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The Jacksonian
A Play
Beth Henley
Northwestern University Press, 2014

In The Jacksonian, Beth Henley returns to the Southern Gothic storytelling that made her reputation with both critics and audiences. Set in a seedy motel in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1964, the play centers around Rosy, a troubled teenager, and Bill, her dentist father who has been living at the motel for several months as his wife, Susan, considers the disgrace of divorce. Fred, the motel bartender, and Eva, a waitress, are locked in a gruesome pact: he’ll marry her if she agrees to help him evade punishment for a hideous crime. But Bill, turning to nitrous oxide to ease the pain of his life collapsing around him, is a convenient target for Eva’s desperate desire for companionship. At the height of the violence associated with the civil rights movement, these characters gradually reveal the shameful secrets and psychological turmoil just beneath the surface of their insistent Southern gentility.

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James Joyce and the Philosophers at Finnegans Wake
Donald Phillip Verene
Northwestern University Press, 2016
James Joyce and the Philosophers at Finnegans Wake explores how Joyce used the philosophers Nicholas Cusanus, Giordano Bruno, and Giambattista Vico as the basis upon which to write Finnegans Wake. Very few Joyce critics know enough about these philosophers and therefore often miss their influence on Joyce's great work. Joyce embraces these philosophic companions to lead him through the underworld of history with all its repetitions and resurrections, oppositions and recombinations. We as philosophical readers of the Wake go along with them to meet everybody and in so doing are bound "to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy" of our souls the "uncreated conscience" of humankind. Verene builds his study on the basis of years of teaching Finnegans Wake side by side with Cusanus, Bruno, and Vico, and his book will serve as a guide to readers of Joyce's novel.
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The Janus Face of the German Avant-Garde
From Expressionism Toward Postmodernism
Rainer Rumold
Northwestern University Press, 2002
Among the avant-garde of the early twentieth century, the German movement remains one of the least understood in the current avant-garde and modernism debates. Rainer Rumold fills this gap with the first large-scale reassessment of the heyday and afterlife of German expressionist and Dada productions as a prolonged crisis of literary culture.
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Jargon of Authenticity
Theodor W. Adorno
Northwestern University Press, 1973

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The Jewish War and The Victory
Henryk Grynberg
Northwestern University Press, 2001
This epic tells the story of a Polish Jewish family struggling against nearly insurmountable odds. In The Jewish War, the family of a young Jewish boy hides throughout the countryside until the father is murdered. To escape, the mother and boy use forged papers and adopt a false life as the Catholic family of an officer captured by the Germans. The Victory picks up the story as the Red Army advances and the boy fights to reclaim his Jewishness amidst the horrors of the past and the choices of an agonizing present.
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Jews and Ukrainians in Russia's Literary Borderlands
From the Shtetl Fair to the Petersburg Bookshop
Amelia M. Glaser
Northwestern University Press, 2012

Studies of Eastern European literature have largely confined themselves to a single language, culture, or nationality. In this highly original book, Glaser shows how writers working in Russian, Ukrainian, and Yiddish during much of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century were in intense conversation with one another. The marketplace was both the literal locale at which members of these different societies and cultures interacted with one another and a rich subject for representation in their art. It is commonplace to note the influence of Gogol on Russian literature, but Glaser shows him to have been a profound influence on Ukrainian and Yiddish literature as well. And she shows how Gogol must be understood not only within the context of his adopted city of St. Petersburg but also that of his native Ukraine. As Ukrainian and Yiddish literatures developed over this period, they were shaped by their geographical and cultural position on the margins of the Russian Empire. As distinctive as these writers may seem from one another, they are further illuminated by an appreciation of their common relationship to Russia. Glaser’s book paints a far more complicated portrait than scholars have traditionally allowed of Jewish (particularly Yiddish) literature in the context of Eastern European and Russian culture.

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The Jews in Polish Culture
Aleksander Hertz
Northwestern University Press, 1988
Jews in Polish Culture was and in large measure remains an essentially pioneering work. Despite the passage of many years, the book's thrust has retained its initial, original freshness. 
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John Donne's Christian Vocation
Robert S. Jackson
Northwestern University Press, 1970
John Donne’s poetry is often difficult and perplexing, even more so because it undergoes a shift away from secular topics after he converts and begins to lead a religious life.  Robert S. Jackson’s John Donne’s Christian Vocation is one of the first studies that takes seriously the ways that Donne’s Christian vocation permeates all of Donne’s writings, not just those after his conversion, but even those prior to it. Jackson’s study remains significant today because the religion and literature movement has focused renewed attention on Donne and his writing, and numerous critics and scholars use John Donne’s Christian Vocation as a model for their own scholarship on Donne.
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John Vinci
Life and Landmarks
Text by Robert Sharoff, Photographs by William Zbaren
Northwestern University Press, 2017
John Vinci: Life and Landmarks is the first authoritative survey of the life and work of one of Chicago’s most acclaimed architects and preservationists. Long awaited by scholars as well as by architecture aficionados, John Vinci provides an intimate look at an architect whose portfolio spans half a century and includes the restoration of some of the city’s most important historic structures as well as numerous award-winning original projects.

This illustrated biography traces Vinci’s origins as a child of Italian immigrants on Chicago’s South Side and his coming of age at the Illinois Institute of Technology, which was then under the direction of the legendary Modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. It follows his career through his subsequent immersion in the historic preservation movement and the work of such early Chicago architects as Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and John Wellborn Root.

Vinci’s pioneering restoration projects include Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House and Home Studio, Sullivan’s Chicago Stock Exchange Trading Room and the Carson Pirie Scott Building, and Root’s Monadnock Building. His original work, meanwhile, includes notable buildings such as the Arts Club of Chicago, numerous award-winning residences, and more than fifty major exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago and other museums.

John Vinci: Life and Landmarks also features portraits and profiles of Vinci’s friends and mentors over the years, including the architectural photographer Richard Nickel, the landscape designer Alfred Caldwell, the Art Institute curators James Speyer and Anne Rorimer, the architects Crombie Taylor and Myron Goldsmith, and the City of Chicago’s cultural historian Tim Samuelson.

The book includes new photos of twenty projects by noted architectural photographer William Zbaren as well as more than one hundred vintage photos and floorplans from Vinci’s personal archives, many never before published. A comprehensive catalogue raisonné rounds out this handsome and definitive work.
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Jonson's Moral Comedy
Alan C. Dessen
Northwestern University Press, 1971
Alan C. Dessen's Johnson's Moral Comedy asks the question about the character of Ben Jonson’s comedies: were they sentimental or were they didactic and moralistic comedies? Dessen’s groundbreaking text remains significant for its contribution to early conversations about Jonsonian comedy, as well as its contribution to the practice of ethical criticism of literature. In his close readings of Jonson’s plays, he offers a model of engaging in such critical practice.
 
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Journalism and Realism
Rendering American Life
Thomas B Connery
Northwestern University Press, 2011
Both newspaper and magazine journalism in the nineteenth century fully participated in the development and emergence of American Realism in the arts, which attempted to accurately portray everyday life, especially in fiction. Magazines and newspapers provided the raw material for American Realism, but were also its early and vocal advocates. This symbiotic relationship reached its peak from 1890 to 1910, when writers who might be called the first literary journalists (or, much later, “new journalists”) closed the circle by more fully adopting the fiction writer’s style of attempting to “show the reader real life,” as their literary progeny Tom Wolfe would put it many years later. Journalism and Realism fills a much-needed gap in the scholarship of American Realism.
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Journalism and Truth
Strange Bedfellows
Tom Goldstein
Northwestern University Press, 2007
The complaint is all too common: I know something about that, and the news got it wrong.  Why this should be, and what it says about the relationship between journalism and truth, is exactly the question that is at the core of Tom Goldstein’s very timely book. 

Other disciplines, Goldstein tells us, have clear protocols for gathering evidence and searching for truth.  Journalism, however, has some curious conventions that may actually work against such a goal.  Looking at how journalism has changed over time--and with it, notions about accuracy and truth in reporting—Goldstein explores how these long-standing and ultimately untrustworthy conventions developed.  He also examines why reliable standards of objectivity and accuracy are critical not just to a free press but to the democratic society it informs and serves.  From a historical overview to a reconsideration of a misunderstood book about journalism (The Journalist and the Murderer) to a reflection on the coverage of the war in Iraq, his book offers a remarkably wide-ranging and thought-provoking account of how journalism and truth work—or fail to work—together, and why it matters.
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The Journals
Volume 1: 1949-1965
John Fowles
Northwestern University Press, 2008
John Fowles gained international recognition in 1963 with his first published novel, The Collector, but his labor on what may be his greatest literary undertaking, his journals, commenced over a decade earlier. Fowles, whose works include The Maggot, The French Lieutenant's Woman, and The Ebony Tower, is among the most inventive and influential English novelists of the twentieth century.
The first volume begins in 1949 with Fowles' final year at Oxford. It reveals his intellectual maturation, chronicling his experiences as a university lecturer in France and as a schoolteacher on the Greek island of Spetsai. Simultaneously candid and eloquent, Fowles' journals also expose the deep connection between his personal and scholarly lives as Fowles struggled to win literary acclaim. From his affair with Elizabeth, the married woman who would become his first wife, to his passion for film, ornithology, travel, and book collecting, the journals present a portrait of a man eager to experience life.
The second and final volume opens in 1966, as Fowles, already an international success, navigates his newfound fame and wealth. With absolute honesty, his journals map his inner turmoil over his growing celebrity and his hesitance to take on the role of a public figure. Fowles recounts his move from London to a secluded house on England's Dorset coast, where discontented with society's voracious materialism he led an increasingly isolated life.
Great works in their own right, Fowles' journals elucidate the private thoughts that gave rise to some of the greatest writing of our time.
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The Journals
Volume 2: 1966-1990
John Fowles
Northwestern University Press, 2009
John Fowles gained international recognition in 1963 with his first published novel, The Collector, but his labor on what may be his greatest literary undertaking, his journals, commenced over a decade earlier. Fowles, whose works include The Maggot, The French Lieutenant's Woman, and The Ebony Tower, is among the most inventive and influential English novelists of the twentieth century.
The first volume begins in 1949 with Fowles' final year at Oxford. It reveals his intellectual maturation, chronicling his experiences as a university lecturer in France and as a schoolteacher on the Greek island of Spetsai. Simultaneously candid and eloquent, Fowles' journals also expose the deep connection between his personal and scholarly lives as Fowles struggled to win literary acclaim. From his affair with Elizabeth, the married woman who would become his first wife, to his passion for film, ornithology, travel, and book collecting, the journals present a portrait of a man eager to experience life.
The second and final volume opens in 1966, as Fowles, already an international success, navigates his newfound fame and wealth. With absolute honesty, his journals map his inner turmoil over his growing celebrity and his hesitance to take on the role of a public figure. Fowles recounts his move from London to a secluded house on England's Dorset coast, where discontented with society's voracious materialism he led an increasingly isolated life.
Great works in their own right, Fowles' journals elucidate the private thoughts that gave rise to some of the greatest writing of our time.
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Journals
Volume Fifteen
Herman Melville
Northwestern University Press, 1989
This volume presents Melville's three known journals. Unlike his contemporaries Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne, Melville kept no habitual record of his days and thoughts; each of his three journals records his actions and observations on trips far from home. In this edition's Historical Note, Howard C. Horsford places each of the journals in the context of Melville's career, discusses its general character, and points out the later literary uses he made of it, notably in Moby-Dick, Clarel, and his magazine pieces.

The editors supply full annotations of Melville's allusions and terse entries and an exhaustive index makes available the range of his acquaintance with people, places, and works of art. Also included are related documents, illustrations, maps, and many pages and passages reproduced from the journals. This scholarly edition aims to present a text as close to the author's intention as his difficult handwriting permits. It is an Approved Text of the Center for Editions of American Authors (Modern Language Association of America).
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Journey to the West
A Play
Mary Zimmerman
Northwestern University Press, 2011
This adaptation of a late sixteenth-century classic Chinese comic novel, Journey to the West, based on Anthony C. Yu’s translation, takes as its point of departure the true story of a seventh-century monk and his fabled pilgrimage from China to India in search of sacred texts. Mixing whimsy with spiritual weight, Zimmerman’s script combines comedy, adventure, and satire in a moving allegory of human perseverance.
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Journey toward the Cradle of Mankind
Guido Gozzano
Northwestern University Press, 1996
The distinguished Italian poet Guido Gozzano (1883-1916) embarked for India in February 1912, ostensibly to treat his tuberculosis. His trip lasted three months and, all told, he spent six weeks on the subcontinent. His dispatches home for a newspaper are collected and published here in English for the first time.

The extent of Gozzano's travels--to Ceylon, Goa, Agra, Jaipur--makes one wonder how the writer could visit all or even most of the places he so vividly describes. "I did not honestly think I would find so much of it intact," the spellbound Gozzano repeats to himself, before what he must shortly recognize as prodigious evidence of decay.
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Judgment and Action
Fragments toward a History
Edited by Vivasvan Soni and Thomas Pfau
Northwestern University Press, 2018
Written by theologians, literary scholars, political theorists, classicists, and philosophers, the essays in Judgment and Action address the growing sense that certain key concepts in humanistic scholarship have become suspect, if not downright unintelligible, amid the current plethora of critical methods. These essays aim to reassert the normative force of judgment and action, two concepts at the very core of literary analysis, systematic theology, philosophy, ethics, aesthetics, and other disciplines.

Interpretation is essential to every humanistic discipline, and every interpretation is an act of judgment. Yet the work of interpretation and judgment has been called into question by contemporary methods in the humanities, which incline either toward contextual determination of meaning or toward the suspension of judgment altogether. Action is closely related to judgment and interpretation and like them, it has been rendered questionable. An action is not simply the performance of a deed but requires the deed’s intelligibility, which can be secured only through interpretation and judgment.

Organized into four broad themes—interiority/contemplation, ethics, politics/community, and aesthetics/image—the aim of this broad-ranging and insightful collection is to illuminate the histories of judgment and action, identify critical sites from which rethinking them may begin, clarify how they came to be challenged, and relocate them within a broader intellectual-historical trajectory that renders them intelligible. 
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Jungian Literary Criticism
Richard P. Sugg
Northwestern University Press, 1992
Jungian Literary Criticism presents a comprehensive, theoretical foundation for a tradition of study that has included some of the leading critics of our time. This collection provides critics, writers, psychologists, and others interested in the relationship between psychology and literature with classics of Jungian literary analysis and with the work of contemporary scholars building on that tradition.
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Just Assassins
The Culture of Terrorism in Russia
Edited and with an introduction by Anthony Anemone
Northwestern University Press, 2010

Just Assassins is an engrossing collection of fourteen original essays that illuminate terrorism as it has occurred in Russian culture past and present. The broad range of writers and scholars have contributed work that examines Russian literature, film, and theater; historical narrative; and even amateur memoir, songs, and poetry posted on the Internet. Along with editor Anthony Anemone’s introduction, these essays chart the evolution of modern political terrorism in Russia, from the Decembrist uprising to the horrific school siege in Beslan in 2004.

As terrorism and the fear of terrorism continues to animate, shape, and deform public policy and international relations across the globe, Just Assassins brings into focus how Russia’s cultural engagement with its legacy of terrorism offers instructive lessons and insights for anyone concerned about political terror.

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