Caught in the act

Litvak demonstrates that private experience in the novels of Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Eliot, and James is a rigorous enactment of a public script that constructs normative gender and class identities. He suggests that the theatricality which pervades these novels enforces social norms while intr...

Contentious traditions

Contentious Traditions analyzes the debate on sati, or widow burning, in colonial India. Though the prohibition of widow burning in 1829 was heralded as a key step forward for women's emancipation in modern India, Lata Mani argues that the women who were burned were marginal to the debate and th...

Benjamin franklin and his enemies

In this engaging study of the much-loved statesman and polymath, Robert Middlekauff uncovers a little-known aspect of Benjamin Franklin's personality—his passionate anger. He reveals a fully human Franklin who led a remarkable life but nonetheless had his share of hostile relationships—political ...

Disenchanted night

Wolfgang Schivelbusch tells the story of the development of artificial light in the nineteenth century. Not simply a history of a technology, Disenchanted Night revelas the ways that the technology of artificial illumination helped forge modern consciousness. In his strikingly illustrated and liv...

Siting translation

The act of translation, Tejaswini Niranjana maintains, is a political action. Niranjana draws on Benjamin, Derrida, and de Man to show that translation has long been a site for perpetuating the unequal power relations among peoples, races, and languages. The traditional view of translation underw...

Art of renaissance venice, 1400–1600

Chronicling the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and journeying from the Piazza San Marco to the villas of the Veneto, this vivid and authoritative survey of architecture, sculpture, and painting offers a rich perspective on the history and artistic achievements of Renaissance Venice. Distingui...

State of mind

State of Mind, the lavishly illustrated companion book to the exhibition of the same name, investigates California’s vital contributions to Conceptual art—in particular, work that emerged in the late 1960s among scattered groups of young artists. The essays reveal connections between the norther...

Lawrence of arabia

Combining ethnography, film criticism, and his extensive knowledge of the Middle East, Steven C. Caton presents an innovative and fascinating examination of the classic film, Lawrence of Arabia. Caton is interested in why this epic film has been so compelling for so many people for more than thre...

Phenomenal

During the 1960s and 1970s, a loosely affiliated group of Los Angeles artists--including Larry Bell, Mary Corse, Robert Irwin, James Turrell, and Doug Wheeler--more intrigued by questions of perception than by the crafting of discrete objects, embraced light as their primary medium. Whether by di...

Toward restoration

Spinning fantasies

Miriam Peskowitz offers a dramatic revision to our understanding of early rabbinic Judaism. Using a wide range of sources—archaeology, legal texts, grave goods, technology, art, and writings in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Latin—she challenges traditional assumptions regarding Judaism's historical...

The archaeology of the roman economy

Kevin Greene shows how archaeology can help provide a more balanced view of the Roman economy by informing the classical historian about geographical areas and classes of society that received little attention from the largely aristocratic classical writers whose work survives.