front cover of The Fabulous Future?
The Fabulous Future?
America and the World in 2040
Morton Schapiro and Gary Saul Morson
Northwestern University Press, 2015

Will the future be one of economic expansion, greater tolerance, liberating inventions, and longer, happier lives? Or do we face economic stagnation, declining quality of life, and a techno­logically enhanced totalitarianism worse than any yet seen? The Fabulous Future? America and the World in 2040 draws its inspi­ration from a more optimistic time, and tome, The Fabulous Fu­ture: America in 1980, in which Fortune magazine celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary by publishing the predictions of thought leaders of its time.

In the present volume, the world’s leading specialists from di­verse fields project developments in their areas of expertise, from religion and the media to the environment and nanotechnology. Will we be happier, and what exactly does happiness have to do with our economic future? Where is higher education heading and how should it develop? And what is the future of prediction itself? These exciting essays provoke sharper questions, reflect unexpectedly on one another, and testify to our present anxieties about the surprising world to come.

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Fair Rosamond
A Study of the Development of a Literary Theme
Virgil B. Heltzel
Northwestern University Press, 1947
In Fair Rosamond Virgil B. Heltzel traces the character of Rosamond Clifford, known as “Fair Rosamond”—which has its origins as a theme in medieval literature—through its use in poetry and plays and novels, from the Renaissance through the early twentieth century. Heltzel’s book retains its importance today for scholars tracing certain thematic structures through all periods of literature.
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Faith and Fat Chances
A Novel
Carla Trujillo
Northwestern University Press, 2015

Finalist, 2012 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction 

Carla Trujillo brings to life another side of the fabled city of Santa Fe in this rollicking novel set in Dogtown, a dilapidated neighborhood on the outskirts of town. Home to a hardscrabble community of working people struggling to make a living on meager means, Dogtown is worlds apart from the tourists, artists, and upscale eateries just a stone’s throw away. The close-knit neighborhood thrives in its own way, until an entrepreneur arrives with a plan to cast out its occupants and construct a winery in its place.

Led by Dogtown’s unofficial mayor, Pepa Romero—an irreverent healer with old-world wisdom and new-age knowledge—the citizens of Dogtown revolt. Using everything at their disposal, including spying, supernatural powers, the law, and individual cunning, they set in motion a thrilling and at times hilarious chain of events that culminates in a storm of epic proportions. With an unforgettable cast of characters, Faith and Fat Chances illuminates the ingenuity and resilience of people fighting to preserve their way of life.

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The Faithful River
Stefan Zeromski
Northwestern University Press, 1999
Originally published in 1912, this lyrical novel is set in a manor house in central Poland during the January Uprising of 1863 to 1864, when a volunteer Polish army futilely fought the Russian occupation. A wounded soldier appears outside the house and is cared for by Salomea, the young ward of the absent owners, who has been left in the manor with an aged servant. As the two strive to conceal the soldier's presence during brutal and invasive visits by the Russians, Salomea finds herself falling in love with her patient.
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Faithful Translators
Authorship, Gender, and Religion in Early Modern England
Jaime Goodrich
Northwestern University Press, 2014
With Faithful Translators Jaime Goodrich offers the first in-depth examination of women’s devotional translations and of religious translations in general within early modern England. Placing female translators such as Queen Elizabeth I and Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, alongside their male counterparts, such as Sir Thomas More and Sir Philip Sidney, Goodrich argues that both male and female translators constructed authorial poses that allowed their works to serve four distinct cultural functions: creating privacy, spreading propaganda, providing counsel, and representing religious groups. Ultimately, Faithful Translators calls for a reconsideration of the apparent simplicity of "faithful" translations and aims to reconfigure perceptions of early modern authorship, translation, and women writers.
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False Starts
The Rhetoric of Failure and the Making of American Modernism
David M. Ball
Northwestern University Press, 2014
From Herman Melville’s claim that “failure is the true test of greatness” to Henry Adams’s self-identification with the “mortifying failure in [his] long education” and William Faulkner’s eagerness to be judged by his “splendid failure to do the impossible,” the rhetoric of failure has served as a master trope of modernist American literary expression. David Ball’s magisterial study addresses the fundamental questions of language, meaning, and authority that run counter to well-rehearsed claims of American innocence and positivity, beginning with the American Renaissance and extending into modernist and contemporary literature. The rhetoric of failure was used at various times to engage artistic ambition, the arrival of advanced capitalism, and a rapidly changing culture, not to mention sheer exhaustion. False Starts locates a lively narrative running through American literature that consequently queries assumptions about the development of modernism in the United States.
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The Familiar Letter as a Literary Genre in the Age of Pushkin
William Mills Todd III
Northwestern University Press, 1999
In the field of Russian literary studies, there is surprisingly little discussion of independent genres and their effect on the creativity of an era. This important text on the quasi-public "friendly letter" of nineteenth-century Russia addresses this deficiency, examining the tradition of familiar letter writing that developed in the early 1800s among literary circles that included such luminaries as Pushkin, Karamzin, and Turgenev, and arguing that these letters constitute a distinct literary genre.
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Fantastic Stories
Abram Tertz
Northwestern University Press, 1986
Abram Tertz is the pseudonym of Andrei Sinyavsky, the exile Soviet dissident writer whose works have been compared to fabulists like Kafka and Borges. Tertz's settings are exotic but familiar and as compelling as those of lunatics and mystics. This edition contains the nightmarish "Pkhentz," a story missing from the first English edition.
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Farewell, Mama Odessa
A Novel
Emil Draitser
Northwestern University Press, 2020

Set in the summer of 1979 at the height of the movement to free Soviet Jewry, Farewell, Mama Odessa is an autobiographical novel whose intertwined storylines follow a variety of people—dissidents, victims of ethnic discrimination, and black marketeers among them—as they bid farewell to their beloved hometown of Odessa, Ukraine, and make their way to the West. At the book’s center is Boris, a young writer thwarted by state censorship and antisemitism. With an Angora kitten for his companion and together with other émigrés, he puts the old country in his rear-view mirror and sets out on a journey that will take him to Bratislava, Vienna, Rome, and New York on his way to Los Angeles. Will Boris be able to rekindle his creative passion and inspiration in the West? Will other Jewish émigrés fit into the new society, so much different than the one they left behind? With humor and compassion, Farewell, Mama
Odessa
describes the émigrés’ attempts at adjustment to the free world. 

 
[more]

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Farewell to Matyora
Valentin Rasputin
Northwestern University Press, 1995
A fine example of Village Prose from the post-Stalin era, Farewell to Matyora decries the loss of the Russian peasant culture to the impersonal, soulless march of progress.

It is the final summer of the peasant village of Matyora. A dam will be completed in the fall, destroying the village. Although their departure is inevitable, the characters over when, and even whether, they should leave. A haunting story with a heartfelt theme, Farewell to Matyora is a passionate plea for humanity and an eloquent cry for a return to an organic life.
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The Fate of Difficulty in the Poetry of Our Time
Edited by Charles Altieri and Nicholas D. Nace
Northwestern University Press, 2017
The Fate of Difficulty in the Poetry of Our Time offers original readings of poems composed in this century—poems that are challenging to follow, challenging to understand, challenging to discuss, and challenging to enjoy. Difficult poetry of the past relied on allusion, syntactic complexity, free association, and strange juxtapositions. The new poetry breaks with the old in its stunning variety; its questioning of inherited values, labels, and narratives; its multilingualism; its origin in and production of unnamed affects; and its coherence around critical and social theorists as much as other poets.

The essays in this volume include poets writing on the works of a younger generation (Lyn Hejinian on Paolo Javier, Bob Perelman on Rachel Zolf, Roberto Tejada on Rosa Alcalá), influential writers addressing the work of peers (Ben Lerner on Maggie Nelson, Michael W. Clune on Aaron Kunin), critics making imaginative leaps to encompass challenging work (Brian M. Reed on Sherwin Bitsui, Siobhan Philips on Juliana Spahr), and younger scholars coming to terms with poets who continue to govern new poetic experimentation (Joseph Jeon on Myung Mi Kim, Lytle Shaw on Lisa Robertson).

In pairings that are both intuitive (Marjorie Perloff on Craig Dworkin) and unexpected (Langdon Hammer on Srikanth Reddy), The Fate of Difficulty in the Poetry of Our Time illuminates the myriad pathways and strategies for exploring difficult poetry of the present.
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Fateless
Imre Kertesz
Northwestern University Press, 1992
Winner, 2002 Nobel Prize for Literature
One of Publishers Weekly's Fifty Best Books of 1992


Fateless is a moving and disturbing novel about a Hungarian Jewish boy’s experiences in German concentration camps and his attempts to reconcile himself to those experiences after the war. Upon his return to his native Budapest still clad in his striped prison clothes, fourteen-year-old George Koves senses the indifference, even hostility, of people on the street. His former neighbors and friends urge him to put the ordeal out of his mind, while a sympathetic journalist refers to the camps as "the lowest circle of hell." The boy can relate to neither cliche and is left to ponder the meaning of his experience alone.

George's response to his experience is curiously ambivalent. In the camps he tries to adjust to his ever-worsening situation by imputing human motives to his inhumane captors. By imposing his logic--that of a bright, sensitive, though in many ways ordinary teenager - he maintains a precarious semblance of normalcy. Once freed, he must contend with the "banality of evil" to which he has become accustomed: when asked why he uses words like "naturally," "undeniably," and "without question" to describe the most horrendous of experiences, he responds, "In the concentration camp it was natural." Without emotional or spiritual ties to his Jewish heritage and rejected by his country, he ultimately comes to the conclusion that neither his Hungarianness nor his Jewishness was really at the heart of his fate: rather, there are only "given situations, and within these, further givens."
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A Feast of Astonishments
Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde, 1960s-1980s
Edited by Lisa Graziose Corrin and Corrine Granof
Northwestern University Press, 2015

Charlotte Moorman was a bold, barrier-breaking musician and performance artist and a tireless champion of experimental art, whose avant-garde festivals in New York City brought new art forms to a broad public. To date, recognition of Moorman has been limited mostly to her collaborations with other artists, including composer John Cage and pioneering multimedia artist Nam June Paik, and to her 1967 performance of Paik’s "Opera Sextronique," for which she became known as the "topless cellist" after being arrested on indecency charges. A Feast of Astonishments looks deeper to portray Moorman as a leading international figure in her own right.

With more than 150 color images and essays by art historians, curators, and musicologists, this catalog will offer a fresh perspective and complement an exhibition that opens at Northwestern University’s Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art in January 2016 before traveling to New York University’s Grey Art Gallery in Manhattan and the Museum der Moderne in Salzburg, Austria. The exhibition will feature original sculptures, photographs, video, props and costumes, annotated music scores, archival materials, film clips, and audio recordings, many drawn from the Charlotte Moorman Archive at the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University Library. The exhibition is a partnership between the Block Museum and the Northwestern University Libraries.

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Federalism
A Dialogue
David L. Shapiro
Northwestern University Press, 1995
David Shapiro explores the virtues and defects of federalism as it has developed in this country from a variety of perspectives that include historical, constitutional, economic, social, and political considerations. Using the dialectical form adopted by advocates trying a case before a court, Shapiro not only examines the strongest arguments on the two principal sides of the issue but also probes the potential value of the dialectical process itself.
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Feelin
Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought
Bettina Judd
Northwestern University Press, 2023

How creativity makes its way through feeling—and what we can know and feel through the artistic work of Black women
 
Feeling is not feelin. As the poet, artist, and scholar Bettina Judd argues, feelin, in African American Vernacular English, is how Black women artists approach and produce knowledge as sensation: internal and complex, entangled with pleasure, pain, anger, and joy, and manifesting artistic production itself as the meaning of the work. Through interviews, close readings, and archival research, Judd draws on the fields of affect studies and Black studies to analyze the creative processes and contributions of Black women—from poet Lucille Clifton and musician Avery*Sunshine to visual artists Betye Saar, Joyce J. Scott, and Deana Lawson.
 
Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought makes a bold and vital intervention in critical theory’s trend toward disembodying feeling as knowledge. Instead, Judd revitalizes current debates in Black studies about the concept of the human and about Black life by considering how discourses on emotion as they are explored by Black women artists offer alternatives to the concept of the human. Judd expands the notions of Black women’s pleasure politics in Black feminist studies that include the erotic, the sexual, the painful, the joyful, the shameful, and the sensations and emotions that yet have no name. In its richly multidisciplinary approach, Feelin calls for the development of research methods that acknowledge creative and emotionally rigorous work as productive by incorporating visual art, narrative, and poetry.

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Feeling Faint
Affect and Consciousness in the Renaissance
Giulio J. Pertile
Northwestern University Press, 2019
Feeling Faint is a book about human consciousness in its most basic sense: the awareness, at any given moment, that we live and feel. Such awareness, it argues, is distinct from the categories of selfhood  to which it is often assimilated, and can only be uncovered at the margins of first-person experience. What would it mean to be conscious without being a first person—to be conscious in the absence of a self? 

Such a phenomenon, subsequently obscured by the Enlightenment identification of consciousness and personal identity, is what we discover in scenes of swooning from the Renaissance: consciousness without self, consciousness reconceived as what Fredric Jameson calls "a registering apparatus for transformed states of being." Where the early modern period has often been seen in terms of the rise of self-aware subjectivity, Feeling Faint argues that swoons, faints, and trances allow us to conceive of Renaissance subjectivity in a different guise: as the capacity of the senses and passions to experience, regulate, and respond to their own activity without the intervention of first-person awareness. 

In readings of Renaissance authors ranging from Montaigne to Shakespeare, Pertile shows how self-loss affords embodied consciousness an experience of itself in a moment of intimate vitality which precedes awareness of specific objects or thoughts—an experience with which we are all familiar, and yet which is tantalizingly difficult to pin down.
 
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The Feminine in Jungian Psychology and in Christian Theology
Ann Belford Ulanov
Northwestern University Press, 1971
The Feminine in Jungian Psychology and in Christian Theology investigates the implications for Christian theology of Jung's special insights into the feminine. In it, Ann Belford Ulanov gathers together in one volume what Jung and Jungians have discovered about the feminine in order to explore what Jungian thought and methods may illuminate about the place of the feminine in Christian theology.

Jung focuses on the human person and sees as central its mixture of masculine and feminine elements. In a time when so much is asserted and written about women in society—their rights, roles, identities, needs, and contributions—it is especially significant that Jung asserts the existence of the feminine as a key element, not only in women but in men as well. No less contested are the roles and identities of Christians. Ulanov brings into focus the deep and fascinating connections between theology and psychology.
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Feminism, Capitalism, and Ecology
Johanna Oksala
Northwestern University Press, 2023
A philosophical response that brings together feminist and ecological approaches to solving the global environmental crisis that the capitalist economic system has created
 
In the face of ecological catastrophe, neither feminists nor environmentalists have the option of merely supporting an environmental politics that would preserve an imagined nature somewhere outside capitalism. As Johanna Oksala contends, the political goal must be more radical: to challenge the capitalist economic system itself and the mechanisms by which it expropriates life on the planet.
 
Feminism, Capitalism, and Ecology lays the critical groundwork for this political project. It develops a new way of bringing feminist and ecological responses to capitalism together into a cohesive framework. By exposing the systemic logic by which environmental destruction and gender oppression are jointly rooted in capitalism, Oksala establishes the theoretical foundations for an effective political alliance. The traditions of materialist ecofeminism and Marxist feminism are critical starting points. But the rapid rise of biotechnology and the steady increase of precarity necessitate a model of resistance that responds to the distinctive challenges of contemporary biocapitalism. Timely and urgent, this book articulates a theoretically sophisticated response and maps out our real-world options in this existential struggle.
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Feminist Experiences
Foucauldian and Phenomenological Investigations
Johanna Oksala
Northwestern University Press, 2016
Feminist Experiences develops and defends a distinctive understanding of feminist philosophy as social critique. Feminist philosophy is essentially a political endeavor, Johanna Oksala argues, aiming to expose, analyze, and ultimately change gendered power relations. However, such an understanding of feminist philosophy raises a host of theoretical problems and paradoxes. Oksala investigates the philosophical challenges and outlines the ontological presuppositions and methodological innovations the project requires.

Drawing on conceptual tools from the thought of Michel Foucault, but also from the tradition of phenomenology, she explores the role of experience in feminist philosophy and its relationship to language and linguistic meaning. Oksala concludes by sketching a feminist ontology of the present through a critical investigation of neoliberalism and the challenges it presents to feminist theory and politics.
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Ferraro
My Story
Geraldine Ferraro with Linda Bird Francke and with a foreword by Marie Wilson
Northwestern University Press, 2004
In this memoir, Geraldine A. Ferraro reflects on her experience as the first and only woman nominated by a major party to run on the presidential ticket. This book reveals the process that led to her nomination as the 1984 Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate and gives a revealing behind-the-scenes look at campaign politics, especially the ruthless criticism directed at her and her family. Ferraro brings to life the dynamics of the women in Congress and how the different life experiences that they bring to the table affect the policy making process. She also gives a real understanding of the pioneering women, including Bella Abzug, Gloria Steinem, Millie Jeffrey and many others who worked together to make sure that a women was on the Democratic ticket in 1984.

Ferraro's run for vice-president was an important moment in American history. The time is right for telling a new generation this story of women's collective political power and the difference women office holders can and do make to public policy.
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Fertility and Other Stories
Vsevolod Ivanov
Northwestern University Press, 1998
Vsevolod Ivanov's personal experiences in Siberia and Central Asia during the Revolution and Civil War, set against a childhood and youth wandering that vast expanse, infuse his writing. Combining traditional elements with the fantastic and the surreal, Ivanov's stories address not only the themes of the Revolution--the dehumanizing effects of famine; the ferment, energy, and uncertainty of the tempestuous times—but also the quotidian: the quiet world of man and nature, and the elemental bond that tied peasants to their native land. Fertility and Other Stories makes available for the first time in English some of the best stories of one of the most talented twentieth-century Russian writers.
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Fever Dogs
Stories
Kim O'Neil
Northwestern University Press, 2017
Finalist, 2017 Balcones Fiction prize

Kim O’Neil’s debut collection, Fever Dogs, is a fictional biography of three generations of women. It begins at the turn of the twenty-first century with Jean, a young woman at an impasse. Romantically adrift, in a dying profession, she decides that to make herself a future, she must first make herself a past. 

To deal with a violent history, Jean’s mother has violently erased it. Starting from a bare outline that includes an unspoken death, a predatory father, and a homeless stint, Jean reconstructs the life her mother, Jane, might have lived. But origin stories can never completely cover their tracks: like Jean’s story, Jane’s cannot be told apart from that of her own mother. 

What follows is a set of stories spanning nearly a century in response to questions the narrator wishes she had asked her mother and to which she has disjointed answers at best. In the absence of answers, the narrator, in various points of view, invents them. As the stories progress backward in time, the footholds in fact grow fewer and the shift to fabulism greater. But in her attempt to unravel her mother's origin and her own, Jean finds that the stories she invents—like the dogs who run through them as witnesses, allies, and objects of desire—serve as well as any other in the makeshift task of authoring a life.
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Fiction Beyond Secularism
Justin Neuman
Northwestern University Press, 2014

Modernist thinkers once presumed a progressive secularity, with the novel replacing religious texts as society’s moral epics. Yet religion—beginning with the Iranian revolution of 1979, through the collapse of communism, and culminating in the singular rupture of September 11, 2001—has not retreated quietly out of sight.

In Fiction Beyond Secularism, Justin Neuman argues that contemporary novelists who are most commonly identified as antireligious—among them Orhan Pamuk, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Margaret Atwood, Nadine Gordimer, Haruki Murakami, and J. M. Coetzee—have defied assumptions and have instead written some of the most trenchant critiques of secular ideologies, as well as the most exciting and rigorous inquiries into the legacies of the religious imagination. As a result, many readers (or nonreaders) on either side of the religious divide neglect the insights of works like The Satanic Verses, Disgrace, and Snow. Fiction Beyond Secularism serves as a timely corrective.

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Fictional Environments
Mimesis, Deforestation, and Development in Latin America
Victoria Saramago
Northwestern University Press, 2021

Finalist, 2022 ASLE Ecocritical Book Award

Fictional Environments: Mimesis, Deforestation, and Development in Latin America investigates how fictional works have become sites for the production of knowledge, imagination, and intervention in Latin American environments. It investigates the dynamic relationship between fictional images and real places, as the lasting representations of forests, rural areas, and deserts in novels clash with collective perceptions of changes like deforestation and urbanization.

From the backlands of Brazil to a developing Rio de Janeiro, and from the rainforests of Venezuela and Peru to the Mexican countryside, rapid deforestation took place in Latin America in the second half of the twentieth century. How do fictional works and other cultural objects dramatize, resist, and intervene in these ecological transformations? Through analyses of work by João Guimarães Rosa, Alejo Carpentier, Juan Rulfo, Clarice Lispector, and Mario Vargas Llosa, Victoria Saramago shows how novels have inspired conservationist initiatives and offered counterpoints to developmentalist policies, and how environmental concerns have informed the agendas of novelists as essayists, politicians, and public intellectuals. This book seeks to understand the role of literary representation, or mimesis, in shaping, sustaining, and negotiating environmental imaginaries during the deep, ongoing transformations that have taken place from the 1950s to the present.

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The Fifth Sun
Mary Helen Lagasse
Northwestern University Press, 2004

Winner of the 3rd Annual Miguel Mármol Prize from Curbstone Press, Mary Helen Lagasse's The Fifth Sun is an inspiring story of an immigrant who struggles valiantly for a better life for herself and her family. A young Mexican woman, Mercedes, leaves her village to work as a housemaid in New Orleans. This fast-paced novel takes us through her adventures in New Orleans, her marriage, her struggle to raise her children, her deportation, and her attempt to re-cross the river and be reunited with her children.

 
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Figurative Inquisitions
Conversion, Torture, and Truth in the Luso-Hispanic Atlantic
Erin Graff Zivin
Northwestern University Press, 2014

Winner, 2015 LAJSA Best Book in Latin American Jewish Studies

The practices of interrogation, torture, and confession have resurfaced in public debates since the early 2000s following human rights abuses around the globe. Yet discussion of torture has remained restricted to three principal fields: the legal, the pragmatic, and the moral, eclipsing the less immediate but vital question of what torture does.Figurative Inquisitions seeks to correct this lacuna by approaching the question of torture from a literary vantage point.

This book investigates the uncanny presence of the Inquisition and marranismo (crypto-Judaism) in modern literature, theater, and film from Mexico, Brazil, and Portugal. Through a critique of fictional scenes of interrogation, it underscores the vital role of the literary in deconstructing the relation between torture and truth. Figurative Inquisitions traces the contours of a relationship among aesthetics, ethics, and politics in an account of the "Inquisitional logic" that continues to haunt contemporary political forms. In so doing, the book offers a unique humanistic perspective on current torture debates.

 
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Figures of the World
The Naturalist Novel and Transnational Form
Christopher Laing Hill
Northwestern University Press, 2020
Figures of the World: The Naturalist Novel and Transnational Form overturns Eurocentric genealogies and globalizing generalizations about “world literature” by examining the complex, contradictory history of naturalist fiction. Christopher Laing Hill follows naturalism’s emergence in France and circulation around the world from North and South America to East Asia. His analysis shows that transnational literary studies must operate on multiple scales, combine distant reading with close analysis, and investigate how literary forms develop on the move.
 
The book begins by tracing the history of naturalist fiction from the 1860s into the twentieth century and the reasons it spread around the world. Hill explores the development of three naturalist figures—the degenerate body, the self-liberated woman, and the social milieu—through close readings of fiction from France, Japan, and the United States. Rather than genealogies of European influence or the domination of cultural “peripheries” by the center, novels by Émile Zola, Tayama Katai, Frank Norris, and other writers reveal conspicuous departures from metropolitan models as writers revised naturalist methods to address new social conditions. Hill offers a new approach to studying culture on a large scale for readers interested in literature, the arts, and the history of ideas.
 
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Filthy Labors
Poems
Lauren Marie Schmidt
Northwestern University Press, 2017
In Filthy Labors, Lauren Marie Schmidt draws on personal observations from her position as a poetry teacher at a shelter for homeless mothers, as well as her own roles as daughter and sister through times of family turmoil. She condemns the indignities suffered by the poor and the powerless and praises the work of those who do the caretaking. Here is poetry in the great tradition of social justice literature going back to Walt Whitman. Organized around the Catholic sacraments, these poems call upon Whitman directly, for his words replace the liturgical text of these rituals to rejoice in the redemptive power of poetry in the absence of religion’s saving grace.
 
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Finding the Middle Ground
Krestovskii, Tur, and the Power of Ambivalence in Nineteenth-Century Russian Women's Prose
Jehanne Gheith
Northwestern University Press, 2004
Though among the most prominent writers in Russia in the mid-nineteenth century, Evgeniia Tur (1815-92) and V. Krestovskii (1820-89) are now little known. By looking in depth at these writers, their work, and their historical and aesthetic significance, Jehanne M. Gheith shows how taking women's writings into account transforms traditional understandings of the field of nineteenth-century Russian literature. Gheith's analysis of these writers' biographies, prose, and criticism intervenes in debates about the Russian literary tradition in general, Russian women's writing in particular, and feminist criticism on female authors and authority as it has largely been developed in and for Western contexts.
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Finished from the Start and Other Plays
Juan Radrigan
Northwestern University Press, 2007

This collection of plays comes from one of Chile’s finest voices of the voiceless: Juan Radrigán. A history marked by personal and political hardship has equipped Radrigán to tell the stories of those his nation left behind. Seven years old when his father abandoned his family, he was forced to work from an early age. As an adult, he worked as a manual laborer during a very dark time for Chile: the demise of Salvador Allende and the rise of General Augusto Pinochet. In a time of torture, exile, and political “disappearances,” his plays stood as quietly powerful anti-regime statements that mourned the country’s loss. Translator Ana Elena Puga’s introduction places Radrigán’s work in its historical and cultural context and provides ample background for the six pieces.

The first work, Testimonies to the Deaths of Sabina, features a fruit seller who may lose her livelihood after she is accused of some mysterious infraction; but she doesn’t know what she has done—if she has truly done anything. The Beasts tells the story of three sisters living in the wilderness who, fearing they have been completely abandoned, devise a means of ultimate escape. Funeral Drums for Lambs and Wolves comes in three parts: Isabel Banished in Isabel, a monologue of a woman left to go mad alone; Without Apparent Motive, a monologue by a murderer who laments the spread of violence; and the dialogue The Guest, a confrontational piece that speaks directly to the spectators, implicating them in their silent, passive tolerance of Pinochet. The title play, Radrigán’s 1981 masterpiece, speaks directly to the specter of the many “disappeared” victims of the military regime.

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Fire Is Not a Country
Poems
Cynthia Dewi Oka
Northwestern University Press, 2022
In her third collection, Indonesian American poet Cynthia Dewi Oka dives into the implications of being parents, children, workers, and unwanted human beings under the savage reign of global capitalism and resurgent nativism. With a voice bound and wrestled apart by multiple histories, Fire Is Not a Country claims the spaces between here and there, then and now, us and not us.

As she builds a lyric portrait of her own family, Oka interrogates how migration, economic exploitation, patriarchal violence, and a legacy of political repression shape the beauties and limitations of familial love and obligation. Woven throughout are speculative experiments that intervene in the popular apocalyptic narratives of our time with the wit of an unassimilable other.

Oka’s speakers mourn, labor, argue, digress, avenge, and fail, but they do not retreat. Born of conflicts public and private, this collection is for anyone interested in what it means to engage the multitudes within ourselves.
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Fire on Water
Porgess and The Abyss
Arnost Lustig
Northwestern University Press, 2005
Contemplations of survival by one of the leading Czech writers of the twentieth century

It occurred to me why I was able to forgive the Italians, but never the Germans. Was it because the Italians never slept on mattresses stuffed with the hair of Luster Leibling or Weltfeind Flusser?

In this pair of short novels, Arnošt Lustig continues his lifelong project of creating a universe-at once concrete and dreamlike-to examine the horrors of the Holocaust and the impossible burden of living as a survivor.
The Abyss is the fragmented memories of David Wiesenthal, aged twenty, tortured by what he has witnessed and by the knowledge that luck-not skill, not courage, certainly not goodness-separated the survivors from the doomed. He seeks solace remembering the women he's loved or desired, even the one who represents his death.
In Porgess, the narrator recounts the life of the title character, "the most handsome boy in Jewish Prague" who was paralyzed on the last day of World War II. The two discuss their mutual fascinations-women, jazz, the significance of numbers-in sometimes bitter, sometimes sardonic voices, but always with the specters of the dead and the guilt of survival close at hand.
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First Ladies and the Press
The Unfinished Partnership of the Media Age
Maurine H. Beasley
Northwestern University Press, 2005
At her first press conference, Eleanor Roosevelt, uncertain of her role as hostess or leader, passed a box of candied grapefruit peel to the thirty-five women journalists. Nearly sixty years later, Hillary Clinton, an accomplished professional woman and lawyer, tried to mollify her critics by handing out her chocolate-chip cookie recipe. These exchanges tells us as much about the social—and political—roles of women in America as they do about the relation of the first lady to the press and the public. Looking at the personal interaction between each first lady from Martha Washington to Laura Bush and the mass media of her day, Maurine H. Beasley traces the growth of the institution of the first lady as a part of the American political system. Her work shows how media coverage of first ladies, often limited to stereotypical ideas about women, has not adequately reflected the importance of their role.
[more]

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The First Lady of Olympic Track
The Life and Times of Betty Robinson
Joe Gergen
Northwestern University Press, 2014

The 1928 Olympic Games in Amsterdam were the first in which women—over the objections of many, including Pope Pius XI and the founder of the modern Olympics, Baron Pierre de Coubertin—were allowed to run in the marquee track events.

Equally remarkable is the story behind the first female gold medal winner in the 100-meter dash, sixteen-year-old American Betty Robinson. A prodigy running in just her fourth organized meet, Robinson stunned the world, earning special praise from the president of the 1928 American Olympic Committee, General Douglas MacArthur. But Robinson’s triumph soon became tragedy when in 1931 she was involved in a life-threatening plane crash. Unable to assume a sprinter’s crouch, she nevertheless joined fellow pioneer Jesse Owens at the infamous 1936 Berlin Olympics, and achieved further glory on the relay team. Journalist Joe Gergen’s The First Lady of Olympic Track rescues an exceptional figure from obscurity.

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The First Person Singular
Alphonso Lingis
Northwestern University Press, 2007
Alphonso Lingis’s singular works of philosophy are not so much written as performed, and in The First Person Singular the performance is characteristically brilliant, a consummate act of philosophical reckoning. Lingis’s subject here, aptly enough, is the subject itself, understood not as consciousness but as embodied, impassioned, active being. His book is, at the same time, an elegant cultural analysis of how subjectivity is differently and collectively understood, invested, and situated.

The subject Lingis elaborates in detail is the passionate subject of fantasy, of obsessive commitment, of noble actions, the subject enacting itself through an engagement with others, including animals and natural forces. This is not the linguistic or literary subject posited by structuralism and post-structuralism, nor the rational consciousness posited by post-Enlightenment philosophy. It is rather a being embodied in both a passionate, intensifying activity and a cultural collective made up of embodied others as well as the social rituals and practices that comprise this first person singular.
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Fishing by Obstinate Isles
Modern and Postmodern British Poetry and American Readers
Keith Tuma
Northwestern University Press, 1998
Fishing by Obstinate Isles explores the relations of recent British and American poetries, challenging American views of a British poetry dominated by antimodernism while discussing the role of rhetorics of national identity on both sides of the Atlantic in the persistence of these views. Devoting its most extensive commentary to a collection of British modernist and postmodernist poets, it attacks the relegation of British poetry to the zones of the quaint, making a compelling case for renewed engagements with fields of British poetry deserving of attention.
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Fission
Helga Konigsdorf
Northwestern University Press, 2000
Under the influence of the medication crucial to her existence, the narrator--like Konigsdorf herself suffering from a degenerative disease--is visited and prodded into an examination of her life by an apparition of Lise Meitner, the Jewish physicist who helped discover atomic fission but was forced to flee Germany before Kristallnacht. Reflecting on her roles as lover, wife, mother, and woman, the narrator asks: How much have I done? Enough? What is left in the end? What will last?
[more]

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Five Portraits
Modernity and the Imagination in Twentieth-Century German Writing
Michael Bernstein
Northwestern University Press, 2000
In Five Portraits, one of the most acute critical thinkers of our time presents essays on five of the most important writers of the past hundred years: Rainer Maria Rilke, Paul Celan, Robert Musil, Martin Heidegger, and Walter Benjamin. The result is a remarkable examination of a moment when these writers, caught between the dream of creating an abiding masterpiece and the reality of a brutal culture fascinated by apocalyptic catastrophe, deliberately put themselves and their work at the center of the storm. Written in elegant and jargon-free prose, Michael Andre Bernstein's essays create a vivid image of an epoch whose aspirations and torments continues to shape the world we inhabit today.
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Flames from the Earth
A Novel from the Lódz Ghetto
Isaiah Spiegel, translated from the Yiddish by Julian Levinson
Northwestern University Press, 2023
An emotionally powerful, poetic Yiddish novel, available in English for the first time, that expands our understanding of Holocaust literature and testimony

Flames from the Earth: A Novel from the Łódź Ghetto is an autobiographical novel written by Isaiah Spiegel, one of the most revered Yiddish authors to survive the Holocaust. Originally published in Israel in 1966, the novel brings together material that Spiegel wrote while imprisoned in the Łódź Ghetto, which he recovered from a cellar when he returned from Auschwitz after the war. The only works by Spiegel previously available to English readers have been short stories.

In this, his first novel, Spiegel explores a complex web of characters in and around the Łódź Ghetto: Vigdor and Gitele, lovers who are involved in the ghetto resistance movement; Nicodem, a Polish priest, who hides a member of the Jewish underground; Stefan Kaczmarek, a Polish tavern keeper who betrays Nicodem to preserve his own smuggling business; Franz Jessike, a Nazi guard who blackmails local Poles for personal gain; and Chaim Vidaver, the heroic leader of the ghetto resistance. Based largely on historical events, the novel’s lyrical style echoes its emotional intensity.

Gripping and atmospheric, Flames from the Earth honors daring acts of heroism and human connections forged amid unthinkable conditions. Spiegel’s novel represents an important contribution to the archive of literary depictions of historical trauma.
 
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Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons
Literary Authority and American Fiction
Hershel Parker
Northwestern University Press, 1984
An evaluation of the importance of textual criticism in evaluation of important literary works, based on his study of important American literary works by authors such as James, Crane, and Mailer.
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Flights of Victory/Vuelos de Victoria
Ernesto Cardenal
Northwestern University Press, 1995
In this bilingual edition, Ernesto Cardenal celebrates his country's successful revolution against the Somoza regime. Recognized world-wide as a major poetic voice from Latin America, he also has long been an activist fighting for political freedom, and he served as Nicaragua's Minister of Culture from 1979-1988. In Flights of Victory, Ernesto Cardenal reflects on events of recent Nicaraguan history with poems about the insurrection against Somoza, the triumph of the popular movement, and the reconstruction of the country, from the unique perspective of a poet-participant.
[more]

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The Flood
A Novel
Carol Ascher
Northwestern University Press, 1996
Nine-year-old Eva Hoffman is the daughter of Austrian Jewish refugees who have found a precarious safety among a small community of European exiles attached to a psychoanalytic hospital in Topeka, Kansas. It is 1951, and the landmark school desegregation case, Brown v. Topeka Board of Education, is being tried in the local court. As the rising river inundates the town, the Hoffmans open their home to refugees from the flood, and Eva learns the complexities of prejudice—and courage—both within and outside her family.
[more]

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Florida
Christine Schutt
Northwestern University Press, 2003
Finalist for the 2004 National Book Award

Florida is the portrait of the artist as a young woman, an orphan's story full of loss and wonder, a familiar tale told in original language. Alice Fivey, fatherless at age seven, is left in the care of her relatives at ten when her love-wearied mother loses custody of her and submits to the sanitarium and years of psychiatric care. A namesake daughter locked in the orphan's move-around life, she must hold still while the seamstress pins her into someone not her mother. But they share the same name, so she is her mother, isn't she?

Alice finds consolation in books and she herself is a storyteller who must build a home for herself word by right word. Florida is her story, recalled in brief scenes of spare beauty and strangeness as Alice moves from house to house, ever further from the desolation of her mother's actions, ever closer to the meaning of her experience. In this most elegiac and luminous novel, Schutt gives voice to the feast of memory, the mystery of the mad and missing, and above all, the life-giving power of language.
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Fog
A Novel
Miguel de Unamuno, Translated from the Spanish by Elena Barcia with an introduction by Alberto Manguel
Northwestern University Press, 2017
Fog is a fresh new translation of the Spanish writer Miguel de Unamuno’s Niebla, first published in 1914. An early example of modernism’s challenge to the conventions of nineteenth-century realist fiction, Fog shocked critics but delighted readers with its formal experimentation and existential themes. This revolutionary novel anticipates the work of Sartre, Borges, Pirandello, Nabokov, Calvino, and Vonnegut.
 
The novel’s central character, Augusto, is a pampered, aimless young man who falls in love with Eugenia, a woman he randomly spots on the street. Augusto’s absurd infatuation offers an irresistible target for the philosophical ruminations of Unamuno’s characters, including Eugenia’s guardian aunt and “theoretical anarchist” uncle, Augusto’s comical servants, and his best friend, Victor, an aspiring writer who introduces him to a new, groundbreaking type of fiction. In a desperate moment, Augusto consults his creator about his fate, arguing with Unamuno about what it means to be “real.” Even Augusto’s dog, Orfeo, offers his canine point of view, reflecting on the meaning of life and delivering his master’s funeral oration.

Fog is a comedy, a tragic love story, a work of metafiction, and a novel of ideas. After more than a century, Unamuno’s classic novel still moves us, makes us laugh, and invites us to question our assumptions about literature, relationships, and mortality.
 
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Fools, Martyrs, Traitors
The Story of Martyrdom in the Western World
Lacey Baldwin Smith
Northwestern University Press, 1999
Lacey Baldwin Smith takes us on a riveting journey through history as he examines one of the most baffling characteristics of the human experience: the willingness to die to sanctify a deity, defend a cause, or simply to prove a point. By delving into the psyches, politics, and personalities of martyrs like Thomas Becket, John Brown, and Gandhi, he illuminates the complex and elusive subject of martyrdom as it has evolved over 2,500 years.
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For a New Novel
Essays on Fiction
Alain Robbe-Grillet
Northwestern University Press, 1989
Alain Robbe-Grillet, one of the leaders of the new French literary movement of the sixties, has long been regarded as the outstanding writer of the nouveau roman, as well as its major spokesman. For a New Novel reevaluates the techniques, ethos, and limits of contemporary fiction. This is a work of immense importance for any discussions of the history of the novel and for contemporary thinking about the future of fiction.
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For an Ontology of Morals
A Critique of Contemporary Ethical Theory
Henry B. Veatch
Northwestern University Press, 1971
For an Ontology of Morals: A Critique of Contemporary Ethical Theory assesses contemporary trends in ethical theory, including the deontological tradition dating back to Kant, the teleological tradition of the utilitarians, the analytic movement, and the existentialist-phenomenologist movement. In refuting these trends, Henry B. Veatch argues that moral and ethical distinctions cannot be rightly or adequately understood if they are regarded simply as matters of linguistic use but are grounded in the very being and nature of things. 
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For Badiou
Idealism without Idealism
Frank Ruda; Preface by Slavoj Zizek
Northwestern University Press, 2015

For Badiou serves both as an introduction to the influential French philosopher Alain Badiou’s thought and as an in-depth examination of his work. Ruda begins with a thorough and clear outline of the sometimes difficult main tenets of Badiou’s philosophy. He then traces the philosophers throughout Western thought who have influenced Badiou’s project—especially Plato, Descartes, Hegel, and Marx—and on whose work Badiou has developed his provocative philosophy. Ruda draws from Badiou’s oeuvre a series of directives with regard to renewing philosophy for the twenty-first century. For Badiou continues the interrogations of its subject and raises new materialistic and dialectical questions for the next generation of engaged philosophers.

 
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Forbidden Journey
Ella Maillart
Northwestern University Press, 2003
A classic account of a trip through China during the golden age of travel

In 1935 Ella Maillart contemplated one of the most arduous journeys in the world: the "impossible journey" from Peking, then a part of Japanese-occupied China, through the distant province of Sinkiang (present day Tukestan), to Kashmir. Enlisting with newswriter Peter Fleming (with the caveat that his company remain tolerable), Maillart undertook a journey considered almost beyond imagination for any European and doubly so for a woman.
The trip promised hardships such as typhus and bandits, as well as the countless hazards surrounding the civil war between Chinese communists and Chiang Kai-shek's nationalists. Setting out with pockets full of Mexican money (the currency used in China at the time), Maillart encountered a way of life now lost, but one that then had gone unchanged for centuries.

Maillart describes it all with the sharp eye and unvarnished prose of a veteran reporter-the missionaries and rogues, parents binding daughters' feet with rags, the impatient Fleming lighting fires under stubborn camels. It's a hard road, not that Maillart cares. At all times she is a witty, always-enchanted guide-except when it comes to bureaucrats.

Forbidden Journey ranks among other travel narratives like Fleming's News from Tartary, (based on the same journey) and Robert Byron's The Road to Oxiana. But it is also a portrait of a fascinating woman, one of many women from the pre-WWII era who ignored convention and traveled in hidden lands. It remains a vivid account of its time and a classic of travel literature.
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Force, Drive, Desire
A Philosophy of Psychoanalysis
Rudolf Bernet, Translated from the French by Sarah Allen
Northwestern University Press, 2020
In Force, Drive, Desire, Rudolf Bernet develops a philosophical foundation of psychoanalysis focusing on human drives. Rather than simply drawing up a list of Freud’s borrowings from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, or Lacan’s from Hegel and Sartre, Bernet orchestrates a dialogue between philosophy and psychoanalysis that goes far beyond what these eminent psychoanalysts knew about philosophy. By relating the writings of Freud, Lacan, and other psychoanalysts to those of Aristotle, Leibniz, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, and, more tacitly, Bergson and Deleuze, Bernet brings to light how psychoanalysis both prolongs and breaks with the history of Western metaphysics and philosophy of nature.
 
Rereading the long history of metaphysics (or at least a few of its key moments) in light of psychoanalytic inquiries into the nature and function of drive and desire also allows for a rewriting of the history of philosophy. Specifically, it allows Bernet to bring to light a different history of metaphysics, one centered less on Aristotelian substance (ousia) and more on the concept of dunamis—a power or potentiality for a realization toward which it strives with all its might. Relating human drives to metaphysical forces also bears fruit for a renewed philosophy of life and subjectivity.
 
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A Force for Change
African American Art and the Julius Rosenwald Fund
Daniel Schulman
Northwestern University Press, 2009
The Julius Rosenwald Fund has been largely ignored in the literature of both art history and African American studies, despite its unique focus, intensity, and commitment. Spertus Museum in Chicago has organized an exhibition, guest curated by Daniel Schulman, that presents and explores the work of funded artists as well as the history of the Fund. Through it, and this accompanying collection of essays, illustrations, and color plates, we see the Fund’s groundbreaking initiative to address issues relating to the unequal treatment of blacks in American life. The book constitutes a veritable Who’s Who of African American artists and intellectuals of the first half of the twentieth century, as well as a roll call of modern contributors who represent the leading scholars in their fields, including Peter M. Ascoli, grandson and biographer of Julius Rosenwald, and Kinshasha Holman Conwill, deputy director of the National Museum of African American Art and Culture. With far-reaching influence even today, the Julius Rosenwald Fund stands alongside the Rockefeller and Carnegie funds as a major force in American cultural history.
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The Forces of Form in German Modernism
Malika Maskarinec
Northwestern University Press, 2018
The Forces of Form in German Modernism charts a modern history of form as emergent from force. Offering a provocative alternative to the imagery of crisis and estrangement that has preoccupied scholarship on modernism, Malika Maskarinec shows that German modernism conceives of human bodies and aesthetic objects as shaped by a contest of conflicting and reciprocally intensifying forces: the force of gravity and a self-determining will to form. Maskarinec thereby discloses, for the first time, German modernism's sustained preoccupation with classical mechanics and with how human bodies and artworks resist gravity. 

Considering canonical artists such as Rodin and Klee, seminal authors such as Kafka and Döblin, and largely neglected thinkers in aesthetics and art history such as those associated with Empathy Aesthetics, Maskarinec unpacks the manifold anthropological and aesthetic concerns and historical lineage embedded in the idea of form as the precarious achievement of uprightness.

The Forces of Form in German Modernism makes a decisive contribution to our understanding of modernism and to contemporary discussions about form, empathy, materiality, and human embodiment.
 
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Forest Primeval
Poems
Vievee Francis
Northwestern University Press, 2015

Winner, 2017 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award
Winner, 2016 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in the Poetry category
Finalist, 2015 Balcones Poetry Prize
Shortlist finalist, 2015 PEN Open Book Award for an exceptional book by an author of color

"Another Anti-Pastoral," the opening poem of Forest Primeval, confesses that sometimes "words fail." With a "bleat in [her] throat," the poet identifies with the voiceless and wild things in the composed, imposed peace of the Romantic poets with whom she is in dialogue. Vievee Francis’s poems engage many of the same concerns as her poetic predecessors—faith in a secular age, the city and nature, aging, and beauty. Words certainly do not fail as Francis sets off into the wild world promised in the title. The wild here is not chaotic but rather free and finely attuned to its surroundings. The reader who joins her will emerge sensitized and changed by the enduring power of her work.

 
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Form and Instability
Eastern Europe, Literature, Postimperial Difference
Anita Starosta
Northwestern University Press, 2015
Form and Instability: Eastern Europe, Literature, and Post-Imperial Difference busies itself with the work of accounting for this discrepancy between ostensible historical change and the persistence of anachronistic ways of thinking, a discrepancy that remains unaddressed and eludes attention; and it goes on to propose that literature—not simply as an archive of representations or a source of cultural capital but as a critical perspective in its own right—offers a way to apprehend and to redress this problem.Historical situations such as the post-1989 transitions to capitalism and liberal democracy, as well as the “Eastern” enlargement of the E.U., not only entail empirical change; they also call for and provoke intense renegotiations of cultural values and analytical concepts. Through rhetoric, reading, and translation—terms central to this book—literature will be seen to expedite and redirect such re-arrangements. It will be shown to destabilize discursively fixed categories without imposing, in turn, its own fixity.

Located at the intersection of comparative literature, area studies, and literary theory, this interdisciplinary study has a twofold commitment: to Eastern Europe on the one hand and to literature on the other. It aims to intervene in the way we conceive of Eastern Europe by seeking to develop a more equitable way of thinking, one that avoids subordinating it to Eurocentric narratives of progress. At the same time, it marshals literature as both object and method of this rethinking, in order to extend existing conceptions of the usefulness and of the proper organization of literary studies. The three terms in the title of this book mark a passage—via literature—from “Eastern Europe” as an inadequate and obsolescent category to “post-imperial difference” as a more accurate, if provisional, account of the region. By way of original readings of particular texts, and by attending to literature as a critical
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Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values
A New Attempt toward the Foundation of an Ethical Personalism
Max Scheler
Northwestern University Press, 1973
A lengthy critique of Kant's apriorism precedes discussions on the ethical principles of eudaemonism, utilitarianism, pragmatism, and positivism.
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The Forsaken Son
Child Murder and Atonement in Modern American Fiction
Joshua Pederson
Northwestern University Press, 2015

The Forsaken Son engages the provocative coincidence of the vocabularies of infanticide and Christianity, specifically atonement theology, in six modern American novels: Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away, the first two installments of John Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Joyce Carol Oates’s My Sister, My Love, and Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark.

Christian atonement theology explains why God lets His son be crucified. Yet in recent years, as an increasing number of scholars have come to reject that explanation, the cross reverts from saving grace to trauma—or even crime. More bluntly, without atonement, the cross may be a filicide, in which God forces his son to die for no apparent reason. Pederson argues that the novels about child murder mentioned above likewise give voice to modern skepticism about traditional atonement theology.

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Fort Dearborn
A Novel
Jerry Crimmins
Northwestern University Press, 2008

In a story that brings to life the founding of one of the world's great cities, Fort Dearborn takes us back to Chicago's early struggle of fire and blood. Through the eyes of two young boys and their fathers—one father a sergeant with the United States First Infantry, the other a Potawatomi warrior—we see the events that lead up to the Fort Dearborn Massacre. Using scores of letters, historical documents and maps, and long-forgotten Native American speeches, Jerry Crimmins breathes life into the little known drama that took place in the vicinity of the fort that once occupied what is now downtown Chicago. A suspenseful narrative, Fort Dearborn is also a remarkable historical account, minutely observed and meticulously documented, preserving a key moment in American history.

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The Fortress
A Novel
Mesa Selimovic, translated from the Serbian by Edward Dennis Goy and Jasna Levinger-Goy
Northwestern University Press, 1999
The Fortress is one of the most significant and fascinating novels to come out of the former Yugoslavia. Published as Tvrđava in Serbian, it is the tenth and among the best-known novels by Mesa Selimovic (1910–1982). In the novel, Ahmet Shabo returns home to seventeenth-century Sarajevo from the war in Russia, numbed by the death in battle or suicide of nearly his entire military unit. In time he overcomes the anguish of war, only to find that he has emerged a reflective and contemplative man in a society that does not value, and will not tolerate, the subversive implications of these qualities.

Set in Bosnia in the late 1700s, the novel sometimes functions as an artful metaphor for the communist Yugoslavia of Selimovic's day. At other times, the author explores the nuances of Ottoman rule in the Balkans. Muslim Ahmet's sustaining marriage to a young Christian woman provides a multicultural tension that strongly resonates with contemporary readers and sensibilities.
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Fortune's Favored Child
Raouf Mama
Northwestern University Press, 2014

Raouf Mama is widely beloved by children and adults alike for his books and especially for his African and multicultural storytelling, which incorporates poetry, song, music, and dance.

In Fortune’s Favored Child, the master storyteller tells his own story, beginning in the West African country of Benin. Through a harrowing experience with sickness, an encounter with a clairvoyant traditional healer, and astonishing twists of fortune, the protagonist struggles to uncover his real identity, to get an education, and to make his own way in the world. His journey takes him to the shores of the United States to attend graduate school at the University of Michigan and begin a new chapter in his life.

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[more]

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Foucault, Politics, and Violence
Johnanna Oksala
Northwestern University Press, 2012
In her book, Oksala shows that the arguments for the ineliminability of violence from the political are often based on excessively broad, ontological conceptions of violence distinct from its concrete and physical meaning and, on the other hand, on a restrictively narrow and empirical understanding of politics as the realm of conventional political institutions.
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Foucault's Askesis
An Introduction to the Philosophical Life
Edward McGushin
Northwestern University Press, 2007
In his renowned courses at the Collège de France from 1982 to 1984, Michel Foucault devoted his lectures to meticulous readings and interpretations of the works of Plato, Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius, among others. In this his aim was not, Edward F. McGushin contends, to develop a new knowledge of the history of philosophy; rather, it was to let himself be transformed by the very activity of thinking. Thus, this work shows us Foucault in the last phase of his life in the act of becoming a philosopher. Here we see how his encounter with ancient philosophy allowed him to experience the practice of philosophy as, to paraphrase Nietzsche, a way of becoming who one is: the work of self-formation that the Greeks called askēsis.

Through a detailed study of Foucault's last courses, McGushin demonstrates that this new way of practicing philosophical askēsis evokes Foucault's ethical resistance to modern relations of power and knowledge. In order to understand Foucault's later project, then, it is necessary to see it within the context of his earlier work. If his earlier projects represented an attempt to bring to light the relations of power and knowledge that narrowed and limited freedom, then this last project represents his effort to take back that freedom by redefining it in terms of care of the self. Foucault always stressed that modern power functions by producing individual subjects. This book shows how his excavation of ancient philosophical practices gave him the tools to counter this function-with a practice of self-formation, an askēsis.
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The Foundation Pit
Andrey Platonov
Northwestern University Press, 1994
Once known only to a small circle of admirers in Russia and the West, Andrey Platonov (1899-1951) has emerged to assume his rightful place as one of the major Russian writers of the twentieth century. Set during a small Russian town during the forcible collectivization of agriculture, The Foundation Pit portrays a group of workmen and local bureaucrats engaged in digging the foundation pit for a grand building where all the town's will live happily and "in silence."
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The Foundations of Arithmetic
A Logico-Mathematical Enquiry into the Concept of Number
Gottlob Frege
Northwestern University Press, 1980
The Foundations of Arithmetic is undoubtedly the best introduction to Frege's thought; it is here that Frege expounds the central notions of his philosophy, subjecting the views of his predecessors and contemporaries to devastating analysis. The book represents the first philosophically sound discussion of the concept of number in Western civilization. It profoundly influenced developments in the philosophy of mathematics and in general ontology.
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Four of the Three Musketeers
The Marx Brothers on Stage
Robert S. Bader
Northwestern University Press, 2022

An updated paperback version of the book heralded as “a new benchmark in Marx scholarship” by the Los Angeles Times

Before film made them international comedy legends, the Marx Brothers developed their comic skills on stage for twenty-five years. In Four of the Three Musketeers: The Marx Brothers on Stage, Robert S. Bader offers the first comprehensive history of the foursome’s hardscrabble early years honing their act in front of live audiences.

From Groucho’s debut in 1905 to their final live performances of scenes from A Night in Casablanca in 1945, the brothers’ stage career shows how their characters and routines evolved before their arrival in Hollywood. Four of the Three Musketeers draws on an unmatched array of sources, many not referenced elsewhere. Bader’s detailed portrait of the struggling young actors both brings to vivid life a typical night on the road for the Marx Brothers and illuminates the inner workings of the vaudeville business, especially during its peak in the 1920s.

As Bader traces the origins of the characters that would later come to be beloved by filmgoers, he also skillfully scrapes away the accretion of rumors and mythology perpetuated not only by fans and writers but by the Marx Brothers themselves. Revealing, vital, and entertaining, Four of the Three Musketeers has taken its place as an essential reference for this legendary American act. Now, the updated edition adds newly discovered performances—some submitted by readers—and additional information provided by descendants of long-departed vaudevillians mentioned in the book.

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Four Places
A Play
Joel Drake Johnson
Northwestern University Press, 2009

Sketched together on a deceptively simple frame, this emotionally precise play uses its spare structure to devastating and darkly comic effect. A brother and sister have received word from their parents’ caretaker that their elderly parents may be a danger to each other. The brother breaks his routine to join his sister and mother on their weekly lunch date in hopes that together he and his sister can get a clearer picture of the situation. As the mother confronts the indignities of age and the children stare down a mounting list of losses and disappointments, an image of the family emerges that is true to life. Johnson gives readers an unwavering exploration of the ways that the love and knowledge family members have of one another creates both hurt and comfort.

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The Fourfold
Reading the Late Heidegger
Andrew J. Mitchell
Northwestern University Press, 2015

Heidegger’s later thought is a thinking of things, so argues Andrew J. Mitchell in The Fourfold. Heidegger understands these things in terms of what he names “the fourfold”—a convergence of relationships bringing together the earth, the sky, divinities, and mortals—and Mitchell’s book is the first detailed exegesis of this neglected aspect of Heidegger’s later thought. As such it provides entrée to the full landscape of Heidegger’s postwar thinking, offering striking new interpretations of the atomic bomb, technology, plants, animals, weather, time, language, the holy, mortality, dwelling, and more. What results is a conception of things as ecstatic, relational, singular, and, most provocatively, as intrinsically tied to their own technological commodification. A major new work that resonates beyond the confines of Heidegger scholarship, The Fourfold proposes nothing less than a new phenomenological thinking of relationality and mediation for understanding the things around us.

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The Fourth Estate at the Fourth Wall
Newspapers on Stage in July Monarchy France
Cary Hollinshead-Strick
Northwestern University Press, 2019
New media are often greeted with suspicion by older media. The Fourth Estate at the Fourth Wall explores how, when the commercial press arrived in France in 1836, popular theater critiqued its corruption, its diluted politics, and its tendency to orient its content toward the lowest common denominator.

July Monarchy plays, which provided affordable entertainment to a broad section of the public, constitute a large, nearly untapped reservoir of commentary on the arrival of the forty-franc press. Vaudevilles and comedies ask whether journalism that benefits from advertisement can be unbiased. Dramas explore whether threatening to spread false news is an acceptable way for journalists to exercise their influence. Hollinshead-Strick uses both plays and novels to show that despite their claims to enlighten their readers, newspapers were often accused of obscuring public access to information. Balzac’s interventions in this media sphere reveal his utopian views on print technology. Nerval’s and Pyat’s demonstrate the nefarious impact that corrupt theater critics could have on authors and on the public alike.

Scholars of press and media studies, French literature, theater, and nineteenth-century literature more generally will find this book a valuable introduction to a cross-genre debate about press publicity that remains surprisingly resonant today.
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Fowling Piece
Poems
Heidy Steidlmayer
Northwestern University Press, 2012

Winner, 2013 Kate Tufts Discovery Award
Winner, 2012 John C. Zacharias First Book Award for best debut book by a Ploughshares writer

A remarkably mature first collection of poems, Heidy Steidlmayer’s Fowling Piece is the debut of a highly original voice. As they search for meaning in both the extraordinary and the everyday, these poems, in exquisitely compressed language, display a fierce attention to the history of individual words and a surprising wit. In Steidlmayer's poetic landscape, words strike the reader as at once familiar and exotic, becoming instruments through which she is able to access and make sense of the most profound, irreducible aspects of human experience. Her mastery of and experiments in form are exceptional for a poet of any age. Fowling Piece offers the rare gift of a new poet whose work is truly new.

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The Fragile We
Ethical Implications Of Heidegger's "Being and Time"
Lawrence Vogel
Northwestern University Press, 1994
Critics have charged that Heidegger's account of authenticity is morally nihilistic, that his fundamental ontology is either egocentric or chauvinistic; and many see Heidegger's turn to Nazism in 1933 as following logically from an indifference, and even hostility, to "otherness" in the premises of his early philosophy.

In The Fragile "We": Ethical Implications of Heidegger's "Being and Time," Lawrence Vogel presents three interpretations of authentic existence—the existentialist, the historicist, and the cosmopolitan—each of which is a plausible version of the personal ideal depicted in Being and Time. He then draws parallels between these interpretations and three moments in the contemporary liberal-communitarian debate over the relationship of the "I" and the "We." His book contributes both to a diagnosis of what there is about Being and Time that invites moral nihilism and to a sense of how fundamental ontology might be recast so that "the other" is accorded an appropriate place in an account of human existence.
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The Frame and the Mirror
On Collage and the Postmodern
Thomas P. Brockelman
Northwestern University Press, 2001
If the postmodern is a collage—as some critics have suggested—or if collage is itself a kernel of the postmodern, what does this mean for our way of understanding the world? The Frame and the Mirror uses this question to probe the distinctive character of the postmodern situation and the philosophical problem of representation. Brockelman’s work is itself a collage of sorts, using juxtapositions of critics and art historical figures to conduct a debate between such figures as Karsten Harries, Gianni Vattimo, Rosalind Krauss, Immanuel Kant, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Slavo Žižek, and Le Corbusier about issues such as truth in art, perspectivism, theatricality, the sublime, psychoanalytic theory, politics, and urbanism.

More than an introduction to the postmodern, The Frame and the Mirror advances our understanding of the contemporary world by relating its features to the peculiar characteristics of collage. Ultimately, Brockelman shows how collage demands that we reinterpret modernity, conceiving of it as suspended between a loss of certainty and a new kind of knowledge about the human condition. In doing so, his work challenges many of the claims made in the name of postmodernism—and offers in their place a new and ironic view of the cultural space in which contemporary and historical events occur.
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Franz Kafka, the Eternal Son
A Biography
Peter-André Alt, Translated from the German by Kristine A. Thorsen
Northwestern University Press, 2018

Franz Kafka remains one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. His novels, stories, and letters are still regarded today as the epitome of the dark, fascinating, and uncanny, a model of the modernist aesthetic. Peter-André Alt’s landmark biography, Franz Kafka, the Eternal Son, recounts and explores Kafka’s life and literary work throughout the cultural and political upheavals of central Europe.

Alt’s biography explores Franz Kafka’s own view of life and writing as a unity that shaped his identity. He locates links and echoes among the author’s work, life, and surroundings, situating him within the traditions of Prague's German literature, modernity, psychoanalysis, and philosophy as well as within its Jewish culture, arts, theater, and intellectual tradition.

In this biographical tour de force, Kafka emerges as an observant flaneur and wistful loner, an anxious ascetic, an ecstatic and skeptic, a specialist in terror, and a master of irony. Alt masterfully illuminates Kafka's life not as source material but as a mirror of his literary genius. Readers begin to see Kafka’s unforgettable novels and stories as shards reflecting the life of their creator.

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Franz Kafka
The Ghosts in the Machine
Stanley Corngold
Northwestern University Press, 2011
Franz Kafka: The Ghosts in the Machine adds an original critical framework to the work begun by Stanley Corngold and Benno Wagner in their monumental collection Franz Kafka: The Office Writings (2008). It is widely acknowledged that Kafka’s daytime occupation as a specialist in industrial accident insurance contributed in a significant way to his fiction. 

Corngold and Wagner frame Kafka’s writings as cultural events, each work reflecting the economic and cultural discourses of his epoch. In pursuing Kafka’s avowed interest in the theory and practice of insurance, the authors view the two systems of his literary worlds—the official and the personal—as a “bundling” together of the various cultural accidents of Kafka’s time. The work of two of the leading scholars of the single most influential writer of literary modernity, Franz Kafka: The Ghosts in the Machine constitutes a breathtakingly original advance in the study of both the more famous and less well-known works of this enigmatic master.
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Free for All
The Internet's Transformation of Journalism
Elliot King
Northwestern University Press, 2010

In Free for All, longtime scholar of digital media Elliot King begins with a brief history of the technological development of news media from the appearance of newspapers in the sixteenth century to the rise of broadcasting and the Internet.

Within that context, King demystifies the emergence of online communication and social media as the third major technological platform for news, making the current pace of change appear less vertiginous. Free for All provides anyone with an interest in the future of journalism the grounding necessary for an informed discussion.


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Free Verse
An Essay on Prosody
Charles O. Hartman
Northwestern University Press, 1996
To make sense of "free verse" in theory of in practice, the study of prosody—the function of rhythm in poetry—must be revised and rethought. In Free Verse: An Essay on Prosody, Charles Hartman develops a theory of prosody that includes the most characteristic form of twentieth-century poetry.
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Freedom and Nature
The Voluntary and the Involuntary
Paul Ricoeur
Northwestern University Press, 2007
This volume, the first part of Paul Ricoeur's Philosophy of the Will, is an eidetics, carried out within carefully imposed phenomenological brackets. It seeks to deal with the essential structure of man's being in the world, and so it suspends the distorting dimensions of existence, the bondage of passion, and the vision of innocence, to which Ricoeur returns in his later writings. The result is a conception of man as an incarnate Cogito, which can make the polar unity of subject and object intelligible and provide a basic continuity for the various aspects of inquiry into man's being-in-the-world.
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Freedom and Nature
The Voluntary and the Involuntary
Paul Ricoeur
Northwestern University Press, 1966
This volume, the first part of Paul Ricoeur's Philosophy of the Will, is an eidetics, carried out within carefully imposed phenomenological brackets. It seeks to deal with the essential structure of man's being in the world, and so it suspends the distorting dimensions of existence, the bondage of passion, and the vision of innocence, to which Ricoeur returns in his later writings. The result is a conception of man as an incarnate Cogito, which can make the polar unity of subject and object intelligible and provide a basic continuity for the various aspects of inquiry into man's being-in-the-world.
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Freedom and Responsibility in Russian Literature
Essays in Honor of Robert Louis Jackson
Elizabeth Cheresh Allen and Gary Saul Morson
Northwestern University Press, 1994
Robert Louis Jackson has long been recognized on both sides of the Atlantic as one of the foremost Dostoevsky scholars in the world. Freedom and Responsibility in Russian Literature collects twenty essays by distinguished scholars (many former students of Jackson's) and admiring colleagues on some of the foremost questions in Russian studies. Whatever the specific topic, these essays manifest a determination to exercise the critical independence and integrity exemplified by Jackson throughout his long career.
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Freedom Hill
A Poem
L.S. Asekoff
Northwestern University Press, 2011
Recepient, 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship
Winner, 2012 Witter Bynner Award and Fellowship

L. S. Asekoff's Freedom Hill is a dramatic monologue divided into three sections. The first concerns the speaker's visit with his aging parents and the death of his father. The second, set at an art party, is a meditation on women, desire, and the nature of the self. In the third, we witness the effects on the speaker of a cerebral stroke, along with his gradual recovery. As readers of Asekoff's unique body of work have come to expect, this highly allusive poem encompasses a wide range of subject matter: Heidegger, C-SPAN, modern art, aging, capitalism, religion. Also familiar will be Asekoff's great variety of tone and verbal ingenuity. Although indebted to high modernism, Freedom Hill is an ambitious, thoroughly contemporary meditation on issues very much of the present.
 
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Freud or Jung
Edward Glover
Northwestern University Press, 1950
One of the great dramatic events in the history of twentieth-century thought was the break of Carl Jung—the crown prince of the psychoanalytic movement—with his mentor and collaborator Sigmund Freud. After the "gladiatorial phase" of the debate between the Freudians and Jungians had passed, British psychoanalyst Edward Glover began serious consideration of the ideas of Jung. Glover's study was immediately recognized as the major Freudian statement on Jung's psychology and was even cited by later Jungians for its trenchant criticisms. This new edition of the unsurpassed classic will make it available for another generation of students, practitioners, and intellectual historians.
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Fritz Reiner
A Biography
Philip Hart
Northwestern University Press, 1996
Thirty years after his death, Fritz Reiner's contribution--as a conductor, as a teacher (of Leonard Bernstein, among others), and as a musician--continues to be reassessed. Music scholar and long-time friend Philip Hart has written the definitive biography of this influential figure.
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From Eves Rib
Gioconda Belli
Northwestern University Press, 1989
Gioconda Belli's poetry, widely published and revered in Latin America and Europe, celebrates the longing for a society in which humanity constructs its future, animated by an inextinguishable erotic, maternal, and transcentendly loving desire. As Salman Rushdie wrote in his book, The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey, her poetry is "a kind of public love poetry that comes closer to expressing the passion of Nicaragua than anything I [have] yet heard."
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From Scenarios to Networks
Performing the Intercultural in Colonial Mexico
Leo Cabranes-Grant
Northwestern University Press, 2016

In this innovative study, Leo Cabranes-Grant analyzes four intercultural events in the Viceroyalty of New Spain that took place between 1566 and 1690. Rather than relying on racial labels to describe alterations of identity, Cabranes-Grant focuses on experimentation, rehearsal, and the interaction between bodies and objects. His analysis shows how scenarios are invested with affective qualities, which in turn enable cultural and semiotic change. Central to his argument is Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory, which figures society as a constantly evolving web of relationships among objects, people, and spaces. In examining these scenarios, Cabranes-Grant attempts to discern the reasons why the conditions of an intensified moment within this ceaseless flow take on a particular value and inspire their re-creation. Cabranes-Grant offers a fresh perspective on Latour’s theory and reorients debates concerning history and historiography in the field of performance studies.

 

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From Text to Action
Essays in Hermeneutics, II
Paul Ricoeur, Translated from the French by Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson, Foreword to the new edition by Richard Kearney
Northwestern University Press, 2007
Incredible originality of thought in areas as vast as phenomenology, religion, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, intersubjectivity, language, Marxism, and structuralism has made Paul Ricoeur one of the philosophical giants of the twentieth century. The way in which Ricoeur approaches these themes makes his works relevant to the reader today: he writes with honesty and depth of insight into the core of a problem, and his ability to mark for future thought the very path of philosophical inquiry is nearly unmatched. 

From Text to Action is an essential companion to the classic The Conflict of Interpretations. Here, Ricoeur continues and extends his project of constructing a general theory of interpretation, positioning his work in relation to its philosophical background: Hegel, Husserl, Gadamer, and Weber. He also responds to contemporary figures like K. O. Apel and Jürgen Habermas, connecting his own theorization of ideology to their critique of ideology. 

This new edition includes a foreword by Richard Kearney. It and other new editions of Ricoeur's texts published by Northwestern University Press have joined the canon of contemporary continental philosophy and continue to contribute to emergent discussions in the twenty-first century. 
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From Text to Action
Essays in Hermeneutics, II
Paul Ricoeur
Northwestern University Press, 1991
With his writings on phenomenology, psychoanalysis, Marxism, ideology, and religion, Paul Ricoeur has single-handedly redefined and revitalized the hermeneutic tradition. From Text to Action is an essential companion to the now classic The Conflict of Interpretations. Here, Ricoeur continues and extends his project of constructing a general theory of interpretation, positioning his work in relation to its own philosophical background: Hegel, Husserl, Gadamer, and Weber. He also responds to contemporary figures like K.O. Apel and Jürgen Habermas, connecting his own theorization of ideology to their version of ideology critique.
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From the Ashes of Sobibor
A Story of Survival
Thomas Toivi Blatt, Foreward by Christopher R. Browning
Northwestern University Press, 1997
From the Ashes of Sobibor: A Story of Survival is an invaluable, firsthand account of a child's survival in a Nazi concentration camp in Poland during World War II. When the Germans invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, Thomas Toivi Blatt was twelve years old. He and his family lived in the largely Jewish town of Izbica in the Lublin district of Poland—the district that was to become the site of three major Nazi extermination camps: Belzec, Sobibor, and Majdanek. Blatt tells of the chilling events that led to his deportation to Sobibor, and of the six months he spent there before taking part in the now-famous uprising and mass breakout. Blatt's tale of escape, and of the five harrowing years spent eluding both the Nazis and anti-Semitic Polish nationalists, is gripping account of resilience and survival.

This edition also includes the author's interview with Karl Frenzel, a former Nazi commandant at Sobibor.
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From the Ballroom to Hell
Grace and Folly in Nineteenth-Century Dance
Elizabeth Aldrich
Northwestern University Press, 1991
During the 1800s, dance and etiquette manuals provided ordinary men and women with the keys to becoming gentlemen and ladies—and thus advancing in society. Why dance? To the insecure and status-oriented upper middle class, the ballroom embodied the perfect setting in which to demonstrate one's fitness for membership in genteel society.

From the Ballroom to Hell collects over 100 little-known excerpts from dance, etiquette, beauty, and fashion manuals from the nineteenth century. Included are instructions for performing various dances, as well as musical scores, costume patterns, and the proper way to hold one's posture, fork, gloves, and fan. While of particular interest to dancers, dance historians, and choreographers, anyone fascinated by the ways and mores of the period will find From the Ballroom to Hell an endearing and informative glimpse of America's past.
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From the Jewish Provinces
Selected Stories
Fradl Shtok; Translated from the Yiddish by Jordan D. Finkin and Allison Schachter
Northwestern University Press, 2022
Winner, 2022 MLA Fenia and Yaakov Leviant Memorial Prize in Yiddish Studies

From the Jewish Provinces showcases a brilliant and nearly forgotten voice in Yiddish letters. An insistently original writer whose abrupt departure from the literary scene is the stuff of legend, Fradl Shtok composed stories that describe the travails of young women looking for love and desire in a world that spurns them. These women struggle with disability, sexual violence, and unwanted marriage, striving to imagine themselves as artists or losing themselves in fantasy worlds. The men around them grapple with their own frustrations and failures to live up to stifling social expectations. Through deft portraits of her characters’ inner worlds Shtok grants us access to unnoticed corners of the Jewish imagination.
 
Set alternately in the Austro‑Hungarian borderlands and in New York City, Shtok’s stories interpret the provincial worlds of the Galician shtetl and the Lower East Side with literary sophistication, experimenting with narrative techniques that make her stories expertly alive to women’s aesthetic experiences.
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Fuchsia in Cambodia
Poems
Roy Jacobstein
Northwestern University Press, 2008
Suffused with tenderness and humor, the poems in this new collection take readers on a journey through emotions, across national boundaries, and even along the geographic timeline. The quick mind of author Jacobstein creates fluid verse that can take on the singular geography of his native Michigan or the story of an immigrant cab driver with ease. His elegant rhyme and clever rhythm are suited equally to an ode to the stegosaurus and to his many poems for his adopted daughter. He moves readers from Washington, D.C., to Delhi, from adolescence to fatherhood, and between heaven and earth. With its immersive voice and sensitive examinations, this set of verses retains its sense of wonder at all the beautiful hellos and good-byes that humans come to know well in their too-short lifetimes.
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Fugitive Objects
Sculpture and Literature in the German Nineteenth Century
Catriona MacLeod
Northwestern University Press, 2014

Winner of the 2014 Jean-Pierre Barricelli Prize for Best Book on Romanticism

In Fugitive Objects, Catriona MacLeod examines the question of why sculpture is both intensively discussed and yet rendered immaterial in German literature. She focuses on three forms of disappearance: sculpture’s vanishing as a legitimate art form at the beginning of the nineteenth century in German aesthetics, statues’ migration from the domain of high art into mass reproduction and popular culture, and sculpture’s dislodging and relocation into literary discourse. Through original readings of Clemens Brentano, Achim von Arnim, Adalbert Stifter, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, and others, MacLeod reveals that if sculpture has disappeared from much of nineteenth-century German literature and aesthetics, it is a vanishing act that paradoxically relocates the statue back onto another cultural pedestal, attesting to the powerful force of the medium.

 
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Fugues
Claribel Alegría, translated from the Spanish by D. J. Flakoll
Northwestern University Press, 1995
Well-known for her incisive descriptions of war and violence in El Salvador, Claribel Alegría is one of Central America's most eminent poets. In Fugues, a lucid and strikingly beautiful original collection, she looks squarely into the face of mortality, love, and aging, to explore the personal as well as universal questions that face each human being.
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The Fulfillment of the Scriptures
Abraham, Moses, and Piers
Ruth W. Ames
Northwestern University Press, 1970
Ruth M. Ames’s The Fulfillment of Scriptures approaches Langland’s key medieval text, Piers Plowman, using critical literary methods developed in interdisciplinary programs that explore the intersections of religion and literature. Ames draws on the history of the development of Christian doctrine as she explores the ways that the allegory of Piers parallels the story of Jesus in Christian doctrine. Ames’s work offers a significantly new critical reading of Piers Plowman, influencing interpretations of medieval literature.
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Furious Flower
Seeding the Future of African American Poetry
Edited by Joanne V. Gabbin and Lauren K. Alleyne; Foreword by Rita Dove
Northwestern University Press, 2020
Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry is an anthology of poems by more than one hundred award-winning poets, including Jericho Brown, Justin Philip Reed, and Tracy K. Smith, with themed essays on poetics from celebrated scholars such as Kwame Dawes, Meta DuEwa Jones, and Evie Shockley. The Furious Flower Poetry Center is the nation’s first academic center for Black poetry. In this eponymous collection, editors Joanne V. Gabbin and Lauren K. Alleyne bring together many of the paramount voices in Black poetry and poetics active today, composing an electrifying mosaic of voices, generations, and aesthetics that reveals the Black narrative in the  work of twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers. Intellectually enlightening and powerfully enlivening, Furious Flower explores and celebrates the idea of the Black poetic voice by posing the question, What’s next for Black poetic expression?
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