BiblioVault

Color Harmonies

Augusto Garau

University of Chicago Press, 1993

Because theories of visual perception have traditionally concentrated on form, artists have generally dealt with the problem of color through their own observation and intuition. In Color Harmonies, Augusto Garau systematically investigates the role of both color and form in visual perception and presents an original theory of the aesthetic relations among colors.

Garau, a painter who teaches the psychology of form, pays particular attention to the way colors behave when organized in patterns. His theory of color combination addresses two principal compositional elements: the relations between figure and ground and the phenomenon of transparency.

Garau meticulously analyzes the use of color in paintings by masters such as Cézanne, Picasso, and Matisse to show how his theory applies to actual works of art. Containing many full-color examples, his introduction to the workings of color relations is of great practical use to art historians and critics, artists, interior decorators, fashion and set designers, and anyone who works with color to display information or convey emotions.

"In an area of the psychology of art where reliable guidance is still so hard to come by, [Garau's] well-supported contributions to the theory of color composition ought to be welcomed by practitioners and scholars alike."—from the Foreword by Rudolf Arnheim

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Color Lines

Affirmative Action, Immigration, and Civil Rights Options for America

John David Skrentny

University of Chicago Press, 2001

A new ethnic order has emerged in the United States. The growing number of Latinos and Asians has rendered the old black-and-white binary obsolete. And yet, political pundits and commentators on both the left and the right continue to overlook the changing face of discrimination and opportunity in today's new multiethnic, multiracial America. With Color Lines, John David Skrentny brings us a collection of essays that reexamines the role of affirmative action and civil rights in light of this important shift in American demographics. The book explores issues of public policy, equal opportunity, diversity, multiculturalism, pathways to better work and higher learning, and attempts in countries outside the United States to protect minority civil rights. Combining perspectives from specialists in fields as diverse as sociology, history, political science, and law, Color Lines is a balanced and broad-ranging guide for anyone interested in civil rights policy and the future of ethnic relations in America.

Contributors:
Erik Bleich
Lawrence D. Bobo
Frank Dobbin
John Aubrey Douglass
Hugh Davis Graham
Kyra R. Greene
Erin Kelly
George R. La Noue
Jennifer Lee
Michael Lichter
Deborah C. Malamud
Sunita Parikh
John C. Sullivan
Thomas J. Sugrue
Carol M. Swain
Steven M. Teles
Roger Waldinger
Christine Min Wotipka

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The Color of Asylum

The Racial Politics of Safe Haven in Brazil

Katherine Jensen

University of Chicago Press, 2023

An ethnography of the difficult experiences of refugees in Brazil.

In 2013, as Syrians desperate to escape a brutal war fled the country, Brazil took the remarkable step of instituting an open-door policy for all Syrian refugees. Why did Brazil—in contrast to much of the international community—offer asylum to any Syrian who would come? And how do Syrians differ from other refugee populations seeking status in Brazil?

In The Color of Asylum, Katherine Jensen offers an ethnographic look at the process of asylum seeking in Brazil, uncovering the different ways asylum seekers are treated and the racial logic behind their treatment. She focuses on two of the largest and most successful groups of asylum seekers: Syrian and Congolese refugees. While the groups obtain asylum status in Brazil at roughly equivalent rates, their journey to that status could not be more different, with Congolese refugees enduring significantly greater difficulties at each stage, from arrival through to their treatment by Brazilian officials. As Jensen shows, Syrians, meanwhile, receive better treatment because the Brazilian state recognizes them as white, in a nation that has historically privileged white immigration. Ultimately, however, Jensen reaches an unexpected conclusion: Regardless of their country of origin, even migrants who do secure asylum status find their lives remain extremely difficult, marked by struggle and discrimination.

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The Color of Family

History, Race, and the Politics of Ancestry

Michael O'Malley

University of Chicago Press, 2024

A uniquely blended personal family history and history of the changing definitions of race in America.

A zealous eugenicist, who regarded himself as white, ran Virginia’s Bureau of Vital Statistics in the first half of the twentieth century, misusing his position to reclassify people he suspected of hiding their “true” race. But in addition to being blinded by his prejudices, he and his predecessors were operating more by instinct than by science. Their whole dubious enterprise was subject not just to changing concepts of race but outright error, propagated across generations.

This is how Michael O’Malley, a descendant of a Philadelphia Irish-American family, came to have “colored” ancestors in Virginia. In The Color of Family, O’Malley teases out the various changes made to citizens’ names and relationships over the years, and how they affected families as they navigated what it meant to be “white,” “colored,” “mixed race,” and more. In the process, he delves into the interplay of genealogy and history, exploring how the documents that establish identity came about, and how private companies like Ancestry.com increasingly supplant state and federal authorities—and not for the better.

Combining the personal history of O’Malley’s own family with the broader history of racial classification, The Color of Family is an accessible and lively look at the ever-shifting and often poisoned racial dynamics of the United States.

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The Color of Mind

Why the Origins of the Achievement Gap Matter for Justice

Derrick Darby and John L. Rury

University of Chicago Press, 2018

American students vary in educational achievement, but white students in general typically have better test scores and grades than black students. Why is this the case, and what can school leaders do about it? In The Color of Mind, Derrick Darby and John L. Rury answer these pressing questions and show that we cannot make further progress in closing the achievement gap until we understand its racist origins.

Telling the story of what they call the Color of Mind—the idea that there are racial differences in intelligence, character, and behavior—they show how philosophers, such as David Hume and Immanuel Kant, and American statesman Thomas Jefferson, contributed to the construction of this pernicious idea, how it influenced the nature of schooling and student achievement, and how voices of dissent such as Frederick Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and W. E. B. Du Bois debunked the Color of Mind and worked to undo its adverse impacts.

Rejecting the view that racial differences in educational achievement are a product of innate or cultural differences, Darby and Rury uncover the historical interplay between ideas about race and American schooling, to show clearly that the racial achievement gap has been socially and institutionally constructed. School leaders striving to bring justice and dignity to American schools today must work to root out the systemic manifestations of these ideas within schools, while still doing what they can to mitigate the negative effects of poverty, segregation, inequality, and other external factors that adversely affect student achievement. While we cannot expect schools alone to solve these vexing social problems, we must demand that they address the dignitary injustices associated with how we track, discipline, and deal with special education that reinforce long-standing racist ideas. That is the only way to expel the Color of Mind from schools, close the racial achievement gap, and afford all children the dignity they deserve.

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The Color of Opportunity

Pathways to Family, Welfare, and Work

Haya Stier and Marta Tienda

University of Chicago Press, 2000

In The Color of Opportunity, Haya Stier and Marta Tienda ask: How do race and ethnicity limit opportunity in post-civil rights Chicago? In the 1960s, Chicago was a focal point of civil rights activities. But in the 1980s it served as the laboratory for ideas about the emergence and social consequences of concentrated urban poverty; many experts such as William J. Wilson downplayed the significance of race as a cause of concentrated poverty, emphasizing instead structural causes that called for change in employment policy. But in this new study, Stier and Tienda ask about the pervasive poverty, unemployment, and reliance on welfare among blacks and Hispanics in Chicago, wondering if and how the inner city poor differ from the poor in general.

The culmination of a six-year collaboration analyzing the Urban Poverty and Family Life Survey of Chicago, The Color of Opportunity is the first major work to compare Chicago's inner city minorities with national populations of like race and ethnicity from a life course perspective. The authors find that blacks, whites, Mexicans, and Puerto Ricans living in poor neighborhoods differ in their experiences with early material deprivation and the lifetime disadvantages that accumulate—but they do not differ much from the urban poor in their family formation, welfare participation, or labor force attachment. Stier and Tienda find little evidence for ghetto-specific behavior, but they document the myriad ways color still restricts economic opportunity.

The Color of Opportunity stands as a much-needed corrective to increasingly negative views of poor people of color, especially the poor who live in deprived neighborhoods. It makes a key and lasting contribution to ongoing debates about the origins and nature of urban poverty.

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The Color of Strangers, the Color of Friends

Alan Peshkin

University of Chicago Press, 1991

Peshkin examines the role played by ethnicity in the daily life of a town he calls "Riverview" and its only high school. Immersing himself in the daily life of halls and classrooms of Riverview's high school and the streets of its neighborhoods, Peshkin coaxes from both young and old their own reflections on the town's early days, on the period of ethnic strife sparked by the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and on the way they see Riverview today.

"Peshkin strikes a hopeful chord, revealing what social encounters among ethnic groups—at their best—can be like in America."—Education Digest

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Colored Property

State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America

David M. P. Freund

University of Chicago Press, 2007

Northern whites in the post–World War II era began to support the principle of civil rights, so why did many of them continue to oppose racial integration in their communities? Challenging conventional wisdom about the growth, prosperity, and racial exclusivity of American suburbs, David M. P. Freund argues that previous attempts to answer this question have overlooked a change in the racial thinking of whites and the role of suburban politics in effecting this change. In Colored Property, he shows how federal intervention spurred a dramatic shift in the language and logic of residential exclusion—away from invocations of a mythical racial hierarchy and toward talk of markets, property, and citizenship.

Freund begins his exploration by tracing the emergence of a powerful public-private alliance that facilitated postwar suburban growth across the nation with federal programs that significantly favored whites. Then, showing how this national story played out in metropolitan Detroit, he visits zoning board and city council meetings, details the efforts of neighborhood “property improvement” associations, and reconstructs battles over race and housing to demonstrate how whites learned to view discrimination not as an act of racism but as a legitimate response to the needs of the market. Illuminating government’s powerful yet still-hidden role in the segregation of U.S. cities, Colored Property presents a dramatic new vision of metropolitan growth, segregation, and white identity in modern America.

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The Colorful Apocalypse

Journeys in Outsider Art

Greg Bottoms

University of Chicago Press, 2007

The Reverend Howard Finster was twenty feet tall, suspended in darkness. Or so he appeared in the documentary film that introduced a teenaged Greg Bottoms to the renowned outsider artist whose death would help inspire him, fourteen years later, to travel the country. Beginning in Georgia with a trip to Finster’s famous Paradise Gardens, his journey—of which The Colorful Apocalypse is a masterly chronicle—is an unparalleled look into the lives and visionary works of some of Finster’s contemporaries: the self-taught evangelical artists whose beliefs and oeuvres occupy the gray area between madness and Christian ecstasy.

With his prodigious gift for conversation and quietly observant storytelling, Bottoms draws us into the worlds of such figures as William Thomas Thompson, a handicapped ex-millionaire who painted a 300-foot version of the book of Revelation; Norbert Kox, an ex-member of the Outlaws biker gang who now lives as a recluse in rural Wisconsin and paints apocalyptic visual parables; and Myrtice West, who began painting to express the revelatory visions she had after her daughter was brutally murdered. These artists’ works are as wildly varied as their life stories, but without sensationalizing or patronizing them, Bottoms—one of today’s finest young writers—gets at the heart of what they have in common: the struggle to make sense, through art, of their difficult personal histories.

In doing so, he weaves a true narrative as powerful as the art of its subjects, a work that is at once an enthralling travelogue, a series of revealing biographical portraits, and a profound meditation on the chaos of despair and the ways in which creativity can help order our lives.

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The Colors of Violence

Cultural Identities, Religion, and Conflict

Sudhir Kakar

University of Chicago Press, 1996

For decades India has been intermittently tormented by brutal outbursts of religious violence, thrusting thousands of ordinary Hindus and Muslims into bloody conflict. In this provocative work, psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar exposes the psychological roots of Hindu-Muslim violence and examines with grace and intensity the subjective experience of religious hatred in his native land.

With honesty, insight, and unsparing self-reflection, Kakar confronts the profoundly enigmatic relations that link individual egos to cultural moralities and religious violence. His innovative psychological approach offers a framework for understanding the kind of ethnic-religious conflict that has so vexed social scientists in India and throughout the world.

Through riveting case studies, Kakar explores cultural stereotypes, religious antagonisms, ethnocentric histories, and episodic violence to trace the development of both Hindu and Muslim psyches. He argues that in early childhood the social identity of every Indian is grounded in traditional religious identifications and communalism. Together these bring about deep-set psychological anxieties and animosities toward the other. For Hindus and Muslims alike, violence becomes morally acceptable when communally and religiously sanctioned. As the changing pressures of modernization and secularism in a multicultural society grate at this entrenched communalism, and as each group vies for power, ethnic-religious conflicts ignite. The Colors of Violence speaks with eloquence and urgency to anyone concerned with the postmodern clash of religious and cultural identities.

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Columbarium

Susan Stewart

University of Chicago Press, 2003

Winner of the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award in the category of poetry.

In her long-awaited fourth book of poetry, Susan Stewart gives us a series of splendid, numinous poems about truths learned with the mind but set free through the senses. Modeled on the seventeenth-century practice of century forms, or books of one hundred pages, Columbarium expresses the bond between the living and the dead in voices of parent to child, lover to beloved, and mortal to the gods. The book arrives as a meditative gift from one of our most respected poet-critics.

Stewart frames her Columbarium with four poems paying homage to the elements-to their destructive and creative aspects and to their roles in the human and more than human worlds. Both nest and crypt, the book's center holds an alphabet of "shadow georgics," poems of instruction and doubt that link knowledge and the unconscious. Questions of mortality, of goodness and suffering, and of the fragility and power of memory animate these poems. In one poem an apple calls the narrator back from the dead to savor the echoes of its varieties in myth and literature. In another, the seeds of a pear tree reveal the essential unity that makes the diversity of existence possible.

Stewart's Columbarium is both a memorial to the dead and a testament to life.

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Combating Jihadism

American Hegemony and Interstate Cooperation in the War on Terrorism

Barak Mendelsohn

University of Chicago Press, 2009

Although terrorism is an age-old phenomenon, jihadi ideology is distinctive in its ambition to abandon the principle of state sovereignty, overthrow the modern state system, and replace it with an extremely radical interpretation of an Islamic world order. These characteristics reflect a radical break from traditional objectives promoted by terrorist groups. In Combating Jihadism Barak Mendelsohn argues that the distinctiveness of the al-Qaeda threat led the international community to change its approach to counterterrorism. Contrary to common yet erroneous conceptions, the United States, in its role as a hegemon, was critical for the formulation of a multilateral response.

While most analyses of hegemony have focused on power, Mendelsohn firmly grounds the phenomenon in a web of shared norms and rules relating to the hegemon’s freedom of action. Consequently, he explains why US leadership in counterterrorism efforts was in some spheres successful, when in others it failed or did not even seek to establish multilateral collaborative frameworks. Tracing the ways in which international cooperation has stopped terrorist efforts, Combating Jihadism provides a nuanced, innovative, and timely reinterpretation of the war on terrorism and the role of the United States in leading the fight against al-Qaeda and its affiliates.

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Combative Politics

The Media and Public Perceptions of Lawmaking

Mary Layton Atkinson

University of Chicago Press, 2017

From the Affordable Care Act to No Child Left Behind, politicians often face a puzzling problem: although most Americans support the aims and key provisions of these policies, they oppose the bills themselves. How can this be? Why does the American public so often reject policies that seem to offer them exactly what they want?
By the time a bill is pushed through Congress or ultimately defeated, we’ve often been exposed to weeks, months—even years—of media coverage that underscores the unpopular process of policymaking, and Mary Layton Atkinson argues that this leads us to reject the bill itself. Contrary to many Americans’ understandings of the policymaking process, the best answer to a complex problem is rarely self-evident, and politicians must weigh many potential options, each with merits and drawbacks. As the public awaits a resolution, the news media tend to focus not on the substance of the debate but on descriptions of partisan combat. This coverage leads the public to believe everyone in Washington has lost sight of the problem altogether and is merely pursuing policies designed for individual political gain. Politicians in turn exacerbate the problem when they focus their objections to proposed policies on the lawmaking process, claiming, for example, that a bill is being pushed through Congress with maneuvers designed to limit minority party input. These negative portrayals become linked in many people’s minds with the policy itself, leading to backlash against bills that may otherwise be seen as widely beneficial. Atkinson argues that journalists and educators can make changes to help inoculate Americans against the idea that debate always signifies dysfunction in the government. Journalists should strive to better connect information about policy provisions to the problems they are designed to ameliorate. Educators should stress that although debate sometimes serves political interests, it also offers citizens a window onto the lawmaking process that can help them evaluate the work their government is doing.

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The Combing of History

David William Cohen

University of Chicago Press, 1994

How is historical knowledge produced? And how do silence and forgetting figure in the knowledge we call history? Taking us through time and across the globe, David William Cohen's exploration of these questions exposes the circumstantial nature of history. His investigation uncovers the conventions and paradigms that govern historical knowledge and historical texts and reveals the economic, social, and political forces at play in the production of history.

Drawing from a wide range of examples, including African legal proceedings, German and American museum exhibits, Native American commemorations, public and academic debates, and scholarly research, David William Cohen explores the "walls and passageways" between academic and non-academic productions of history.

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Come In and Hear the Truth

Jazz and Race on 52nd Street

Patrick Burke

University of Chicago Press, 2008

Between the mid-1930s and the late ’40s, the center of the jazz world was a two-block stretch of 52nd Street in Manhattan. Dozens of crowded basement clubs between Fifth and Seventh avenues played host to legends such as Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker, as well as to innumerable professional musicians whose names aren’t quite so well known. Together, these musicians and their audiences defied the traditional border between serious art and commercial entertainment—and between the races, as 52nd Street was home to some of the first nightclubs in New York to allow racially integrated bands and audiences. Patrick Burke argues that the jazz played on 52nd Street complicated simplistic distinctions between musical styles such as Dixieland, swing, and bebop. And since these styles were defined along racial lines, the music was itself a powerful challenge to racist ideology.

Come In and Hear the Truth uses a range of materials, from classic photographs to original interviews with musicians, to bring the street’s vibrant history to life and to shed new light on the interracial contacts and collaborations it generated.

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Comeback

A Parker Novel

Richard Stark

University of Chicago Press, 2011

After the bloodbath of Butcher’s Moon, the action-filled blowout Parker adventure, Donald Westlake said, "Richard Stark proved to me that he had a life of his own by simply disappearing. He was gone." And for nearly twenty-five years, he stayed away, while readers waited.

But nothing bad is truly gone forever, and Parker’s as bad as they come. According to Westlake, one day in 1997, “suddenly, he came back from the dead, with a chalky prison pallor”—and the resulting novel, Comeback, showed that neither Stark nor Parker had lost a single step. Knocking over a highly lucrative religious revival show, Parker reminds us that not all criminals don ski masks—some prefer to hide behind the wings of fallen angels.

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The Comedians of the King

"Opéra Comique" and the Bourbon Monarchy on the Eve of Revolution

Julia Doe

University of Chicago Press, 2021

Lyric theater in ancien régime France was an eminently political art, tied to the demands of court spectacle. This was true not only of tragic opera (tragédie lyrique) but also its comic counterpart, opéra comique, a form tracing its roots to the seasonal trade fairs of Paris. While historians have long privileged the genre’s popular origins, opéra comique was brought under the protection of the French crown in 1762, thus consolidating a new venue where national music might be debated and defined.

In The Comedians of the King, Julia Doe traces the impact of Bourbon patronage on the development of opéra comique in the turbulent prerevolutionary years. Drawing on both musical and archival evidence, the book presents the history of this understudied genre and unpacks the material structures that supported its rapid evolution at the royally sponsored Comédie-Italienne. Doe demonstrates how comic theater was exploited in, and worked against, the monarchy’s carefully cultivated public image—a negotiation that became especially fraught after the accession of the music-loving queen, Marie Antoinette. The Comedians of the King examines the aesthetic and political tensions that arose when a genre with popular foundations was folded into the Bourbon propaganda machine, and when a group of actors trained at the Parisian fairs became official representatives of the sovereign, or comédiens ordinaires du roi.

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The Comfort Women

Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan

C. Sarah Soh

University of Chicago Press, 2008

In an era marked by atrocities perpetrated on a grand scale, the tragedy of the so-called comfort women—mostly Korean women forced into prostitution by the Japanese army—endures as one of the darkest events of World War II. These women have usually been labeled victims of a war crime, a simplistic view that makes it easy to pin blame on the policies of imperial Japan and therefore easier to consign the episode to a war-torn past. In this revelatory study, C. Sarah Soh provocatively disputes this master narrative.
Soh reveals that the forces of Japanese colonialism and Korean patriarchy together shaped the fate of Korean comfort women—a double bind made strikingly apparent in the cases of women cast into sexual slavery after fleeing abuse at home. Other victims were press-ganged into prostitution, sometimes with the help of Korean procurers. Drawing on historical research and interviews with survivors, Soh tells the stories of these women from girlhood through their subjugation and beyond to their efforts to overcome the traumas of their past. Finally, Soh examines the array of factors— from South Korean nationalist politics to the aims of the international women’s human rights movement—that have contributed to the incomplete view of the tragedy that still dominates today.

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The Comforts of Home

Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi

Luise White

University of Chicago Press, 1990

"This history is . . . the first fully-fleshed story of African Nairobi in all of its complexity which foregrounds African experiences. Given the overwhelming white dominance in the written sources, it is a remarkable achievement."—Claire Robertson, International Journal of African Historical Studies

"White's book . . . takes a unique approach to a largely unexplored aspect of African History. It enhances our understanding of African social history, political economy, and gender studies. It is a book that deserves to be widely read."—Elizabeth Schmidt, American Historical Review

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Comic Faith

The Great Tradition from Austen to Joyce

Robert M. Polhemus

University of Chicago Press, 1980

"Polhemus sketches several distinctions between nineteenth- and twentieth-century novelists and concludes that what most characterizes the nineteenth century, from the perspective of the twentieth, is the tendency in its comic fiction to criticize and to undermine the dogma and institutions of religion and to put faith instead of the existence of the comic perspective. Comic Faith is a virtuoso performance of impressive stature; I suspect the book will be influential for many years to come."—John Halperin, Modern Fiction Studies

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The Comic Mind

Comedy and the Movies

Gerald Mast

University of Chicago Press, 1979

Although books on the comedies of the silent era abound, few have attempted to survey film comedy as a whole—its history and evolution, how the philosophical visions of its greatest artists and directors have shaped its traditions, and how these visions have informed both the meaning and manner of their work.

Blending information with interpretation, description with analysis, Mast traces the development of screen comedy from the first crude efforts of Edison and Lumière to the subtlety and psychological complexity of Annie Hall. As he guides the reader through detailed discussions of specific films, Mast reveals the structures, the values, and the cinematic techniques which have appeared and reappeared in comic cinema.

The second edition of The Comic Mind treats the comic developments of the 1970s in terms of the traditions of film comedy set forth in the first edition, including a discussion of the evolution of Jacques Tati and the emergence of Mel Brooks and Woody Allen as the two greatest American comic stylists of the seventies.

"The most comprehensive study of film comedy yet written in English. . . .The book's extensive index with references to companies from which 16mm prints of many of the cited films may be rented will be of great value to the film teacher and audiovisual librarian."—Choice

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Comics & Media

A Special Issue of "Critical Inquiry"

Edited by Hillary L. Chute and Patrick Jagoda

University of Chicago Press, 2014

The past decade has seen the medium of comics reach unprecedented heights of critical acclaim and commercial success. Comics & Media reflects that, bringing together an amazing array of contributors--creators and critics alike--to discuss the state, future, and potential of the medium.

Loaded with full-color reproductions of work by such legends as R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Alison Bechdel, Chris Ware, Daniel Clowes, and Lynda Barry, the book addresses the place of comics in both a contemporary and historical context. Essays by such high-profile figures as Tom Gunning, N. Katherine Hayles, Patrick Jagoda, and W. J. T. Mitchell address a stunning range of topics, including the place of comics in the history of aesthetics, changes to popular art forms, digital humanities, and ongoing tensions between new and old media. The result is a substantial step forward for our understanding of what comics are and can be, and the growing place they hold in our culture.

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The Coming Health Crisis

Who Will Pay for Care for the Aged in the 21st Century?

John R. Wolfe

University of Chicago Press, 1993

By the turn of the century, the largest generation of Americans in history, the "Baby Boomers," will be approaching 65 years old. But as the demand for health and long-term care is growing dramatically, health care programs have been shrinking instead of expanding to meet the older generation's needs. In this timely book, John R. Wolfe offers practical solutions to the coming health crisis, exploring innovative ways of developing insurance plans for the care of the large, aging "Baby Boom" generation and beyond.

In previous decades, when younger Americans far outnumbered older ones, retirees could depend on financial support through taxes from the population at large. But as "Boomers" retire and the work force begins to shrink, there will be a disproportionately large population of retirees to workers. With such a big jump in the percentage of older Americans in the population, fewer workers will be able to to transfer funds, through taxes, to retirees. Moreover, other traditionally reliable sources of financial assistance—Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—have faced serious financial difficulties in recent years. Who will the aged turn to for assistance?

The Coming Health Crisis suggests that as funds from all quarters dwindle, older Americans will have to look to alternative programs for financial assistance. Wolfe urges immediate action to develop new saving programs and increase existing transfer schemes to head off an imminent crisis. Although tax increases might provide some resources, he demonstrates that it is more important to accumulate capital to create solid reserves for the future. Wolfe also explores two roles for government: prefunding new or existing social insurance programs and promoting private insurance options. By exempting insurance fund income from corporate taxation and permitting people at all income levels to defer income tax on accounts earmarked for long-term care, he shows how government could greatly encourage and expand personal saving.

Finally, this work assesses the value of other recent health and long-term-care innovations: social/health maintenance organizations, long-term-care individual retirement accounts, and reverse annuity mortgages, in addition to vouchers, care rationing, mandatory public insurance, and expanded private coverage. Through this wide-ranging survey, Wolfe demonstrates that, through a combination of these programs, we can care for the aging "Baby Boom" generation by anticipating their needs and saving now.

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The Coming of the Civil War

Avery O. Craven

University of Chicago Press, 1966

"In recent years a highly industrious school of historians has begun asking whether the war should have been fought at all and whether it was perhaps not more the fault of the North than of the South. Seeking to revise earlier judgments they have become known as the revisionists, and one of the most gifted and studious of them all is Avery Craven, whose The Coming of the Civil War . . . is one of the landmarks of revisionist literature."—Bruce Catton, American Heritage

". . . those who would examine the democratic process during a period of progressive breakdown, in order to understand the dangers it embodies within itself, will find The Coming of the Civil War a classic analysis."—Louis D. Rubin, Jr., Sewanee Review

"The book has always been recognized, even by its most severe critics, as a work of consummate scholarship."—T. Harry Williams, Baton Rouge Morning Advocate

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Coming Out Republican

A History of the Gay Right

Neil J. Young

University of Chicago Press, 2024

A revelatory and comprehensive history of the gay Right from incisive political commentator Neil J. Young.

One of the most maligned, misunderstood, and even mocked constituencies in American politics, gay Republicans regularly face condemnation from both the LGBTQ+ community and their own political party. Yet they’ve been active and influential for decades. Gay conservatives were instrumental, for example, in ending “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and securing the legalization of same-sex marriage—but they also helped lay the groundwork for the rise of Donald Trump.

In Coming Out Republican, political historian and commentator Neil J. Young provides the first comprehensive history of the gay Right. From the 1950s up to the present day, Young excavates the multifarious origins, motivations, and evolutions of LGBTQ+ people who found their way to the institutions and networks of modern conservatism. Many on the gay Right have championed conservative values—like free markets, a strong national defense, and individual liberty—and believed that the Republican Party therefore offered LGBTQ+ people the best pathway to freedom. Meanwhile, that same party has actively and repeatedly demonized them. With his precise and provocative voice, Young details the complicated dynamics of being in—and yet never fully accepted into—the Republican Party.

Coming Out Republican provides striking insight into who LGBTQ+ conservatives are, what they want, and why many of them continue to align with a party whose rank and file largely seem to hate them. As the Republican Party renews its assaults on LGBTQ+ rights, understanding the significant history of the gay Right has never been more critical.

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Coming To

Consciousness and Natality in Early Modern England

Timothy M. Harrison

University of Chicago Press, 2020

In Coming To, Timothy M. Harrison uncovers the forgotten role of poetry in the history of the idea of consciousness. Drawing our attention to a sea change in the English seventeenth century, when, over the course of a half century, “conscience” made a sudden shift to “consciousness,” he traces a line that leads from the philosophy of René Descartes to the poetry of John Milton, from the prenatal memories of theologian Thomas Traherne to the unresolved perspective on natality, consciousness, and ethics in the philosophy of John Locke. Each of these figures responded to the first-person perspective by turning to the origins of how human thought began. Taken together, as Harrison shows, this unlikely group of thinkers sheds new light on the emergence of the concept of consciousness and the significance of human natality to central questions in the fields of literature, philosophy, and the history of science.

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Coming to Mind

The Soul and Its Body

Lenn E. Goodman and D. Gregory Caramenico

University of Chicago Press, 2013

How should we speak of bodies and souls? In Coming to Mind, Lenn E. Goodman and D. Gregory Caramenico pick their way through the minefields of materialist reductionism to present the soul not as the brain’s rival but as its partner. What acts, they argue, is what is real. The soul is not an ethereal wisp but a lively subject, emergent from the body but inadequately described in its terms.

Rooted in some of the richest philosophical and intellectual traditions of Western and Eastern philosophy, psychology, literature, and the arts and the latest findings of cognitive psychology and brain science—Coming to Mind is a subtle manifesto of a new humanism and an outstanding contribution to our understanding of the human person. Drawing on new and classical understandings of perception, consciousness, memory, agency, and creativity, Goodman and Caramenico frame a convincing argument for a dynamic and integrated self capable of language, thought, discovery, caring, and love.

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Coming Together

The Cinematic Elaboration of Gay Male Life, 1945-1979

Ryan Powell

University of Chicago Press, 2019

In Coming Together, Ryan Powell captures the social and political vitality of the first wave of movies made by, for, and about male-desiring men in the United States between World War II and the 1980s. From the underground films of Kenneth Anger and the Gay Girls Riding Club to the gay liberation-era hardcore films and domestic dramas of Joe Gage and James Bidgood, Powell illuminates how central filmmaking and exhibition were to gay socializing and worldmaking. Unearthing scores of films and a trove of film-related ephemera, Coming Together persuasively unsettles popular histories that center Stonewall as a ground zero for gay liberation and visibility. Powell asks how this generation of movie-making—which defiantly challenged legal and cultural norms around sexuality and gender—provided, and may still provide, meaningful models for living.

[more]

Commentaries on the Laws of England, A Facsimile of the First Edition of 1765-1769

William Blackstone

University of Chicago Press, 2002

Perhaps the most important legal treatise ever written in the English language, Sir William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-69) was the first effort to consolidate English common law into a unified and rational system. Clearly and elegantly written, the work achieved immediate renown and exerted a powerful influence on legal education both in England and America. This handsomely produced, slipcased four-volume set includes facsimiles of the eighteenth-century first edition, undistorted by later interpolations.

The Commentaries is divided into four books. The first, introduced by Stanley N. Katz, deals with what Blackstone called "the rights of persons," what a modern lawyer would call constitutional law, the legal structure of government. Book II includes an introduction by A. W. Brian Simpson and describes the law of property. Book III, introduced by John H. Langbein, analyzes civil procedure and remedies. The last book, which is devoted to criminal law and procedure, includes an introduction by Thomas A. Green.

Now regarded as a literary, as well as a legal classic, Blackstone's Commentaries brilliantly laid out the system of English law in the mid-eighteenth century, demonstrating that as a system of justice, it was comparable to Roman law and the civil law of the Continent. Ironically, the work also revealed to the colonists the insufficiencies of the system and became a model for the legal system of the fledgling American nation in 1789. Supplemented with commentary by experts in the field, these classic facsimile volumes belong on every lawyer's bookshelves.

Volume I: Of the Rights of Persons (1765)
Volume II: Of the Rights of Things (1766)
Volume III: Of Private Wrongs (1768)
Volume IV: Of Public Wrongs (1769)

[more]

Commentaries on the Laws of England, Volume 1

A Facsimile of the First Edition of 1765-1769

William Blackstone

University of Chicago Press, 1979

Sir William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-1769) stands as the first great effort to reduce the English common law to a unified and rational system. Blackstone demonstrated that the English law as a system of justice was comparable to Roman law and the civil law of the Continent. Clearly and elegantly written, the work achieved immediate renown and exerted a powerful influence on legal education in England and in America which was to last into the late nineteenth century. The book is regarded not only as a legal classic but as a literary masterpiece.

Previously available only in an expensive hardcover set, Commentaries on the Laws of England is published here in four separate volumes, each one affordably priced in a paperback edition. These works are facsimiles of the eighteenth-century first edition and are undistorted by later interpolations. Each volume deals with a particular field of law and carries with it an introduction by a leading contemporary scholar.

In his introduction to this first volume, Of the Rights of Persons, Stanley N. Katz presents a brief history of Blackstone's academic and legal career and his purposes in writing the Commentaries. Katz discusses Blackstone's treatment of the structure of the English legal system, his attempts to justify it as the best form of government, and some of the problems he encountered in doing so.

[more]

Commentaries on the Laws of England, Volume 2

A Facsimile of the First Edition of 1765-1769

William Blackstone

University of Chicago Press, 1979

Sir William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-1769) stands as the first great effort to reduce the English common law to a unified and rational system. Blackstone demonstrated that the English law as a system of justice was comparable to Roman law and the civil law of the Continent. Clearly and elegantly written, the work achieved immediate renown and exerted a powerful influence on legal education in England and in America which was to last into the late nineteenth century. The book is regarded not only as a legal classic but as a literary masterpiece.

Previously available only in an expensive hardcover set, Commentaries on the Laws of England is published here in four separate volumes, each one affordably priced in a paperback edition. These works are facsimiles of the eighteenth-century first edition and are undistorted by later interpolations. Each volume deals with a particular field of law and carries with it an introduction by a leading contemporary scholar.

Introducing this second volume, Of the Rights of Things, A. W. Brian Simpson discusses the history of Blackstone's theory of various aspects of property rights—real property, feudalism, estates, titles, personal property, and contracts—and the work of his predecessors.

[more]

Commentaries on the Laws of England, Volume 3

A Facsimile of the First Edition of 1765-1769

William Blackstone

University of Chicago Press, 1979

Sir William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-1769) stands as the first great effort to reduce the English common law to a unified and rational system. Blackstone demonstrated that the English law as a system of justice was comparable to Roman law and the civil law of the Continent. Clearly and elegantly written, the work achieved immediate renown and exerted a powerful influence on legal education in England and in America which was to last into the late nineteenth century. The book is regarded not only as a legal classic but as a literary masterpiece.

Previously available only in an expensive hardcover set, Commentaries on the Laws of England is published here in four separate volumes, each one affordably priced in a paperback edition. These works are facsimiles of the eighteenth-century first edition and are undistorted by later interpolations. Each volume deals with a particular field of law and carries with it an introduction by a leading contemporary scholar.

Introducing this third volume, Of Private Wrongs, John H. Langbein discusses Blackstone's account of procedure and jurisdiction, jury trial, and equity. He also examines Blackstone's uneasy attitude toward the celebrated legal frictions of English civil procedure.

[more]

Commentaries on the Laws of England, Volume 4

A Facsimile of the First Edition of 1765-1769

William Blackstone

University of Chicago Press, 1979

Sir William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-1769) stands as the first great effort to reduce the English common law to a unified and rational system. Blackstone demonstrated that the English law as a system of justice was comparable to Roman law and the civil law of the Continent. Clearly and elegantly written, the work achieved immediate renown and exerted a powerful influence on legal education in England and in America which was to last into the late nineteenth century. The book is regarded not only as a legal classic but as a literary masterpiece.

Previously available only in an expensive hardcover set, Commentaries on the Laws of England is published here in four separate volumes, each one affordably priced in a paperback edition. These works are facsimiles of the eighteenth-century first edition and are undistorted by later interpolations. Each volume deals with a particular field of law and carries with it an introduction by a leading contemporary scholar.

Introducing this fourth and final volume, Of Public Wrongs, Thomas A. Green examines Blackstone's attempt to rationalize the severity of the law with what he saw as the essentially humane inspiration of English law. Green discusses Blackstone's ideas on criminal law, criminal procedure, and sentencing.

[more]

A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness

Joseph S. Catalano

University of Chicago Press, 1985

"[A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness] represents, I believe, a very important beginning of a deservingly serious effort to make the whole of Being and Nothingness more readily understandable and readable. . . . In his systematic interpretations of Sartre's book, [Catalano] demonstrates a determination to confront many of the most demanding issues and concepts of Being and Nothingness. He does not shrink—as do so many interpreters of Sartre—from such issues as the varied meanings of 'being,' the meaning of 'internal negation' and 'absolute event,' the idiosyncratic senses of transcendence, the meaning of the 'upsurge' in its different contexts, what it means to say that we 'exist our body,' the connotation of such concepts as quality, quantity, potentiality, and instrumentality (in respect to Sartre's world of 'things'), or the origin of negation. . . . Catalano offers what is doubtless one of the most probing, original, and illuminating interpretations of Sartre's crucial concept of nothingness to appear in the Sartrean literature."—Ronald E. Santoni, International Philosophical Quarterly

[more]

A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume 1, Theory of Practical Ensembles

Joseph S. Catalano

University of Chicago Press, 1986

Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason ranks with Being and Nothingness as a work of major philosophical significance, but it has been largely neglected. The first volume, published in 1960, was dismissed as a Marxist work at a time when structuralism was coming into vogue; the incomplete second volume has only recently been published in France. In this commentary on the first volume, Joseph S. Catalano restores the Critique to its deserved place among Sartre’s works and within philosophical discourse as a whole. Sartre attempts one of the most needed tasks of our times, Catalano asserts—the delivery of history into the hands of the average person.

Sartre’s concern in the Critique is with the historical significance of everyday life. Can we, he asks, as individuals or even collectively, direct the course of our history? A historical context for our lives is given to us at birth, but we sustain that context with even our most mundane actions—buying a newspaper, waiting in line, eating a meal. In looking at history, Sartre argues, reason can never separate the historical situation of the investigator from the investigation. Thus reason falls into a dialectic, always depending upon the past for guidance but always being reshaped by the present.

Clearly showing the influence of Marx on Sartre’s thought, the Critique adds the historical dimension lacking in Being and Nothingness. In placing the Critique within the corpus of Sartre’s philosophical writings, Catalano argues that it represents a development rather than a break from Sartre’s existentialist phase. Catalano has organized his commentary to follow the Critique and has supplied clear examples and concrete expositions of the most difficult ideas. He explicates the dialogue between Marx and Sartre that is internal to the text, and he also discusses Sartre’s Search for Method, which is published separately from the Critique in English editions.

[more]

A Commentary on Kant's Critique of Practical Reason

Lewis White Beck

University of Chicago Press, 1996

When this work was first published in 1960, it immediately filled a void in Kantian scholarship. It was the first study entirely devoted to Kant's Critique of Practical Reason and by far the most substantial commentary on it ever written. This landmark in Western philosophical literature remains an indispensable aid to a complete understanding of Kant's philosophy for students and scholars alike.

This Critique is the only writing in which Kant weaves his thoughts on practical reason into a unified argument. Lewis White Beck offers a classic examination of this argument and expertly places it in the context of Kant's philosophy and of the moral philosophy of the eighteenth century.

[more]

A Commentary on Plato's Meno

Jacob Klein

University of Chicago Press, 1989

The Meno, one of the most widely read of the Platonic dialogues, is seen afresh in this original interpretation that explores the dialogue as a theatrical presentation. Just as Socrates's listeners would have questioned and examined their own thinking in response to the presentation, so, Klein shows, should modern readers become involved in the drama of the dialogue. Klein offers a line-by-line commentary on the text of the Meno itself that animates the characters and conversation and carefully probes each significant turn of the argument.

"A major addition to the literature on the Meno and necessary reading for every student of the dialogue."—Alexander Seasonske, Philosophical Review

"There exists no other commentary on Meno which is so thorough, sound, and enlightening."—Choice

Jacob Klein (1899-1978) was a student of Martin Heidegger and a tutor at St. John's College from 1937 until his death. His other works include Plato's Trilogy: Theaetetus, the Sophist, and the Statesman, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

[more]

A Commentary on The Complete Greek Tragedies. Aeschylus

James C. Hogan

University of Chicago Press, 1985

This commentary offers a rich introduction and useful guide to the seven surviving plays attributed to Aeschylus. Though it may profitably be used with any translation of Aeschylus, the commentary is based on the acclaimed Chicago translations, The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore.

James C. Hogan provides a general introduction to Aeschylean theater and drama, followed by a line-by-line commentary on each of the seven plays. He places Aeschylus in the historical, cultural, and religious context of fifth-century Athens, showing how the action and metaphor of Aeschylean theater can be illuminated by information on Athenian law athletic contests, relations with neighboring states, beliefs about the underworld, and countless other details of Hellenic life. Hogan clarifies terms that might puzzle modern readers, such as place names and mythological references, and gives special attention to textual and linguistic issues: controversial questions of interpretation; difficult or significant Greek words; use of style, rhetoric, and commonplaces in Greek poetry; and Aeschylus's place in the poetic tradition of Homer, Hesiod, and the elegiac poets. Practical information on staging and production is also included, as are maps and illustrations, a bibliography, indexes, and extensive cross-references between the seven plays. Forthcoming volumes will cover the works of Sophocles and Euripides.

[more]

The Commerce of Cartography

Making and Marketing Maps in Eighteenth-Century France and England

Mary Sponberg Pedley

University of Chicago Press, 2005

Though the political and intellectual history of mapmaking in the eighteenth century is well established, the details of its commercial revolution have until now been widely scattered. In The Commerce of Cartography, Mary Pedley presents a vivid picture of the costs and profits of the mapmaking industry in England and France, and reveals how the economics of map trade affected the content and appearance of the maps themselves.

Conceptualizing the relationship between economics and cartography, Pedley traces the process of mapmaking from compilation, production, and marketing to consumption, reception, and criticism. In detailing the rise of commercial cartography, Pedley explores qualitative issues of mapmaking as well. Why, for instance, did eighteenth-century ideals of aesthetics override the modern values of accuracy and detail? And what, to an eighteenth-century mind and eye, qualified as a good map?

A thorough and engaging study of the business of cartography during the Enlightenment, The Commerce of Cartography charts a new cartographic landscape and will prove invaluable to scholars of economic history, historical geography, and the history of publishing.

[more]

The Commerce of War

Exchange and Social Order in Latin Epic

Neil Coffee

University of Chicago Press, 2009

Latin epics such as Virgil’s Aeneid, Lucan’s Civil War, and Statius’s Thebaid addressed Roman aristocrats whose dealings in gifts, favors, and payments defined their conceptions of social order. In The Commerce of War, Neil Coffee argues that these exchanges play a central yet overlooked role in epic depictions of Roman society.

Tracing the collapse of an aristocratic worldview across all three poems, Coffee highlights the distinction they draw between reciprocal gift giving among elites and the more problematic behaviors of buying and selling. In the Aeneid, customary gift and favor exchanges are undermined by characters who view human interaction as short-term and commodity-driven. The Civil War takes the next logical step, illuminating how Romans cope once commercial greed has supplanted traditional values. Concluding with the Thebaid, which focuses on the problems of excessive consumption rather than exchange, Coffee closes his powerful case that these poems constitute far-reaching critiques of Roman society during its transition from republic to empire.

[more]

Commercial Visions

Science, Trade, and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age

Dániel Margócsy

University of Chicago Press, 2014

Entrepreneurial science is not new; business interests have strongly influenced science since the Scientific Revolution. In Commercial Visions, Dániel Margócsy illustrates that product marketing, patent litigation, and even ghostwriting pervaded natural history and medicine—the “big sciences” of the early modern era—and argues that the growth of global trade during the Dutch Golden Age gave rise to an entrepreneurial network of transnational science.

Margócsy introduces a number of natural historians, physicians, and curiosi in Amsterdam, London, St. Petersburg, and Paris who, in their efforts to boost their trade, developed modern taxonomy, invented color printing and anatomical preparation techniques, and contributed to philosophical debates on topics ranging from human anatomy to Newtonian optics. These scientific practitioners, including Frederik Ruysch and Albertus Seba, were out to do business: they produced and sold exotic curiosities, anatomical prints, preserved specimens, and atlases of natural history to customers all around the world. Margócsy reveals how their entrepreneurial rivalries transformed the scholarly world of the Republic of Letters into a competitive marketplace.

Margócsy’s highly readable and engaging book will be warmly welcomed by anyone interested in early modern science, global trade, art, and culture.

[more]

Commodity & Propriety

Competing Visions of Property in American Legal Thought, 1776-1970

Gregory S. Alexander

University of Chicago Press, 1997

Most people understand property as something that is owned, a means of creating individual wealth. But in Commodity and Propriety, the first full-length history of the meaning of property, Gregory Alexander uncovers in American legal writing a competing vision of property that has existed alongside the traditional conception. Property, Alexander argues, has also been understood as proprietary, a mechanism for creating and maintaining a properly ordered society. This view of property has even operated in periods—such as the second half of the nineteenth century—when market forces seemed to dominate social and legal relationships.

In demonstrating how the understanding of property as a private basis for the public good has competed with the better-known market-oriented conception, Alexander radically rewrites the history of property, with significant implications for current political debates and recent Supreme Court decisions.

[more]

Commodity Prices and Markets

Edited by Takatoshi Ito and Andrew K. Rose

University of Chicago Press, 2011

Fluctuations of commodity prices, most notably of oil, capture considerable attention and have been tied to important economic effects, such as inflation and low rates of economic growth. Commodity Prices and Markets advances our understanding of the consequences of these fluctuations, providing both general analysis and a particular focus on the countries of the Pacific Rim. The volume addresses three distinct subjects: the difficulties in forecasting commodity prices, the effects of exogenous commodity price shocks on the domestic economy, and the relationship between price shocks and monetary policy. The ability to forecast commodity prices is difficult but of great importance to businesses and governments, and this volume will be invaluable to professionals and policy makers interested in the field.

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The Common

Gail Mazur

University of Chicago Press, 1995

At the heart of Gail Mazur's The Common is the refusal to simplify what is paradoxical in our world and a recognition of the tensions in our own divided nature. These unflinching poems create a place where wisdom and foolishness, fear and courage, rage and pity, love and diffidence, naturally co-exist.

Desire, ambition, devotion, and devastating loss are all subjects for Mazur's clear-eyed poems, which resonate with the contradictions between the body's yearning and the mind's acknowledgment of the consequences of our choices. In a poetry driven by unrelenting questioning, Mazur tries, in Rilke's worlds, "to love the questions themselves."

[more]

The Common Cause

Postcolonial Ethics and the Practice of Democracy, 1900-1955

Leela Gandhi

University of Chicago Press, 2014

Europeans and Americans tend to hold the opinion that democracy is a uniquely Western inheritance, but in The Common Cause, Leela Gandhi recovers stories of an alternate version, describing a transnational history of democracy in the first half of the twentieth century through the lens of ethics in the broad sense of disciplined self-fashioning. Gandhi identifies a shared culture of perfectionism across imperialism, fascism, and liberalism—an ethic that excluded the ordinary and unexceptional. But, she also illuminates an ethic of moral imperfectionism, a set of anticolonial, antifascist practices devoted to ordinariness and abnegation that ranged from doomed mutinies in the Indian military to Mahatma Gandhi’s spiritual discipline.

Reframing the way we think about some of the most consequential political events of the era, Gandhi presents moral imperfectionism as the lost tradition of global democratic thought and offers it to us as a key to democracy’s future. In doing so, she defends democracy as a shared art of living on the other side of perfection and mounts a postcolonial appeal for an ethics of becoming common.

[more]

Common Ground

Encounters with Nature at the Edges of Life

Rob Cowen

University of Chicago Press, 2016

All too often, we think of nature as something distinct from ourselves, something to go and see, a place that’s separate from the ordinary modern world in which we live and work. But if we take the time to look, we soon find that’s not how nature works. Even in our parceled-out, paved-over urban environs, nature is all around us; it is in us. It is us.

That’s what Rob Cowen discovered after moving to a new home in northern England. After ten years in London he was suddenly adrift, searching for a sense of connection. He found himself drawn to a square-mile patch of waste ground at the edge of town. Scrappy, weed-filled, this heart-shaped tangle of land was the very definition of overlooked—a thoroughly in-between place that capitalism no longer had any use for, leaving nature to take its course. Wandering its meadows, woods, hedges, and fields, Cowen found it was also a magical, mysterious place, haunted and haunting, abandoned but wildly alive—and he fell in fascinated love.

Common Ground is a true account of that place and Cowen’s transformative journey through its layers and lives, but it’s much more too. As the land’s stories intertwine with events in his own life—and he learns he is to become a father for the first time—the divisions between human and nature begin to blur and shift. The place turns out to be a mirror, revealing what we are, what we’re not and how those two things are ultimately inseparable.

This is a book about discovering a new world, a forgotten world on the fringes of our daily lives, and the richness that comes from uncovering the stories and lives—animal and human—contained within. It is an unforgettable piece of nature writing, part of a brilliant tradition that stretches from Gilbert White to Robert Macfarlane and Helen Macdonald.

“I am dreaming of the edge-land again,” Cowen writes. Read Common Ground, and you, too, will be dreaming of the spaces in between, and what—including us—thrives there.

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Common Knowledge

News and the Construction of Political Meaning

W. Russell Neuman, Marion R. Just, and Ann N. Crigler

University of Chicago Press, 1992

Photo opportunities, ten-second sound bites, talking heads and celebrity anchors: so the world is explained daily to millions of Americans. The result, according to the experts, is an ignorant public, helpless targets of a one-way flow of carefully filtered and orchestrated communication. Common Knowledge shatters this pervasive myth. Reporting on a ground-breaking study, the authors reveal that our shared knowledge and evolving political beliefs are determined largely by how we actively reinterpret the images, fragments, and signals we find in the mass media.

For their study, the authors analyzed coverage of 150 television and newspaper stories on five prominent issues—drugs, AIDS, South African apartheid, the Strategic Defense Initiative, and the stock market crash of October 1987. They tested audience responses of more than 1,600 people, and conducted in-depth interviews with a select sample. What emerges is a surprisingly complex picture of people actively and critically interpreting the news, making sense of even the most abstract issues in terms of their own lives, and finding political meaning in a sophisticated interplay of message, medium, and firsthand experience.

At every turn, Common Knowledge refutes conventional wisdom. It shows that television is far more effective at raising the saliency of issues and promoting learning than is generally assumed; it also undermines the assumed causal connection between newspaper reading and higher levels of political knowledge. Finally, this book gives a deeply responsible and thoroughly fascinating account of how the news is conveyed to us, and how we in turn convey it to others, making meaning of at once so much and so little. For anyone who makes the news—or tries to make anything of it—Common Knowledge promises uncommon wisdom.

[more]

Common People

In Pursuit of My Ancestors

Alison Light

University of Chicago Press, 2015

“Family history begins with missing persons,” Alison Light writes in Common People. We wonder about those we’ve lost, and those we never knew, about the long skein that led to us, and to here, and to now. So we start exploring.

Most of us, however, give up a few generations back. We run into a gap, get embarrassed by a ne’er-do-well, or simply find our ancestors are less glamorous than we’d hoped. That didn’t stop Alison Light: in the last weeks of her father’s life, she embarked on an attempt to trace the history of her family as far back as she could reasonably go. The result is a clear-eyed, fascinating, frequently moving account of the lives of everyday people, of the tough decisions and hard work, the good luck and bad breaks, that chart the course of a life. Light’s forebears—servants, sailors, farm workers—were among the poorest, traveling the country looking for work; they left few lasting marks on the world. But through her painstaking work in archives, and her ability to make the people and struggles of the past come alive, Light reminds us that “every life, even glimpsed through the chinks of the census, has its surprises and secrets.”

What she did for the servants of Bloomsbury in her celebrated Mrs. Woolf and the Servants Light does here for her own ancestors, and, by extension, everyone’s: draws their experiences from the shadows of the past and helps us understand their lives, estranged from us by time yet inextricably interwoven with our own. Family history, in her hands, becomes a new kind of public history.

[more]

The Common Place of Law

Stories from Everyday Life

Patricia Ewick and Susan S. Silbey

University of Chicago Press, 1998

Why do some people not hesitate to call the police to quiet a barking dog in the middle of the night, while others accept the pain and losses associated with defective products, unsuccesful surgery, and discrimination? Patricia Ewick and Susan Silbey collected accounts of the law from more than four hundred people of diverse backgrounds in order to explore the different ways that people use and experience it. Their fascinating and original study identifies three common narratives of law that are captured in the stories people tell.

One narrative is based on an idea of the law as magisterial and remote. Another views the law as a game with rules that can be manipulated to one's advantage. A third narrative describes the law as an arbitrary power that is actively resisted. Drawing on these extensive case studies, Ewick and Silbey present individual experiences interwoven with an analysis that charts a coherent and compelling theory of legality. A groundbreaking study of law and narrative, The Common Place of Law depicts the institution as it is lived: strange and familiar, imperfect and ordinary, and at the center of daily life.

[more]

Common Prayer

The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England

Ramie Targoff

University of Chicago Press, 2001

Common Prayer explores the relationship between prayer and poetry in the century following the Protestant Reformation. Ramie Targoff challenges the conventional and largely misleading distinctions between the ritualized world of Catholicism and the more individualistic focus of Protestantism. Early modern England, she demonstrates, was characterized less by the triumph of religious interiority than by efforts to shape public forms of devotion. This provocatively revisionist argument will have major implications for early modern studies.

Through readings of William Shakespeare's Hamlet, Richard Hooker's Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie, Philip Sidney's Apology for Poetry and his translations of the Psalms, John Donne's sermons and poems, and George Herbert's The Temple, Targoff uncovers the period's pervasive and often surprising interest in cultivating public and formalized models of worship. At the heart of this study lies an original and daring approach to understanding the origins of devotional poetry; Targoff shows how the projects of composing eloquent verse and improving liturgical worship come to be deeply intertwined. New literary practices, then, became a powerful means of forging common prayer, or controlling private and otherwise unmanageable expressions of faith.

[more]

Common Understandings, Poetic Confusion

Playhouses and Playgoers in Elizabethan England

William N. West

University of Chicago Press, 2021

A new account of playgoing in Elizabethan England, in which audiences participated as much as performers.

What if going to a play in Elizabethan England was more like attending a football match than a Broadway show—or playing in one? In Common Understandings, Poetic Confusion, William N. West proposes a new account of the kind of participatory entertainment expected by the actors and the audience during the careers of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. West finds surprising descriptions of these theatrical experiences in the figurative language of early modern players and playgoers—including understanding, confusion, occupation, eating, and fighting. Such words and ways of speaking are still in use today, but their earlier meanings, like that of theater itself, are subtly, importantly different from our own. Playing was not confined to the actors on the stage but filled the playhouse, embracing audiences and performers in collaborative experiences that did not belong to any one alone but to the assembled, various crowd. What emerged in playing was a kind of thinking and feeling distributed across persons and times that were otherwise distinct. Thrown apples, smashed bottles of beer, and lumbering bears—these and more gave verbal shape to the physical interactions between players and playgoers, creating circuits of exchange, production, and consumption.

[more]

The Communal Experience

Anarchist and Mystical Communities in Twentieth Century America

Laurence R. Veysey

University of Chicago Press, 1978

The original impulse for groups to separate from society and establish communities of their own was religious. Though the religious side of this drive toward separation remains strong, the last two centuries have seen the appearance of secular communities with a socialist or anarchist orientation. In The Communal Experience, nominated for a National Book Award in 1973, Laurence Veysey explores the close resemblances between the secular and religious forms of cultural radicalism through intensive observation of four little-known communities.

Veysey compares the history of secular communities such as the early Ferrer Colony and Modern School, of Shelton, New Jersey, with contemporary anarchist communities in New York, Vermont, and New Mexico. Religious communes—"Communities of Discipline"—such as the Vedanta monasteries of the early twentieth century are compared with contemporary mystical communities in New Mexico. Distinctions between the anarchist and the mystical groups are most obvious from their approach to communal life. As Veysey shows, anarchist communities are loose, unstructured, voluntaristic; the mystics establish more rigid life-styles, focus on spiritual leaders, and hold community a secondary goal to self-realization. In a new preface written for this Phoenix Edition, he describes his return to a New Mexican mystical community and the changes that have occurred in the six years since his last visit.

[more]

Communicating the Infinite

The Emergence of the Habad School

Naftali Loewenthal

University of Chicago Press, 1990

At the end of the eighteenth century the hasidic movement was facing an internal crisis: to what extent should the teachings of Baal Shem Tov and Maggid of Mezritch, with their implicit spiritual demands, be transmitted to the rank-and-file of the movement? Previously these teachings had been reserved for a small elite. It was at this point that the Habad school emerged with a communication ethos encouraging the transmission of esoteric to the broad reaches of the Jewish world. Communicating the Infinite explores the first two generations of the Habad school under R. Shneur Zalman of Liadi and his son R. Dov Ber and examines its early opponents.

Beginning with the different levels of communication in the teachings of the Baal Shem Tov and the Maggid and his disciples, Naftali Loewenthal traces the unfolding of the dialectic between the urge to transmit esoteric ideas and a powerful inner restraint. Gradually R. Shneur Zalman came to the fore as the prime exponent of the communication ethos. Loewenthal follows the development of his discourses up to the time of his death, when R. Dov Ber and R. Aaron Halevi Horowitz formed their respective "Lubavitch" and "Staroselye" schools. The author continues with a detailed examination of the teachings of R. Dov Ber, an inspired mystic. Central in his thought was the esoteric concept of self-abnegation, bitul, yet this combined with the quest to communicate hasidic teachings to every level of society, including women.

From the late eighteenth century onwards, the main problem for the Jewish world was posed by the fall of the walls of the social and political ghetto. Generally, the response was either to secularize, or abandon altogether, traditional Judaism or to retreat from the threatening modern world into enclave religiosity; by stressing communication, the Habad school opened the way for a middle range response that was neither a retreat into elitism nor an abandonment of tradition. Based on years of research from Hebrew and Yiddish primary source materials, Communicating the Infinite is a work of importance not only to specialists of Judaic studies but also to historians and sociologists.

[more]

Communism

A TLS Companion

Edited by Ferdinand Mount

University of Chicago Press, 1993

From the overthrow of the tsars until the sudden collapse of Soviet communism, the most influential Western analysts have reflected on and debated the rise and fall of communism in the pages of the TLS. The diverse opinions gathered in Communism: A TLS Companion reflect the succession of Western attitudes to the birth, growth, and death of communism.

Contributors to this volume include Isaac Deutscher, Eric Hobsbawm, Richard Pipes, Hugh Seton-Watson, Robert Conquest, Geoffrey Hosking, C. M. Woodhouse, Max Hayward, Leszek Kolakowski, Timothy Garton Ash, and many others of equal distinction. The volume is arranged in four sections covering the period leading to the Russian Revolution, the post-Revolution era of Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin; the Soviet Union from World War II to 1968; and the final period of disillusionment and collapse.

[more]

Communities of Style

Portable Luxury Arts, Identity, and Collective Memory in the Iron Age Levant

Marian H. Feldman

University of Chicago Press, 2014

Communities of Style examines the production and circulation of portable luxury goods throughout the Levant in the early Iron Age (1200–600 BCE). In particular it focuses on how societies in flux came together around the material effects of art and style, and their role in collective memory.

Marian H. Feldman brings her dual training as an art historian and an archaeologist to bear on the networks that were essential to the movement and trade of luxury goods—particularly ivories and metal works—and how they were also central to community formation. The interest in, and relationships to, these art objects, Feldman shows, led to wide-ranging interactions and transformations both within and between communities. Ultimately, she argues, the production and movement of luxury goods in the period demands a rethinking of our very geo-cultural conception of the Levant, as well as its influence beyond what have traditionally been thought of as its borders.

[more]

A Community Built on Words

The Constitution in History and Politics

H. Jefferson Powell

University of Chicago Press, 2002

H. Jefferson Powell offers a powerful new approach to one of the central issues in American constitutional thinking today: the problem of constitutional law's historicity, or the many ways in which constitutional arguments and outcomes are shaped both by historical circumstances and by the political goals and commitments of various actors, including judges. The presence of such influences is often considered highly problematic: if constitutional law is political and historical through and through, then what differentiates it from politics per se, and what gives it integrity and coherence? Powell argues that constitutional theory has as its (sometimes hidden) agenda the ambition of showing how constitutional law can escape from history and politics, while much constitutional history seeks to identify an historically true meaning of the constitutional text that, once uncovered, can serve as a corrective to subsequent deviations from that truth.

Combining history and theory, Powell analyzes a series of constitutional controversies from 1790 to 1944 to demonstrate that constitutional law from its very beginning has involved politically charged and ideologically divisive arguments. Nowhere in our past can one find the golden age of apolitical constitutional thinking that a great deal of contemporary scholarship seeks or presupposes. Viewed over time, American constitutional law is a history of political dispute couched in constitutional terms.

Powell then takes his conclusions one step further, claiming that it is precisely this historical tradition of argument that has given American constitutional law a remarkable coherence and integrity over time. No matter what the particular political disputes of the day might be, constitutional argument has provided a shared language through which our political community has been able to fight out its battles without ultimately fracturing.

A Community Built on Words will be must reading for any student of constitutional history, theory, or law.

[more]

Community Health Equity

A Chicago Reader

Edited by Fernando De Maio, Raj C. Shah, MD, John Mazzeo, and David A. Ansell, MD

University of Chicago Press, 2019

Perhaps more than any other American city, Chicago has been a center for the study of both urban history and economic inequity. Community Health Equity assembles a century of research to show the range of effects that Chicago’s structural socioeconomic inequalities have had on patients and medical facilities alike. The work collected here makes clear that when a city is sharply divided by power, wealth, and race, the citizens who most need high-quality health care and social services have the greatest difficulty accessing them. Achieving good health is not simply a matter of making the right choices as an individual, the research demonstrates: it’s the product of large-scale political and economic forces. Understanding these forces, and what we can do to correct them, should be critical not only to doctors but to sociologists and students of the urban environment—and no city offers more inspiring examples for action to overcome social injustice in health than Chicago.

[more]

The Community of Rights

Alan Gewirth

University of Chicago Press, 1997

Alan Gewirth extends his fundamental principle of equal and universal human rights, the Principle of Generic Consistency, into the arena of social and political philosophy, exploring its implications for both social and economic rights. He argues that the ethical requirements logically imposed on individual action hold equally for the supportive state as a community of rights, whose chief function is to maintain and promote the universal human rights to freedom and well-being. Such social afflictions as unemployment, homelessness, and poverty are basic violations of these rights, which the supportive state is required to overcome. A critical alternative to both "liberal" and "communitarian" views, this book will command the attention of anyone engaged in the debate over social and economic justice.

[more]

Community Service and Social Responsibility in Youth

James Youniss and Miranda Yates

University of Chicago Press, 1997

James Youniss and Miranda Yates present a sophisticated analysis of community service's beneficial effects on adolescents' political and moral identity.

Using a case study from a predominantly Black, urban high school in Washington, D.C., Youniss and Yates build on the insights of Erik Erikson on the social and historical nature of identity development. They show that service at a soup kitchen as part of a course on social justice gives youth the opportunity to reflect on their status in society, on how society is organized, on how government should use its power, and on moral principles related to homelessness and poverty. Developing a sense of social responsibility and a civic commitment, youth come to see themselves as active agents in society.

The most authoritative work to date on the subject, this book challenges negative stereotypes of contemporary adolescents and illustrates how youth, when given the opportunity, can use their talents for social good. It will interest readers concerned with the development of today's youth and tomorrow's society.

[more]

Commutative Semigroup Rings

Robert Gilmer

University of Chicago Press, 1984

Commutative Semigroup Rings was the first exposition of the basic properties of semigroup rings. Gilmer concentrates on the interplay between semigroups and rings, thereby illuminating both of these important concepts in modern algebra.

[more]

front cover of A Companion to John Dewey's

A Companion to John Dewey's "Democracy and Education"

D. C. Phillips

University of Chicago Press, 2016

This year marks the centenary publication of John Dewey’s magnum opus, Democracy and Education. Despite its profound importance as a foundational text in education, it is notoriously difficult and—dare we say it—a little dry. In this charming and often funny companion, noted philosopher of education D. C. Phillips goes chapter by chapter to bring Dewey to a twenty-first-century audience. Drawing on over fifty years of thinking about this book—and on his own experiences as an educator—he lends it renewed clarity and a personal touch that proves its lasting importance.

Phillips bridges several critical pitfalls of Democracy and Education that often prevent contemporary readers from fully understanding it. Where Dewey sorely needs a detailed example to illustrate a point—and the times are many—Phillips steps in, presenting cases from his own classroom experiences. Where Dewey casually refers to the works of people like Hegel, Herbart, and Locke—common knowledge, apparently, in 1916—Phillips fills in the necessary background. And where Dewey gets convoluted or is even flat-out wrong, Phillips does what few other scholars would do: he takes Dewey to task. The result is a lively accompaniment that helps us celebrate and be enriched by some of the most important ideas ever offered in education.

[more]

A Companion to The Iliad

Malcolm M. Willcock

University of Chicago Press, 1976

Those who are able to read Homer in Greek have ample recourse to commentaries, but the vast majority who read the Iliad in translation have not been so well served—the many available translations contain few, if any, notes. For these readers, Malcolm M. Willcock provides a line-by-line commentary that explains the many factual details, mythological allusions, and Homeric conventions that a student or general reader could not be expected to bring to an initial encounter with the Iliad.

The notes, which always relate to particular lines in the text, have as their prime aim the simple, factual explanation of things the inexperienced reader would be unlikely to have at his or her command (What is a hecatomb? Who is Atreus' son?). Second, they enhance an appreciation of the Iliad by illuminating epic style, Homer's methods of composition, the structure of the work, and the characterization of the major heroes. The "Homeric Question," concerning the origin and authorship of the Iliad, is also discussed.

Professor Willcock's commentary is based on Richmond Lattimore's translation—regarded by many as the outstanding translation of the present generation—but it may be used profitably with other versions as well. This clearly written commentary, which includes an excellent select bibliography, will make one of the touchstones of Western literature accessible to a wider audience.

[more]

The Comparative Approach in Evolutionary Anthropology and Biology

Charles L. Nunn

University of Chicago Press, 2011

Comparison is fundamental to evolutionary anthropology. When scientists study chimpanzee cognition, for example, they compare chimp performance on cognitive tasks to the performance of human children on the same tasks. And when new fossils are found, such as those of the tiny humans of Flores, scientists compare these remains to other fossils and contemporary humans. Comparison provides a way to draw general inferences about the evolution of traits and therefore has long been the cornerstone of efforts to understand biological and cultural diversity. Individual studies of fossilized remains, living species, or human populations are the essential units of analysis in a comparative study; bringing these elements into a broader comparative framework allows the puzzle pieces to fall into place, creating a means of testing adaptive hypotheses and generating new ones.

With this book, Charles L. Nunn intends to ensure that evolutionary anthropologists and organismal biologists have the tools to realize the potential of comparative research. Nunn provides a wide-ranging investigation of the comparative foundations of evolutionary anthropology in past and present research, including studies of animal behavior, biodiversity, linguistic evolution, allometry, and cross-cultural variation. He also points the way to the future, exploring the new phylogeny-based comparative approaches and offering a how-to manual for scientists who wish to incorporate these new methods into their research.

[more]

The Comparative Approach in Evolutionary Anthropology and Biology

Charles L. Nunn

University of Chicago Press, 2011

Comparison is fundamental to evolutionary anthropology. When scientists study chimpanzee cognition, for example, they compare chimp performance on cognitive tasks to the performance of human children on the same tasks. And when new fossils are found, such as those of the tiny humans of Flores, scientists compare these remains to other fossils and contemporary humans. Comparison provides a way to draw general inferences about the evolution of traits and therefore has long been the cornerstone of efforts to understand biological and cultural diversity. Individual studies of fossilized remains, living species, or human populations are the essential units of analysis in a comparative study; bringing these elements into a broader comparative framework allows the puzzle pieces to fall into place, creating a means of testing adaptive hypotheses and generating new ones.

With this book, Charles L. Nunn intends to ensure that evolutionary anthropologists and organismal biologists have the tools to realize the potential of comparative research. Nunn provides a wide-ranging investigation of the comparative foundations of evolutionary anthropology in past and present research, including studies of animal behavior, biodiversity, linguistic evolution, allometry, and cross-cultural variation. He also points the way to the future, exploring the new phylogeny-based comparative approaches and offering a how-to manual for scientists who wish to incorporate these new methods into their research.

[more]

The Comparative Method of Language Acquisition Research

Clifton Pye

University of Chicago Press, 2017

The Mayan family of languages is ancient and unique. With their distinctive relational nouns, positionals, and complex grammatical voices, they are quite alien to English and have never been shown to be genetically related to other New World tongues. These qualities, Clifton Pye shows, afford a particular opportunity for linguistic insight. Both an overview of lessons Pye has gleaned from more than thirty years of studying how children learn Mayan languages as well as a strong case for a novel method of researching crosslinguistic language acquisition more broadly, this book demonstrates the value of a close, granular analysis of a small language lineage for untangling the complexities of first language acquisition.

Pye here applies the comparative method to three Mayan languages—K’iche’, Mam, and Ch’ol—showing how differences in the use of verbs are connected to differences in the subject markers and pronouns used by children and adults. His holistic approach allows him to observe how small differences between the languages lead to significant differences in the structure of the children’s lexicon and grammar, and to learn why that is so. More than this, he expects that such careful scrutiny of related languages’ variable solutions to specific problems will yield new insights into how children acquire complex grammars. Studying such an array of related languages, he argues, is a necessary condition for understanding how any particular language is used; studying languages in isolation, comparing them only to one’s native tongue, is merely collecting linguistic curiosities.

[more]

Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music

Essays on the History of Ethnomusicology

Edited by Bruno Nettl and Philip V. Bohlman

University of Chicago Press, 1991

Nineteen scholars from five countries explore significant issues in the history of ethnomusicology and its methodological and theoretical foundations, while providing a critique of the discipline.

"This is a useful and enriching collection of articles of interest to musicologists and ethnomusicologists. . . . The authors manage to cover much ground, presenting fascinating insights into the history of the discipline while also exploring new directions in both theory and analysis. . . . the most sweeping work of this kind to be published since the 1960s."—L. D. Loeb, University of Utah, for Choice

[more]

Comparative National Balance Sheets

A Study of Twenty Countries, 1688-1979

Raymond W. Goldsmith

University of Chicago Press, 1985

Raymond W. Goldsmith has combined his experience, good sense, and flair with figures to construct this groundbreaking comparative study of the balance sheets of twenty of the largest nations. A pioneer in the field of national accounts, Goldsmith now presents a work that will be a valuable tool in tracking the economic progress of and between nations.

The majority of the balance sheets were created especially for this project, their components gleaned from fragmentary and heterogeneous data. There are approximately 3,500 entries, each measuring the value of one type of tangible or financial asset or liability at a given date. Goldsmith's estimates are keyed to fifteen benchmark dates in the economic progress of the cited nations, and for twelve nations he was able to construct balance sheets dating back to the nineteenth century or earlier. Combined, worldwide balance sheet are included for 1950 and 1978.

Comparative National Balance Sheets will provide an essential basis for the quantitative analysis of the long-term financial development of these nations. In addition to national balance sheets for all large countries except Brazil and China, sectoral balance sheets for France, Germany, Great Britain, India, Japan, and the United States in the postwar period are also included.

[more]

The Comparative Reception of Darwinism

Edited by Thomas F. Glick

University of Chicago Press, 1988

The reaction to Darwin's Origin of Species varied in many countries according to the roles played by national scientific institutions and traditions and the attitudes of religious and political groups. The contributors to this volume, including M. J. S. Hodge, David Hull, and Roberto Moreno, gathered in 1972 at an international conference on the comparative reception of Darwinism. Their essays look at early pro- and anti-Darwinism arguments, and three additional comparative essays and appendices add a larger perspective. For this paperback edition, Thomas F. Glick has added a new preface commenting on recent research.

[more]

The Compass

The Improvisational Theatre that Revolutionized American Comedy

Janet Coleman

University of Chicago Press, 1991

Janet Coleman brilliantly recreates the time, the place, the personalities, and the neurotic magic whereby the Compass made theater history in America. The Compass began in a storefront theater near the University of Chicago campus in the summer of 1955 and lasted only a few years before its players—including David Shepherd, Paul Sills, Elaine May, Mike Nichols, Barbara Harris, and Shelley Berman—moved on. Out of this group was born a new form: improvisational theater and a radically new kind of comedian. "They did not plan to be funny or to change the course of comedy," writes Coleman. "But that is what happened."

"For anyone who is interested in theatre, underground theatre, improvisational theatre, and the sheer madness of trying something new with a repertory group, The Compass will prove a welcome history with fascinating details."—Norman Mailer

"Janet Coleman has done a spectacular job of capturing the history, the almost alarmingly diverse cultural influences, and the extraordinary people who made up the Compass."—Neal Weaver, Los Angeles Village View

"Engrossing. . . . An open window on a part of the theater that should be known."—Arthur Miller

"A valuable chronicle of an important chapter in the history of comedy and theater."—William Wolf, New York Observer

"The eruptive, disruptive talents who made the theater memorable are the same ones who make The Compass a good read."—Jay Cocks, Time

"A moving, inspirational, anecdote-studded feast."—Publishers Weekly

[more]

Compassion and Responsibility

Readings in the History of Social Welfare Policy in the United States

Frank R. Breul and Steven J. Diner

University of Chicago Press, 1985

The Compensations of Plunder

How China Lost Its Treasures

Justin M. Jacobs

University of Chicago Press, 2020

From the 1790s until World War I, Western museums filled their shelves with art and antiquities from around the world. These objects are now widely regarded as stolen from their countries of origin, and demands for their repatriation grow louder by the day. In The Compensations of Plunder, Justin M. Jacobs brings to light the historical context of the exodus of cultural treasures from northwestern China. Based on a close analysis of previously neglected archives in English, French, and Chinese, Jacobs finds that many local elites in China acquiesced to the removal of art and antiquities abroad, understanding their trade as currency for a cosmopolitan elite. In the decades after the 1911 Revolution, however, these antiquities went from being “diplomatic capital” to disputed icons of the emerging nation-state. A new generation of Chinese scholars began to criminalize the prior activities of archaeologists, erasing all memory of the pragmatic barter relationship that once existed in China. Recovering the voices of those local officials, scholars, and laborers who shaped the global trade in antiquities, The Compensations of Plunder brings historical grounding to a highly contentious topic in modern Chinese history and informs heated debates over cultural restitution throughout the world.

[more]

Competence and Character through Life

Edited by Anne Colby, Jacquelyn Boone James, and Daniel Hart

University of Chicago Press, 1998

Competence and character are at the heart of our notions of a mature and successful adult, yet many questions about their nature and development remain unanswered.

In this collection, leading psychologists, sociologists, and criminologists highlight the potential for positive development in different domains. By positing the possibility of multiple pathways of development rather than a single universal sequence, the contributors view the individual as potentially advancing in a wide range of interrelated and overlapping competencies. The nine essays in the book cover the years from youth to middle age, and they examine a range of social, political, and moral components of "competence and character" from teenage pregnancy and life-planning skills to voting records and educational attainment in low income households. Unlike comparable studies, this original and comprehensive volume frames issues, events, and longitudinal data through the lens of possibility rather than the pathology of defeat, stressing a positive approach to our conception of human potential.

[more]

Competition and Entrepreneurship

Israel M. Kirzner

University of Chicago Press, 1978

Stressing verbal logic rather than mathematics, Israel M. Kirzner provides at once a thorough critique of contemporary price theory, an essay on the theory of entrepreneurship, and an essay on the theory of competition. Competition and Entrepreneurship offers a new appraisal of quality competition, of selling effort, and of the fundamental weaknesses of contemporary welfare economics.

Kirzner's book establishes a theory of the market and the price system which differs from orthodox price theory. He sees orthodox price theory as explaining the configuration of prices and quantities that satisfied the conditions for equilibrium. Mr. Kirzner argues that "it is more useful to look to price theory to help understand how the decisions of individual participants in the market interact to generate the market forces which compel changes in prices, outputs, and methods of production and in the allocation of resources."

Although Competition and Entrepreneurship is primarily concerned with the operation of the market economy, Kirzner's insights can be applied to crucial aspects of centrally planned economic systems as well. In the analysis of these processes, Kirzner clearly shows that the rediscovery of the entrepreneur must emerge as a step of major importance.

[more]

Complacency

Classics and Its Displacement in Higher Education

John T. Hamilton

University of Chicago Press, 2022

A critical reflection on complacency and its role in the decline of classics in the academy.

In response to philosopher Simon Blackburn’s portrayal of complacency as a vice that impairs university study at its core, John T. Hamilton examines the history of complacency in classics and its implications for our contemporary moment.

The subjects, philosophies, and literatures of ancient Greece and Rome were once treated as the foundation of learning, with everything else devolving from them. Hamilton investigates what this model of superiority, derived from the golden age of the classical tradition, shares with the current hegemony of mathematics and the natural sciences. He considers how the qualitative methods of classics relate to the quantitative positivism of big data, statistical reasoning, and presumably neutral abstraction, which often dismiss humanist subjectivity, legitimize self-sufficiency, and promote a fresh brand of academic complacency. In acknowledging the reduced status of classics in higher education today, he questions how scholarly striation and stagnation continue to bolster personal, ethical, and political complacency in our present era.

[more]

The Complete Anti-Federalist

Edited by Herbert J. Storing

University of Chicago Press, 1981

The Complete Anti-Federalist, first published in 1981, contains an unprecedented collection of all the significant pamphlets, newspaper articles and letters, essays, and speeches that were written in opposition to the Constitution during the ratification debate. Storing’s work includes introductions to each entry, along with his own consideration of the Anti-Federalist thought.

This new three-volume set includes all the contents of the original seven-volume publication in a convenient, manageable format.

“A work of magnificent scholarship. Publication of these volumes is a civic event of enduring importance.”—Leonard W. Levy, New York Times Book Review

[more]

The Complete Civil War Journal and Selected Letters of Thomas Wentworth Higginson

Thomas Wentworth Higginson

University of Chicago Press, 1999

"I desire to record, as simply as I may, the beginnings of a momentous military experiment, whose ultimate results were the reorganization of the whole American army and the remoulding of the relations of two races on this continent. . . . I can only hope that the importance of the subject may save me from that egotism which makes great things seem little and little things seem less in the narrating."

So wrote Thomas Wentworth Higginson about his role in one of the most compelling and fascinating episodes in the history of the United States. As the colonel of the first regiment of black men in the Union army during the Civil War, Higginson was an early, articulate, and powerful crusader for civil rights, and his journal and letters, collected for the first time in this volume, present some of the most extraordinary documents of the Civil War.

Higginson was a politically engaged intellectual at the forefront of radical antislavery, labor, and feminist causes. Born in 1823 to a formerly wealthy but still prominent Brahmin family, he became one of America's leading social activists and a prominent writer, minister, and reformer. With the publication in 1869 of his classic Army Life in a Black Regiment, which drew on this journal, Higginson became one of the most important chroniclers of the Civil War. The Complete Civil War Journal and Selected Letters of Thomas Wentworth Higginson is the first comprehensive edition of his journal. Sensitively and thoroughly annotated by Christopher Looby and supplemented by a large selection of Higginson's wartime letters, this volume offers the most vivid and intimate picture of the radical interracial solidarity brought about by the transformative experience of the army camp and of Civil War life.

"The immediacy of Higginson's reflections, as well as their sharp insights, make this journal both distinctive and enduringly compelling . . . . Higginson's vivid texts can once again educate, gratify and delight readers."—Publishers Weekly

"This volume will enrich our understanding of the transformations that emancipation and war wrought."—Library Journal

[more]

The Complete Danteworlds

A Reader's Guide to the Divine Comedy

Guy P. Raffa

University of Chicago Press, 2009

Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy has, despite its enormous popularity and importance, often stymied readers with its multitudinous characters, references, and themes. But until the publication in 2007 of Guy Raffa’s guide to the Inferno, students lacked a suitable resource to help them navigate Dante’s underworld. With this new guide to the entire Divine Comedy, Raffa provides readers—experts in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Dante neophytes, and everyone in between—with a map of the entire poem, from the lowest circle of Hell to the highest sphere of Paradise.

Based on Raffa’s original research and his many years of teaching the poem to undergraduates, The CompleteDanteworlds charts a simultaneously geographical and textual journey, canto by canto, region by region, adhering closely to the path taken by Dante himself through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. This invaluable reference also features study questions, illustrations of the realms, and regional summaries. Interpreting Dante’s poem and his sources, Raffa fashions detailed entries on each character encountered as well as on many significant historical, religious, and cultural allusions.

[more]

The Complete Greek Tragedies

Aeschylus I

Edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore

University of Chicago Press, 1969

"These authoritative translations consign all other complete collections to the wastebasket."—Robert Brustein, The New Republic

"This is it. No qualifications. Go out and buy it everybody."—Kenneth Rexroth, The Nation

"The translations deliberately avoid the highly wrought and affectedly poetic; their idiom is contemporary....They have life and speed and suppleness of phrase."—Times Education Supplement

"These translations belong to our time. A keen poetic sensibility repeatedly quickens them; and without this inner fire the most academically flawless rendering is dead."—Warren D. Anderson, American Oxonian

"The critical commentaries and the versions themselves...are fresh, unpretentious, above all, functional."—Commonweal

"Grene is one of the great translators."—Conor Cruise O'Brien, London Sunday Times

"Richmond Lattimore is that rara avis in our age, the classical scholar who is at the same time an accomplished poet."—Dudley Fitts, New York Times Book Review

[more]

The Complete Greek Tragedies

Aeschylus II

Edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore

University of Chicago Press, 1991

The Grene and Lattimore edition of the Greek tragedies has been among the most widely acclaimed and successful publications of the University of Chicago Press. On the occasion of the Centennial of the University of Chicago and its Press, we take pleasure in reissuing this complete work in a handsome four-volume slipcased edition as well as in redesigned versions of the familiar paperbacks.

For the Centennial Edition two of the original translations have been replaced. In the original publication David Grene translated only one of the three Theban plays, Oedipus the King. Now he has added his own translations of the remaining two, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone, thus bringing a new unity of tone and style to this group. Grene has also revised his earlier translation of Prometheus Bound and rendered some of the former prose sections in verse. These new translations replace the originals included in the paperback volumes Sophocles I (which contains all three Theban plays), Aeschylus II, Greek Tragedies, Volume I, and Greek Tragedies, Volume III, all of which are now being published in second editions.

All other volumes contain the translations of the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides for the most part from the original versions first published in the 1940s and 1950s. These translations have been the choice of generations of teachers and students, selling in the past forty years over three million copies.

[more]

The Complete Greek Tragedies

Euripides I

Edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore

University of Chicago Press, 1955

In nine paperback volumes, the Grene and Lattimore editions offer the most comprehensive selection of the Greek tragedies available in English. Over the years these authoritative, critically acclaimed editions have been the preferred choice of over three million readers for personal libraries and individual study as well as for classroom use.

[more]

The Complete Greek Tragedies

Euripides II

Edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore

University of Chicago Press, 1956

In nine paperback volumes, the Grene and Lattimore editions offer the most comprehensive selection of the Greek tragedies available in English. Over the years these authoritative, critically acclaimed editions have been the preferred choice of over three million readers for personal libraries and individual study as well as for classroom use.

[more]

The Complete Greek Tragedies

Euripides III

Edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore

University of Chicago Press, 1992

In nine paperback volumes, the Grene and Lattimore editions offer the most comprehensive selection of the Greek tragedies available in English. Over the years these authoritative, critically acclaimed editions have been the preferred choice of over three million readers for personal libraries and individual study as well as for classroom use.
"These authoritative translations consign all other complete collections to the wastebasket."—Robert Brustein, The New Republic

"This is it. No qualifications. Go out and buy it everybody."—Kenneth Rexroth, The Nation

"The translations deliberately avoid the highly wrought and affectedly poetic; their idiom is contemporary....They have life and speed and suppleness of phrase."—Times Education Supplement

"These translations belong to our time. A keen poetic sensibility repeatedly quickens them; and without this inner fire the most academically flawless rendering is dead."—Warren D. Anderson, American Oxonian

"The critical commentaries and the versions themselves...are fresh, unpretentious, above all, functional."—Commonweal

"Grene is one of the great translators."—Conor Cruise O'Brien, London Sunday Times

"Richmond Lattimore is that rara avis in our age, the classical scholar who is at the same time an accomplished poet."—Dudley Fitts, New York Times Book Review

[more]

The Complete Greek Tragedies

Euripides IV

Edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore

University of Chicago Press, 1968

In nine paperback volumes, the Grene and Lattimore editions offer the most comprehensive selection of the Greek tragedies available in English. Over the years these authoritative, critically acclaimed editions have been the preferred choice of over three million readers for personal libraries and individual study as well as for classroom use.

[more]

The Complete Greek Tragedies

Euripides V

Edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore

University of Chicago Press, 1969

In nine paperback volumes, the Grene and Lattimore editions offer the most comprehensive selection of the Greek tragedies available in English. Over the years these authoritative, critically acclaimed editions have been the preferred choice of over three million readers for personal libraries and individual study as well as for classroom use.

[more]

The Complete Greek Tragedies

Sophocles I

Edited by David Grene

University of Chicago Press, 1991

"These authoritative translations consign all other complete collections to the wastebasket."—Robert Brustein, The New Republic

"This is it. No qualifications. Go out and buy it everybody."—Kenneth Rexroth, The Nation

"The translations deliberately avoid the highly wrought and affectedly poetic; their idiom is contemporary....They have life and speed and suppleness of phrase."—Times Education Supplement

"These translations belong to our time. A keen poetic sensibility repeatedly quickens them; and without this inner fire the most academically flawless rendering is dead."—Warren D. Anderson, American Oxonian

"The critical commentaries and the versions themselves...are fresh, unpretentious, above all, functional."—Commonweal

"Grene is one of the great translators."—Conor Cruise O'Brien, London Sunday Times

"Richmond Lattimore is that rara avis in our age, the classical scholar who is at the same time an accomplished poet."—Dudley Fitts, New York Times Book Review

[more]

The Complete Greek Tragedies

Sophocles II

Edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore

University of Chicago Press, 1969

"These authoritative translations consign all other complete collections to the wastebasket."—Robert Brustein, The New Republic

"This is it. No qualifications. Go out and buy it everybody."—Kenneth Rexroth, The Nation

"The translations deliberately avoid the highly wrought and affectedly poetic; their idiom is contemporary....They have life and speed and suppleness of phrase."—Times Education Supplement

"These translations belong to our time. A keen poetic sensibility repeatedly quickens them; and without this inner fire the most academically flawless rendering is dead."—Warren D. Anderson, American Oxonian

"The critical commentaries and the versions themselves...are fresh, unpretentious, above all, functional."—Commonweal

"Grene is one of the great translators."—Conor Cruise O'Brien, London Sunday Times

"Richmond Lattimore is that rara avis in our age, the classical scholar who is at the same time an accomplished poet."—Dudley Fitts, New York Times Book Review

[more]

The Complete Greek Tragedies, Volume 1

Aeschylus

Edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore

University of Chicago Press, 1992

The Grene and Lattimore edition of the Greek tragedies has been among the most widely acclaimed and successful publications of the University of Chicago Press. On the occasion of the Centennial of the University of Chicago and its Press, we take pleasure in reissuing this complete work in a handsome four-volume slipcased edition as well as in redesigned versions of the familiar paperbacks.

For the Centennial Edition two of the original translations have been replaced. In the original publication David Grene translated only one of the three Theban plays, Oedipus the King. Now he has added his own translations of the remaining two, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone, thus bringing a new unity of tone and style to this group. Grene has also revised his earlier translation of Prometheus Bound and rendered some of the former prose sections in verse. These new translations replace the originals included in the paperback volumes Sophocles I (which contains all three Theban plays), Aeschylus II, Greek Tragedies, Volume I, and Greek Tragedies, Volume III, all of which are now being published in second editions.

All other volumes contain the translations of the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides for the most part from the original versions first published in the 1940s and 1950s. These translations have been the choice of generations of teachers and students, selling in the past forty years over three million copies.

[more]

The Complete Greek Tragedies, Volume 2

Sophocles

Edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore

University of Chicago Press, 1992

The Grene and Lattimore edition of the Greek tragedies has been among the most widely acclaimed and successful publications of the University of Chicago Press. On the occasion of the Centennial of the University of Chicago and its Press, we take pleasure in reissuing this complete work in a handsome four-volume slipcased edition as well as in redesigned versions of the familiar paperbacks.

For the Centennial Edition two of the original translations have been replaced. In the original publication David Grene translated only one of the three Theban plays, Oedipus the King. Now he has added his own translations of the remaining two, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone, thus bringing a new unity of tone and style to this group. Grene has also revised his earlier translation of Prometheus Bound and rendered some of the former prose sections in verse. These new translations replace the originals included in the paperback volumes Sophocles I (which contains all three Theban plays), Aeschylus II, Greek Tragedies, Volume I, and Greek Tragedies, Volume III, all of which are now being published in second editions.

All other volumes contain the translations of the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides for the most part from the original versions first published in the 1940s and 1950s. These translations have been the choice of generations of teachers and students, selling in the past forty years over three million copies.

[more]

The Complete Greek Tragedies, Volume 3

Euripides

Edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore

University of Chicago Press, 1992

The Grene and Lattimore edition of the Greek tragedies has been among the most widely acclaimed and successful publications of the University of Chicago Press. On the occasion of the Centennial of the University of Chicago and its Press, we take pleasure in reissuing this complete work in a handsome four-volume slipcased edition as well as in redesigned versions of the familiar paperbacks.

For the Centennial Edition two of the original translations have been replaced. In the original publication David Grene translated only one of the three Theban plays, Oedipus the King. Now he has added his own translations of the remaining two, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone, thus bringing a new unity of tone and style to this group. Grene has also revised his earlier translation of Prometheus Bound and rendered some of the former prose sections in verse. These new translations replace the originals included in the paperback volumes Sophocles I (which contains all three Theban plays), Aeschylus II, Greek Tragedies, Volume I, and Greek Tragedies, Volume III, all of which are now being published in second editions.

All other volumes contain the translations of the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides for the most part from the original versions first published in the 1940s and 1950s. These translations have been the choice of generations of teachers and students, selling in the past forty years over three million copies.

[more]

The Complete Greek Tragedies, Volume 4

Euripides

Edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore

University of Chicago Press, 1992

The Grene and Lattimore edition of the Greek tragedies has been among the most widely acclaimed and successful publications of the University of Chicago Press. On the occasion of the Centennial of the University of Chicago and its Press, we take pleasure in reissuing this complete work in a handsome four-volume slipcased edition as well as in redesigned versions of the familiar paperbacks.

For the Centennial Edition two of the original translations have been replaced. In the original publication David Grene translated only one of the three Theban plays, Oedipus the King. Now he has added his own translations of the remaining two, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone, thus bringing a new unity of tone and style to this group. Grene has also revised his earlier translation of Prometheus Bound and rendered some of the former prose sections in verse. These new translations replace the originals included in the paperback volumes Sophocles I (which contains all three Theban plays), Aeschylus II, Greek Tragedies, Volume I, and Greek Tragedies, Volume III, all of which are now being published in second editions.

All other volumes contain the translations of the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides for the most part from the original versions first published in the 1940s and 1950s. These translations have been the choice of generations of teachers and students, selling in the past forty years over three million copies.

[more]

The Complete Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858

Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas

University of Chicago Press, 1991

The Lincoln-Douglas debates remain our culture's model of what public political debate ought to be. This new edition of the complete transcripts of the debates and eyewitness interpretations of them (previously published under the title Created Equal?) includes a new Foreword by David Zarefsky.

Zarefsky analyzes the rhetoric of the speeches, showing how Lincoln and Douglas chose their arguments and initiated a debate that shook the nation. Their eloquent, statesmanlike discussion of the morality of slavery illustrates the masterful use of rhetorical strategies and tactics in the public forum: a form of discourse that has nearly disappeared from the political scene today.

[more]

The Complete Poems of Michelangelo

Michelangelo

University of Chicago Press, 1998

There is no artist more celebrated than Michelangelo. Yet the magnificence of his achievements as a visual artist often overshadow his devotion to poetry. Michelangelo used poetry to express what was too personal to display in sculpture or painting. John Frederick Nims has brought the entire body of Michelangelo's verse, from the artist's ardent twenties to his anguished and turbulent eighties, to life in English in this unprecedented collection. The result is a tantalizing glimpse into a most fascinating mind.

"Wonderful. . . . Nims gives us Michelangelo whole: the polymorphous love sonneteer, the political allegorist, and the solitary singer of madrigals."—Kirkus Reviews

"A splendid, fresh and eloquent translation. . . . Nims, an eminent poet and among the best translators of our time, conveys the full meaning and message of Michelangelo's love sonnets and religious poems in fluently rhymed, metrical forms."—St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"The best so far. . . . Nims is best at capturing the sound and sense of Michelangelo's poetic vocabulary."—Choice

"Surely the most compelling translations of Michelangelo currently available in English."—Ronald L. Martinez, Washington Times

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The Complete Poems

The 1554 Edition of the "Rime," a Bilingual Edition

Gaspara Stampa

University of Chicago Press, 2010

Gaspara Stampa (1523?-1554) is one of the finest female poets ever to write in Italian. Although she was lauded for her singing during her lifetime, her success and critical reputation as a poet emerged only after her verse was republished in the early eighteenth century. Her poetry runs the gamut of human emotion, ranging from ecstasy over a consummated love affair to despair at its end. While these tormented works and their multiple male addressees have led to speculation that Stampa may have been one of Venice’s famous courtesans, they can also be read as a rebuttal of typical assumptions about women’s roles. Championed by Rainer Maria Rilke, among others, she has more recently been celebrated by feminist scholars for her distinctive and original voice and her challenge to convention.

The first complete translation of Stampa into English, this volume collects all of her passionate and lyrical verse. It is also the first modern critical edition of her poems, and in restoring the original sequence of the 1554 text, it allows readers the opportunity to encounter Stampa as she intended. Jane Tylus renders Stampa’s verse in precise and graceful English translations, allowing a new generation of students and scholars of poetry, Renaissance literature, and music history to rediscover this incipiently modern Italian poet.

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Complete Poetry and Prose

A Bilingual Edition

Louise Labé

University of Chicago Press, 2006

Thanks to her acclaimed volume of poetry and prose published in France in 1555, Louise Labé (1522-66) remains one of the most important and influential women writers of the Continental Renaissance. Best known for her exquisite collection of love sonnets, Labé played off the Petrarchan male tradition with wit and irony, and her elegies respond with lyric skill to predecessors such as Sappho and Ovid. The first complete bilingual edition of this singular and broad-ranging female author, Complete Poetry and Prose also features the only translations of Labé's sonnets to follow the exacting rhyme patterns of the originals and the first rhymed translation of Labé's elegies in their entirety.

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The Complete Tales of Nikolai Gogol, Volume 1

Nikolai Gogol

University of Chicago Press, 1985

Nikolai Gogol was an artist who, like Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift, and Sterne, "knew how to walk upside down in our valley of sorrows so as to make it to a merry place." This two-volume edition at last brings all of Gogol's fiction (except his novel Dead Souls) together in paperback. Volume 1 includes Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka, the early Ukrainian folktales that first brought Gogol fame, as well as "Nevsky Prospekt" and "Diary of a Madman."

"It is good to have a complete collection of Gogol's tales in paperback. . . . Professor Kent has thoroughly revised Mrs. Garnett's conscientious and skillful translation, eliminating the Victorianisms of her style, correcting mistakes and pruderies of diction, and making the whole translation sound much more contemporary and alive. But he has avoided the whimsicality and 'curliness' in which some recent translators indulged, and he has not changed or suppressed anything material. He has also supplied helpful notes which are often the first annotation in English, and he has written an introduction which steers the correct middle course between making Gogol an irresponsible artist of the grotesque and proving him a documentary historian of backward Russia."—René Wellek, Yale University

[more]

The Complete Tales of Nikolai Gogol, Volume 2

Nikolai Gogol

University of Chicago Press, 1983

Volume 2 of The Complete Tales includes Gogol's Mirgorod stories—among them that masterpiece of grotesque comedy, "The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich," the wonderfully satiric "Old World Landowners," and the Cossak epic "Taras Bulba." Here also is "The Nose," Gogol's final effort in the realm of the fantastic, as well as "The Coach," "The Portrait" (in its final version), and the most influential of his Petersburg stories, "The Overcoat."

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The Complete Tragedies, Volume 1

Medea, The Phoenician Women, Phaedra, The Trojan Women, Octavia

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

University of Chicago Press, 2017

The first of two volumes collecting the complete tragedies of Seneca.

Edited by world-renowned classicists Elizabeth Asmis, Shadi Bartsch, and Martha C. Nussbaum, the Complete Works of Lucius Annaeus Seneca series offers authoritative, modern English translations of the writings of the Stoic philosopher and playwright (4 BCE–65 CE). The two volumes of The Complete Tragedies present all of his dramas, expertly rendered by preeminent scholars and translators.

This first volume contains Medea, The Phoenician Women, Phaedra, The Trojan Women, and Octavia, the last of which was written in emulation of Senecan tragedies and serves as a unique example of political tragedy. The second volume includes Oedipus, Hercules Mad, Hercules on Oeta, Thyestes, and Agamemnon. High standards of accuracy, clarity, and style are maintained throughout the translations, which render Seneca into verse with as close a correspondence, line for line, to the original as possible, and with special attention paid to meter and overall flow. In addition, each tragedy is prefaced by an original translator’s introduction offering reflections on the work’s context and meaning. Notes are provided for the reader unfamiliar with the culture and history of classical antiquity. Accordingly, The Complete Tragedies will be of use to a general audience and professionals alike, from the Latinless student to scholars and instructors of comparative literature, classics, philosophy, drama, and more.

[more]

The Complete Tragedies, Volume 2

Oedipus, Hercules Mad, Hercules on Oeta, Thyestes, Agamemnon

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

University of Chicago Press, 2017

The second of two volumes collecting the complete tragedies of Seneca.

Edited by world-renowned classicists Elizabeth Asmis, Shadi Bartsch, and Martha C. Nussbaum, the Complete Works of Lucius Annaeus Seneca offers authoritative, modern English translations of the writings of the Stoic philosopher and playwright (4 BCE–65 CE). The two volumes of The Complete Tragedies presents all of his dramas, expertly rendered by preeminent scholars and translators.

The first volume contains Medea, The Phoenician Women, Phaedra, The Trojan Women, and Octavia, the last of which was written in emulation of Senecan tragedies and serves as a unique example of political tragedy. This second volume includes Oedipus, Hercules Mad, Hercules on Oeta, Thyestes, and Agamemnon. High standards of accuracy, clarity, and style are maintained throughout the translations, which render Seneca into verse with as close a correspondence, line for line, to the original as possible, and with special attention paid to meter and overall flow. In addition, each tragedy is prefaced by an original translator’s introduction offering reflections on the work’s context and meaning. Notes are provided for the reader unfamiliar with the culture and history of classical antiquity. Accordingly, The Complete Tragedies will be of use to a general audience and professionals alike, from the Latinless student to scholars and instructors of comparative literature, classics, philosophy, drama, and more.

[more]

The Complete Works

Handbook, Discourses, and Fragments

Epictetus

University of Chicago Press, 2022

The complete surviving works of Epictetus, the most influential Stoic philosopher from antiquity.

“Some things are up to us and some are not.”

Epictetus was born into slavery around the year 50 CE, and, upon being granted his freedom, he set himself up as a philosophy teacher. After being expelled from Rome, he spent the rest of his life living and teaching in Greece. He is now considered the most important exponent of Stoicism, and his surviving work comprises a series of impassioned discourses, delivered live and recorded by his student Arrian, and the Handbook, Arrian’s own take on the heart of Epictetus’s teaching.

In Discourses, Epictetus argues that happiness depends on knowing what is in our power to affect and what is not. Our internal states and our responses to events are up to us, but the events themselves are assigned to us by the benevolent deity, and we should treat them—along with our bodies, possessions, and families—as matters of indifference, simply making the best use of them we can. Together, the Discourses and Handbook constitute a practical guide to moral self-improvement, as Epictetus explains the work and exercises aspirants need to do to enrich and deepen their lives. Edited and translated by renowned scholar Robin Waterfield, this book collects the complete works of Epictetus, bringing to modern readers his insights on how to cope with death, exile, the people around us, the whims of the emperor, fear, illness, and much more.

CUSTOMER NOTE: THE HARDCOVER IS FOR LIBRARIES AND HAS NO JACKET.

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Complete Writings

Letterbook, Dialogue on Adam and Eve, Orations

Isotta Nogarola

University of Chicago Press, 2004

Renowned in her day for her scholarship and eloquence, Isotta Nogarola (1418-66) remained one of the most famous women of the Italian Renaissance for centuries after her death. And because she was one of the first women to carve out a place for herself in the male-dominated republic of letters, Nogarola served as a crucial role model for generations of aspiring female artists and writers.

This volume presents English translations of all of Nogarola's extant works and highlights just how daring and original her convictions were. In her letters and orations, Nogarola elegantly synthesized Greco-Roman thought with biblical teachings. And striding across the stage in public, she lectured the Veronese citizenry on everything from history and religion to politics and morality. But the most influential of Nogarola's works was a performance piece, Dialogue on Adam and Eve, in which she discussed the relative sinfulness of Adam and Eve—thereby opening up a centuries-long debate in Europe on gender and the nature of woman and establishing herself as an important figure in Western intellectual history. This book will be a must read for teachers and students of Women's Studies as well as of Renaissance literature and history.

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