Boris Slutsky (1919-1986) is a major original figure of Russian poetry of the second half of the twentieth century whose oeuvre has remained unexplored and unstudied. The first scholarly study of the poet, Marat Grinberg's book substantially fills this critical lacuna in the current comprehension of Russian and Soviet literatures. Grinberg argues that Slutsky's body of work amounts to a Holy Writ of his times, which daringly fuses biblical prooftexts and stylistics with the language of late Russian Modernism and Soviet newspeak. The book is directed toward readers of Russian poetry and pan-Jewish poetic traditions, scholars of Soviet culture and history, and the burgeoning field of Russian Jewish studies. Finally, it contributes to the general field of poetics and Modernism.

Half a century into the digital era, the profound impact of information technology on intellectual and cultural life is universally acknowledged but still poorly understood. The sheer complexity of the technology coupled with the rapid pace of change makes it increasingly difficult to establish common ground and to promote thoughtful discussion.

Responding to this challenge, Switching Codes brings together leading American and European scholars, scientists, and artists--including Charles Bernstein, Ian Foster, Bruno Latour, Alan Liu, and Richard Powers--to consider how the precipitous growth of digital information and its associated technologies are transforming the ways we think and act. Employing a wide range of forms, including essay, dialogue, short fiction, and game design, this book aims to model and foster discussion between IT specialists, who typically have scant training in the humanities or traditional arts, and scholars and artists, who often understand little about the technologies that are so radically transforming their fields. Switching Codes will be an indispensable volume for anyone seeking to understand the impact of digital technology on contemporary culture, including scientists, educators, policy makers, and artists alike.

"At a moment when culture's digital makeover seems to have induced epistemological vertigo in many, Switching Codes offers a timely and well-targeted intervention. ... Bartscherer, Coover, and their authors take up the challenges posed by the digital arts and humanities, mapping their new contexts, defining their analytic repertoire, and compelling a fresh set of insights. More than a portrait of our times, Switching Codes exemplifies the very logics that it explicates."--William Uricchio, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Deformed and Destructive Beings is a critical work that proposes a new theory of horror films: that the purpose of such films is to present deformed and destructive beings (also known as monsters) to satisfy the audience's taste for being. In particular, monsters satisfy the audience's desire for precisely those kinds of being that are inaccessible because they are unreal and would be dangerous if they were real. In laying out this theory, Deformed and Destructive Beings ranges across subjects that include epistemology, ethics, aesthetic evaluation, and monster taxonomy.

In this deeply engaging account, Michelle H. Raheja offers the first book-length study of the indigenous actors, directors, and spectators who helped shape Hollywood's representation of indigenous peoples. Since the era of silent films, Hollywood movies and visual culture generally have provided the primary representational field on which indigenous images have been displayed to non-Native audiences. These films have been highly influential in shaping perceptions of indigenous peoples as, for example, a dying race or as inherently unable or unwilling to adapt to change. However, films with indigenous plots and subplots also signify at least some degree of Native presence in a culture that largely defines Native peoples as absent or separate.

Native actors, directors, and spectators have had a part in creating these cinematic representations and have thus complicated the dominant, and usually negative, messages about Native peoples that films portray. In Reservation Reelism Raheja examines the history of these Native actors, directors, and spectators; reveals their contributions; and attempts to create positive representations in film that reflect the complex and vibrant experiences of Native peoples and communities.

This volume in the Shakespeare Criticism series offers a range of approaches to Twelfth Night, including its critical reception, performance history, and relation to early modern culture.

James Schiffer's extensive introduction surveys the play's critical reception and performance history, while individual essays explore a variety of topics relevant to a full appreciation of the play: early modern notions of love, friendship, sexuality, madness, festive ritual, exoticism, social mobility, and detection. The contributors approach these topics from a variety of perspectives, such as new critical, new historicist, cultural materialist, feminist and queer theory, and performance criticism, occasionally combining several approaches within a single essay.

The new essays from leading figures in the field explore and extend the key debates surrounding Twelfth Night, creating the ideal book for readers approaching this text for the first time or wishing to further their knowledge of this stimulating, much-loved play.

In spite of the unique beauty and universal appeal of African American spirituals, they rarely are considered to be lyric poetry. The first major study on the topic, this book attests to slave spirituals' centrality to the canons of African American literature and American poetry at large. Positioning them as a foundational and distinctive body of lyric expression, Lauri Ramey restores slaves' songs to their rightful place in literary tradition for their intrinsic value as poetry, and as a touchstone of the American imagination.

This collection of essays provides an international perspective on ways to incorporate black British writing and culture in the study of English literature, and presents imaginative, theoretically sophisticated, and practical strategies for doing so. It offers a pedagogical, pragmatic, and ideological introduction to the field for those without background and an integrated body of current and stimulating essays for those who are already knowledgeable. Contributors include coeditors R. Victoria Arana and Lauri Ramey, Chris Weedon, Tracey Walters, Judith Bryan, and Maria Helena Lima.

Crossing the disciplinary borders between political, religious, and economic history, Aaron Kitch's innovative new study demonstrates how 16th-century treatises and debates about trade influenced early modern English literature by shaping key formal and aesthetic concerns of authors between 1580 and 1630. The author's analysis concentrates on a commonly overlooked period of economic history--the English commercial revolution before 1620--and, utilizing an impressive combination of archival research, close reading, and attention to historical detail, traces the transformation of genre in both neglected and canonical texts. The topics here are wide-ranging but are presented with a commitment to providing a concrete understanding of the religious, political, and historic context in literary thought. Kitch begins with the emerging wool trade and explosion of economic writing, Spenser's glorification of commerce and the Protestant state as presented in The Faerie Queene, and writers such as Thomas Nashe who drew on the same economic principles to challenge Spenser. Other topics include the reaction to the herring trade in prose satire and pamphlets, the presentation of Jewish trading nations in Shakespeare and Marlowe, and the tension between the crown and London merchants as reflected in Middleton's city comedies and Jonson's and Munday's pageants and court masques.

While scholars have long noted the fascination with Roman literature and history expressed by many preeminent British cultural figures of the early and middle 18th century, they have only sparingly commented on the increasingly vexed role Rome played during the subsequent Romantic period. This critical oversight has skewed our understanding of British Romanticism as being either a full-scale rejection of classical precedents or an embrace of Greece at the expense of Rome. In contrast, Romantic Antiquity argues that Rome is relevant to the Romantic period not as the continuation of an earlier neoclassicism, but rather as a concept that is simultaneously transformed and transformative: transformed in the sense that new models of historical thinking produced a changed understandings of historicity itself and therefore a way to comprehend changes associated with modernity. The book positions Rome as central to a variety of literary events, including the British response to the French Revolution, the Jacobin novel, Byron's late rejection of Romantic poetics, Shelley's Hellenism, and the London theater, where the staging of Rome is directly responsible for Hazlitt's understanding of poetry as anti-democratic, or "right royal." By exposing how Roman references helped structure Romantic poetics and theories of the imagination, and how this aesthetic work, in turn, impacted fundamental aspects of political modernity like mass democracy and the spread of empire, the book recasts how we view the presence of antiquity in a modernity with which we continue to struggle.

Goethe's Modernisms demonstrates Goethe's pivotal influence on the development of Western society. It also reveals him to be one of modernity's profoundest critics. His influence has not only shaped aesthetic issues, but a myriad of cultural and intellectual ones as well. By studying his works, we can thus gain insights into the foundational principles of modern society and its shortcomings. Tantillo explores Goethe's role within the culture wars that have been with us for some time, his role as a both a progenitor and a critic of modernity, and suggests how we might rethink aspects of our current policies, whether educational or fiscal.

Each chapter presents an interpretation of literary texts and then demonstrates their relationship to a contemporary issue: the ascendancy of science and technology and their close connection to new economic theories (Faust); the cultural success of religious evangelicalism and its consequences (The Sorrows of Young Werther); and the ramifications of progressive, student-centered education (the Wilhelm Meister novels). Each chapter further places these issues within the context of conservative and liberal philosophies.