Research & Innovation

This new volume of essays explores what waste reveals about the culture that creates it. From floating barges of urban refuse to dung-encrusted works of art, from toxic landfills to dirty movies, filth has become a major presence and a point of volatile contention in modern life. This book explores the question of what filth has to do with culture: what critical role the lost, the rejected, the abject, and the dirty play in social management and identity formation. It suggests the ongoing power of culturally mandated categories of exclusion and repression.

It is linked to the eroticism and theatricality of the playhouse tiring-room as well as to the learning and privilege of the gentleman's closet. As a symbol of both progressive and retrograde versions of femininity, Designing Women clearly establishes the dressing room trope in eighteenth-century literature as redefining the gendered constitution of private spaces, and offers a corrective to our literary history of generic influence and development between satire and the novel: once the satirist shows the way into the lady's dressing room, the eighteenth-century novelist never stops looking.

Embarrassed by her mother's all-too-public civil rights activities in the fall of 1963, 17-year-old Beryl Rosinsky flees her home in Washington, DC, and begins college at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Here, in the segregated South, she means to reject her destiny as her mother's daughter by conforming and fitting in. But she finds herself in a world of uncomfortable paradoxes. Strict rules for women don't apply to men. Southern good manners don't extend to the black girl who lives alone on the other side of the dorm. Soon Beryl begins to appreciate her family's values -- and learn who she really is.

Rose Solari’s second full-length collection of poems is made up of two compellingly different yet intertwining strands. In one, Solari explores a variety of myths, climbing beneath the skin of classical heroes and villains to offer contemporary perspectives on these characters and their tales. The other strand consists of poems of celebration and farewell, written for the author’s late parents, as well as in honor of relationships, illusions, and old selves that have passed on. Woven together, the two strands illuminate each other, dissolving boundaries between the past and the present, the extraordinary and the ordinary, the mythical and the everyday.

• Ranges widely over the major themes, regions, theories and practices of postcolonial study
• Presents original essays by the leading proponents of postcolonial study in the Americas, Europe, India, Africa, East and West Asia
• Provides clear introductions to the major social and political movements underlying colonization and decolonization, accessible histories of the literature and culture, and separate regions affected by European colonization
• Features introductory essays on the major thinkers and intellectual schools that have informed strategies of national liberation worldwide
• Offers an incisive summary of the long history and theory of modern European colonization in local detail and global scale

Oxford: Blackwell, 2000 (paperback 2004).

Available in English for the first time, An Inca Account of the Conquest of Peru is a firsthand account of the Spanish invasion, narrated in 1570 by Diego de Castro Titu Cusi Yupanqui - the penultimate ruler of the Inca dynasty - to a Spanish missionary and transcribed by a mestizo assistant. The resulting hybrid document offers an Inca perspective on the Spanish conquest of Peru, filtered through the monk and his scribe.

Titu Cusi tells of his father's maltreatment at the hands of the conquerors; his father's ensuing military campaigns, withdrawal, and murder; and his own succession as ruler. Although he continued to resist Spanish attempts at "pacification," Titu Cusi entertained Spanish missionaries, converted to Christianity, and then, most importantly, narrated his story of the conquest to enlighten Emperor Phillip II about the behavior of the emperor's subjects in Peru. This vivid narrative illuminates the Incan view of the Spanish invaders and offers an important account of indigenous resistance, accommodation, change, and survival in the face of the European conquest.

Informed by literary, historical, and anthropological scholarship, Bauer's introduction points out the hybrid elements of Titu Cusi's account, revealing how it merges native Andean and Spanish rhetorical and cultural practices. This new English edition will interest students of colonial Latin American history and culture and of Native American literatures.

This intense 1907 thriller -- a precursor to works by Graham Greene and John le Carre -- concerns a British double agent who infiltrates a cabal of anarchists. Conrad explores political and criminal intrigue in a modern society, building to a climax that the critic F.R. Leavis deemed "one of the most astonishing triumphs of genius in fiction."

(Prototype of website now accessible; full site still under construction)

 

Patrick Phillips' first book, Chattahoochee, received a 2003 "Discovery" / The Nation Award, and was published by the University of Arkansas Press in 2004. His poems have appeared in many magazines, including recent issues of Poetry, DoubleTake, and Ploughshares. His honors include the Sjoberg Translation Prize of the American-Scandinavian Foundation, the Pablo Neruda Prize, and a Fulbright Scholarship at the University of Copenhagen. He is currently a MacCracken Fellow at New York University.

Can a story be both a shrug and a prayer? Can it punch you in the arm because, hey, it is only joking, and the next minute fall at your feet, cling to your knees, beg you to listen? Sure. The stories in Making Light of Tragedy are arrogant and uncertain. (This is not a contradiction.) They make no apologies for poor taste, or the occasional rhyme, but they do make a few demands. These include: Let there be light. Let there be no more epigraphs. Let the ski jumper take off. Let him never ever land. Let us cut limbs, when necessary. And the word count too. Let this be true. Let one person speak the truth. Let Peter Mansbridge be the ghost of Christmas future. In this first collection by Journey Prize-winner Jessica Grant, you'll find twenty-three bite-sized stories, with guest appearances by Holt Renfrew's daughter, Chantal Hébert, Napoleon, the Management, the Senior Climatologist, the Dean of Humanity, Jon Bon Jovi, Virginia Woolf and God.