twenty-first-Century Perspectives
Language: English
Release Date: June 17, 2016
More than forty years have passed since the official end of the Vietnam War, yet the war’s legacies endure. Its history and iconography still provide fodder for film and fiction, communities of war refugees have spawned a wide Vietnamese diaspora, and the United States military remains embroiled...
Wonder Woman
New edition with full color illustrations
Language: English
Release Date: May 31, 2017
William Marston was an unusual man—a psychologist, a soft-porn pulp novelist, more than a bit of a carny, and the (self-declared) inventor of the lie detector. He was also the creator of Wonder Woman, the comic that he used to express two of his greatest passions: feminism and women in bondage.
Comics...
Southwest Asia
The Transpacific Geographies of Chicana/o Literature
Language: English
Release Date: June 17, 2016
Chicana/o literature is justly acclaimed for the ways it voices opposition to the dominant Anglo culture, speaking for communities ignored by mainstream American media. Yet the world depicted in these texts is not solely inhabited by Anglos and Chicanos; as this groundbreaking new book shows, Asian...
Flickers of Film
Nostalgia in the Time of Digital Cinema
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2015
Whether paying tribute to silent films in Hugo and The Artist or celebrating arcade games in Tron: Legacy and Wreck-It-Ralph, Hollywood suddenly seems to be experiencing a wave of intense nostalgia for outmoded technologies. To what extent is that a sincere lament for modes of artistic production...
Courting Justice
Ten New Jersey Cases That Shook the Nation
Language: English
Release Date: July 23, 2013
Since 1947 a modernized New Jersey Supreme Court has played an important and controversial role in the state, nation, and world. Its decisions in cutting-edge cases have confronted society’s toughest issues, reflecting changing social attitudes, modern life’s complexities, and new technologies.
Paul...
Abandoning the Black Hero
Sympathy and Privacy in the Postwar African American White-Life Novel
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2012
Abandoning the Black Hero is the first book to examine the postwar African American white-life novel—novels with white protagonists written by African Americans. These fascinating works have been understudied despite having been written by such defining figures in the tradition as Richard Wright,...
by Erika Balsom, Kenneth Berger, Susie Bright
Language: English
Release Date: January 14, 2019
Language: English
Release Date: January 14, 2019
We all have images that we find unwatchable, whether for ethical, political, or sensory and affective reasons. From news coverage of terror attacks to viral videos of police brutality, and from graphic horror films to transgressive artworks, many of the images in our media culture might strike us...
Dream Nation
Puerto Rican Culture and the Fictions of Independence
Language: English
Release Date: March 19, 2014
Over the past fifty years, Puerto Rican voters have roundly rejected any calls for national independence. Yet the rhetoric and iconography of independence have been defining features of Puerto Rican literature and culture. In the provocative new book Dream Nation, María Acosta Cruz investigates the...
Unbecoming Americans
Writing Race and Nation from the Shadows of Citizenship, 1945-1960
Language: English
Release Date: January 10, 2013
During the Cold War, Ellis Island no longer served as the largest port of entry for immigrants, but as a prison for holding aliens the state wished to deport. The government criminalized those it considered un-assimilable (from left-wing intellectuals and black radicals to racialized migrant laborers)...
Climate Trauma
Foreseeing the Future in Dystopian Film and Fiction
Language: English
Release Date: December 4, 2015
Each month brings new scientific findings that demonstrate the ways in which human activities, from resource extraction to carbon emissions, are doing unprecedented, perhaps irreparable damage to our world. As we hear these climate change reports and their predictions for the future of Earth, many...
Intersections of Harm
Narratives of Latina Deviance and Defiance
Language: English
Release Date: July 13, 2015
In this innovative new study, Laura Halperin examines literary representations of harm inflicted on Latinas’ minds and bodies, and on the places Latinas inhabit, but she also explores how hope can be found amid so much harm. Analyzing contemporary memoirs and novels by Irene Vilar, Loida Maritza...
Anatomy of a Robot
Literature, Cinema, and the Cultural Work of Artificial People
Language: English
Release Date: July 7, 2014
Why do we find artificial people fascinating? Drawing from a rich fictional and cinematic tradition, Anatomy of a Robot explores the political and textual implications of our perennial projections of humanity onto figures such as robots, androids, cyborgs, and automata. In an engaging, sophisticated,...