front cover of I Wonder U
I Wonder U
How Prince Went beyond Race and Back
Adilifu Nama
Rutgers University Press, 2020
Featured in the 2020 Association of University Presses Book, Jacket, and Journal Show

In 1993, Prince infamously changed his name to a unique, unpronounceable symbol. Yet this was only one of a long string of self-reinventions orchestrated by Prince as he refused to be typecast by the music industry’s limiting definitions of masculinity and femininity, of straightness and queerness, of authenticity and artifice, or of black music and white music.
 
Revealing how he continually subverted cultural expectations, I Wonder U examines the entirety of Prince’s diverse career as a singer, multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, producer, record label mogul, movie star, and director. It shows how, by blending elements of R&B, rock, and new wave into an extremely videogenic package, Prince was able to overcome the color barrier that kept black artists off of MTV. Yet even at his greatest crossover success, he still worked hard to retain his credibility among black music fans. In this way, Adilifu Nama suggests, Prince was able to assert a distinctly black political sensibility while still being perceived as a unique musical genius whose appeal transcended racial boundaries.
 
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The Kurbskii-Groznyi Apocrypha
the 17th-Century Genesis of the "Correspondence" Attributed to Prince A. M. Kurbskii and Tsar Ivan IV
Edward L. Keenan
Harvard University Press, 1971

For centuries the exchange of letters between Ivan the Terrible (1530-1584) and Prince Kurbskii, Muscovy's first notable defector, has been considered an authentic and important source for sixteenth-century Russian history. The Ivan portrayed in these letters has dominated posterity's perception of him and his time. But the provenance of the "Correspondence" has never been properly established.

Edward L. Keenan draws on all the tools of source study and literary criticism to demonstrate that the "Correspondence" is a forgery, and in fact was composed some decades later in the seventeenth century. He concentrates on the first letter of Kurbskii, which is the earliest of the letters as well as a source for the later ones, and concludes that it was written between 1623 and 1625 by Semen Ivanovich Shakhovskoi--a conclusion that will necessitate the re-evaluation of sixteenth-century Russian history as it has previously been written by scholars throughout the world.

Keenan discusses at length the implications of his discovery and sketches directions for future study, which will include a reconstruction of our conception of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century political thought, of Ivan's personality--indeed of the nature of his reign--and of the evolution of Muscovite state ideology.

[more]

front cover of The Prince Of Fire
The Prince Of Fire
Radmila Gorup
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998

Winner of the 1998 Misha Djordjevic Award for the best book on Serbian culture in English.

Editors Gorup and Obradovic have collected stories from thirty-five outstanding writers in this first English anthology of Serbian fiction in thirty years. The anthology, representing a great variety of literary styles and themes, includes works by established writers with international reputations, as well as promising new writers spanning the generation born between 1930 and 1960.  These stories may lead to a greater understanding of the current events in the former Yugoslavia.

[more]

front cover of The Prince of Mournful Thoughts and Other Stories
The Prince of Mournful Thoughts and Other Stories
Caroline Kim
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021
Winner, 2020 Drue Heinz Literature Prize
Finalist, 2021 Northern California Book Award
Longlist, 2021 PEN/Robert Bingham Prize
Longlist, 2020 The Story Prize


Exploring what it means to be human through the Korean diaspora, Caroline Kim’s stories feature many voices. From a teenage girl in 1980’s America, to a boy growing up in the middle of the Korean War, to an immigrant father struggling to be closer to his adult daughter, or to a suburban housewife whose equilibrium depends upon a therapy robot, each character must face their less-than-ideal circumstances and find a way to overcome them without losing themselves. Language often acts as a barrier as characters try, fail, and momentarily succeed in connecting with each other. With humor, insight, and curiosity, Kim’s wide-ranging stories explore themes of culture, communication, travel, and family. Ultimately, what unites these characters across time and distance is their longing for human connection and a search for the place—or people—that will feel like home.

 

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
A Prince of Our Disorder
The Life of T. E. Lawrence
John E. Mack
Harvard University Press, 1998

When this Pulitzer Prize–winning biography first appeared in 1976, it rescued T.E. Lawrence from the mythologizing that had seemed to be his fate. In it, John Mack humanely and objectively explores the relationship between Lawrence’s inner life and his historically significant actions.

Extensive interviews, far-flung correspondence, access to War Office dispatches and unpublished letters provide the basis for Mack’s sensitive investigation of the psychiatric dimensions of Lawrence’s personality. In addition, Mack examines the pertinent history, politics, and sociology of the time in order to weigh the real forces with which Lawrence contended and which impinged upon him.

[more]

front cover of Prince of Tricksters
Prince of Tricksters
The Incredible True Story of Netley Lucas, Gentleman Crook
Matt Houlbrook
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Meet Netley Lucas, Prince of Tricksters—royal biographer, best-selling crime writer, and gentleman crook. In the years after the Great War, Lucas becomes infamous for climbing the British social ladder by his expert trickery—his changing names and telling of tales. An impudent young playboy and a confessed confidence trickster, he finances his far-flung hedonism through fraud and false pretenses. After repeated spells in prison, Lucas transforms himself into a confessing “ex-crook,” turning his inside knowledge of the underworld into a lucrative career as freelance journalist and crime expert. But then he’s found out again—exposed and disgraced for faking an exclusive about a murder case. So he reinvents himself, taking a new name and embarking on a prolific, if short-lived, career as a royal biographer and publisher. Chased around the world by detectives and journalists after yet another sensational scandal, the gentleman crook dies as spectacularly as he lived—a washed-up alcoholic, asphyxiated in a fire of his own making.

The lives of Netley Lucas are as flamboyant as they are unlikely. In Prince of Tricksters, Matt Houlbrook picks up the threads of Lucas’s colorful lies and lives. Interweaving crime writing and court records, letters and life-writing, Houlbrook tells Lucas’s fascinating story and, in the process, provides a panoramic view of the 1920s and ’30s. In the restless times after the Great War, the gentlemanly trickster was an exemplary figure, whose tall tales and bogus biographies exposed the everyday difficulties of knowing who and what to trust. Tracing how Lucas both evoked and unsettled the world through which he moved, Houlbrook shows how he prompted a pervasive crisis of confidence that encompassed British society, culture, and politics.

Taking readers on a romp through Britain, North America, and eventually into Africa, Houlbrook confronts readers with the limits of our knowledge of the past and challenges us to think anew about what history is and how it might be made differently.
[more]

front cover of The Prince
The Prince
Second Edition
Niccolò Machiavelli
University of Chicago Press, 1998
The most famous book on politics ever written, The Prince remains as lively and shocking today as when it was written almost five hundred years ago. Initially denounced as a collection of sinister maxims and a recommendation of tyranny, it has more recently been defended as the first scientific treatment of politics as it is practiced rather than as it ought to be practiced. Harvey C. Mansfield's brilliant translation of this classic work, along with the new materials added for this edition, make it the definitive version of The Prince, indispensable to scholars, students, and those interested in the dark art of politics.

This revised edition of Mansfield's acclaimed translation features an updated bibliography, a substantial glossary, an analytic introduction, a chronology of Machiavelli's life, and a map of Italy in Machiavelli's time.

"Of the other available [translations], that of Harvey C. Mansfield makes the necessary compromises between exactness and readability, as well as providing an excellent introduction and notes."—Clifford Orwin, The Wall Street Journal

"Mansfield's work . . . is worth acquiring as the best combination of accuracy and readability."—Choice

"There is good reason to assert that Machiavelli has met his match in Mansfield. . . . [He] is ready to read Machiavelli as he demands to be read—plainly and boldly, but also cautiously."—John Gueguen, The Sixteenth Century Journal
[more]

front cover of The Prince
The Prince
Second Edition
Niccolò Machiavelli
University of Chicago Press, 1998
This is an auto-narrated audiobook version of this book.

The most famous book on politics ever written, The Prince remains as lively and shocking today as when it was written almost five hundred years ago. Initially denounced as a collection of sinister maxims and a recommendation of tyranny, it has more recently been defended as the first scientific treatment of politics as it is practiced rather than as it ought to be practiced. Harvey C. Mansfield's brilliant translation of this classic work, along with the new materials added for this edition, make it the definitive version of The Prince, indispensable to scholars, students, and those interested in the dark art of politics.

This revised edition of Mansfield's acclaimed translation features an updated bibliography, a substantial glossary, an analytic introduction, a chronology of Machiavelli's life, and a map of Italy in Machiavelli's time.

"Of the other available [translations], that of Harvey C. Mansfield makes the necessary compromises between exactness and readability, as well as providing an excellent introduction and notes."—Clifford Orwin, The Wall Street Journal

"Mansfield's work . . . is worth acquiring as the best combination of accuracy and readability."—Choice

"There is good reason to assert that Machiavelli has met his match in Mansfield. . . . [He] is ready to read Machiavelli as he demands to be read—plainly and boldly, but also cautiously."—John Gueguen, The Sixteenth Century Journal
[more]

front cover of Publishing The Prince
Publishing The Prince
History, Reading, and the Birth of Political Criticism
Jacob Soll
University of Michigan Press, 2010

As new ideas arose during the Enlightenment, many political thinkers published their own versions of popular early modern "absolutist" texts and transformed them into manuals of political resistance. As a result, these works never achieved a fixed and stable edition. Publishing The Prince illustrates how Abraham-Nicolas Amelot de La Houssaye created the most popular late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century version of Machiavelli's masterpiece. In the process of translating, Amelot also transformed the work, altering its form and meaning, and his ideas spread through later editions.

Revising the orthodox schema of the public sphere in which political authority shifted away from the crown with the rise of bourgeois civil society in the eighteenth century, Soll uses the example of Amelot to show for the first time how the public sphere in fact grew out of the learned and even royal libraries of erudite scholars and the bookshops of subversive, not-so-polite publicists of the republic of letters.

Jacob Soll is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University.

Cover art courtesy of Annenberg Rare Book Room and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania
Jacket Design: Stephanie Milanowski

"Jacob Soll traces the origins of Enlightenment criticism to the practices of learned humanists and hard-pressed literary entrepreneurs. This learned and lively book is also a tour de force of historical research and interpretation."
---Anthony Grafton, author of Cardano's Cosmos and Bring Out Your Dead

"Brilliant. How the printed page changed political philosophy into investigative reporting, and reason of state into the unmasking of power."
---J. G. A. Pocock, author of The Machiavellian Moment

"Soll's path-breaking study is a 'must read' for all those interested in the history of political thought and early modern intellectual history."
---Barbara Shapiro, University of California Berkeley

"Soll has done [Amelot] and his context justice, writing as he does with a clear, singular, and welcome voice."
---Margaret C. Jacobs, American Historical Review

[more]

front cover of Tales from the Prince of Storytellers
Tales from the Prince of Storytellers
Robert Louis Stevenson
Northwestern University Press, 1993
Robert Louis Stevenson is widely known for his novels Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Treasure Island, and Kidnapped. His reputation as a "romantic" writer and children's author, however, reflects only a portion of his literary achievement. This collection of stories features an introduction by Stevenson scholar Barry Menikoff which places Stevenson's writing in a new context. Menikoff argues that Stevenson is misunderstood by academic readers and critics and presents him as a writer whose subjects and methods are clearly modernist.

Included in this volume for the first time are versions of the stories "Markheim" and "The Isle of Voices" as they appear in Stevenson' s holograph manuscripts, plus his classics The Suicide Club, The Rajah's Diamond, "The Bottle Imp," "The Pavilion on the Links," "A Lodging for the Night," "The Merry Men," and "Thrawn Janet."
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter