Weekly Book List, June 9, 2017

AFRICAN-AMERICAN STUDIES

Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg by Vanessa K. Valdes (State University of New York Press; 190 pages; $80). A biography of the Puerto Rican-born scholar, collector, and archivist (1874-1938), whose personal library was the basis for a center for research on black culture at the New York Public Library.

The Labor of Faith: Gender and Power in Black Apostolic Pentecostalism by Judith Casselberry (Duke University Press; 213 pages; $89.95 hardcover, $24.95 paperback). Examines the key role of women in the Harlem-based Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ of the Apostolic Faith, Inc., a female-majority but male-led Pentecostal denomination.

Struggle on Their Minds: The Political Thought of African American Resistance by Alex Zamalin (Columbia University Press; 222 pages; $35). Focuses on five activists: David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Huey Newton, and Angela Davis.

ANTHROPOLOGY

Death, Beauty, Struggle: Untouchable Women Create the World by Margaret Trawick (University of Pennsylvania Press; 304 pages; $69.95). Describes the songs and stories of Dalit women that document their experience of marginalization in Indian society.

Grace after Genocide: Cambodians in the United States by Carol A. Mortland (Berghahn Books; 290 pages; $120). An ethnographic study of Cambodians in the United States; contrasts the refugee generation that arrived in 1975 with their American-born children.

Vengeance in Reverse: The Tangled Loops of Violence, Myth, and Madness by Mark R. Anspach (Michigan State University Press; 121 pages; $24.95). Topics include gift exchange as a form of vengeance in reverse; draws on Rene Girard’s theories of mimesis.

Webs of Kinship: Family in Northern Cheyenne Nationhood by Christina Gish Hill (University of Oklahoma Press; 382 pages; $34.95). Combines archival and oral-historical data in a study of how the Northern Cheyenne have used kinship ties strategically to secure their nationhood and resources.

ARCHAEOLOGY

Modes of Production and Archaeology edited by Robert M. Rosenswig and Jerimy J. Cunningham (University Press of Florida; 347 pages; $95). Writings that apply Marx and Engels’s concept of modes of production to the archaeological analysis of long-term patterns of cultural change; includes essays on hunter-gatherer, pre-state agriculturalist, and state societies, with a focus on the Americas.

ART AND ARCHITECTURE

Abstraction in Reverse: The Reconfigured Spectator in Mid-Twentieth-Century Latin American Art by Alexander Alberro (University of Chicago Press; 309 pages; $50). A study of art and writings by mid-20th-century post-Concrete Latin American artists who developed an activist role for the spectator in the realization of works.

Adolph Menzel: The Quest for Reality by Werner Busch, translated by Carola Kleinstuck-Schulman (Getty Research Institute; 283 pages; $65). Translation of a 2015 study of the artist (1815-1905), a pioneer in German realist painting.

The Art of Contact: Comparative Approaches to Greek and Phoenician Art by S. Rebecca Martin (University of Pennsylvania Press; 282 pages; $59.95). Uses art attributed to Greeks and Phoenicians during the first millennium BC to challenge prevailing assumptions about the two cultures’ identities and interaction, as well as notions of the inevitability of Greek triumph.

Designing Detroit: Wirt Rowland and the Rise of Modern American Architecture by Michael G. Smith (Wayne State University Press; 498 pages; $44.99). Discusses the American architect (1878-1946) as a neglected figure responsible for many of the city’s most innovative skyscrapers and other buildings.

Elastic Architecture: Frederick Kiesler and Design Research in the First Age of Robotic Culture by Stephen J. Phillips (MIT Press; 364 pages; $39.95). Examines the research-based practice of the European-born American avant-garde designer (1890-1965), who was described by Philip Johnson as “the greatest non-building architect of our time.”

Goldoni in Paris: La Gloire et le Malentendu by Jessica Goodman (Oxford University Press; 227 pages; $95). A study of the Italian playwright and librettist Carlo Goldoni (1707-93) that focuses on how Paris, his home after 1762, figured in his aspirations and self-fashioning.

The Unmaking of Home in Contemporary Art by Claudette Lauzon (University of Toronto Press; 224 pages; US$65). Draws on Judith Butler, Mieke Bal, and other theorists in a study of Krzysztof Wodiczko, Santiago Sierra, Doris Salcedo, and Yto Barrada and other artists who disrupt the notion of home as a place of comfort and safety.

CRIMINAL JUSTICE

Convicted and Condemned: The Politics and Policies of Prisoner Reentry by Keesha M. Middlemass (New York University Press; 282 pages; $89 hardcover, $30 paperback). Focuses on housing, education, and employment in a study of the difficulties faced by former inmates, and the lifelong consequences of a felony conviction; draws on interviews and fieldwork in Newark, N.J.

Exonerated: A History of the Innocence Movement by Robert J. Norris (New York University Press; 288 pages; $35). Examines key leaders and cases in a movement that in recent decades has resulted in the freeing of more than 1,800 people who were convicted for crimes they did not commit.

The Technoscientific Witness of Rape: Contentious Histories of Law, Feminism, and Forensic Science by Andrea Quinlan (University of Toronto Press; 272 pages; US$65 hardcover, US$24.95 paperback). Discusses the sexual-assault evidence kit used in Ontario since 1984 and its role in a system that, it is argued, re-victimizes many victims.

ECONOMICS

Beating the Odds: Jump-Starting Developing Countries by Justin Yifu Lin and Celestin Monga (Princeton University Press; 393 pages; $35). Criticizes prevailing approaches in development economics and argues for poor nations to build industrial parks and export-processing zones as a means of jump-starting their entrance into global markets.

The First Serious Optimist: A.C. Pigou and the Birth of Welfare Economics by Ian Kumekawa (Princeton University Press; 352 pages; $35). An intellectual biography of the British economist (1877-1959).

The World After GDP: Politics, Business and Society in the Post Growth Era by Lorenzo Fioramonti (Polity Press; 276 pages; $64.95 hardcover, $22.95 paperback). Proposes alternative benchmarks to the GDP as a means of achieving a more equitable and sustainable economy.

EDUCATION

Teaching for Equity in Complex Times: Negotiating Standards in a High-Performing Bilingual School by Jamy Stillman, Lauren Anderson, and others (Teachers College Press; 220 pages; $84 hardcover, $39.95 paperback). An ethnographic study of a high-performing K-8 bilingual charter school; examines tensions between the school’s multicultural and bilingual mission and efforts to comply with Common Core State Standards.

FILM STUDIES

The Cinema of the Soviet Thaw: Space, Materiality, Movement by Lida Okaderova (Indiana University Press; 214 pages; $75 hardcover, $30 paperback). Explores space as a trope and social concern in films made from 1958 to 1967 by such directors as Mikhail Kalatozov, Georgii Danelia, Larisa Shepitko and Kira Muratova.

The Flaherty: Decades in the Cause of Independent Cinema by Patricia R. Zimmermann and Scott MacDonald (Indiana University Press; 341 pages; $41). Traces the history of a non-profit organization and seminar founded in 1955, named after the documentarian Robert Flaherty, and dedicated to independent cinema.

Robert Beavers edited by Rebekah Rutkoff (Austrian Film Museum, distributed by Columbia University Press; 217 pages; $29.90). Writings by and about the American avant-garde filmmaker (b. 1949).

War Pictures: Cinema, Violence, and Style in Britain, 1939-1945 by Kent Puckett (Fordham University Press; 264 pages; $125 hardcover, $35 paperback). Examines World War II’s challenges to British filmmaking, and the role of cinema as propaganda, criticism, and self analysis; focuses on Henry V, Brief Encounter, and The Life and Times of Colonel Blimp.

GENDER STUDIES

The Hirschfeld Archives: Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture by Heike Bauer (Temple University Press; 236 pages; $92.50 hardcover, $34.95 paperback). Uses published and unpublished writings by the German sexologist and activist, as well as other materials, to examine persecution and violence as an aspect of queer activism in the early 20th century.

HISTORY

Albert A. Pena Jr.: Dean of Chicano Politics by Jose Angel Gutierrez (Michigan State University Press; 308 pages; $39.95). A biography of the San Antonio judge and Chicano leader (1917-2006).

American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Soviet Dream by Julia L. Mickenberg (University of Chicago Press; 432 pages; $35). Offers a collective biography of American women, radical and otherwise, who were drawn to Soviet Russia in the 1920s and 30s.

At the Edge of the World: The Heroic Century of the French Foreign Legion by Jean-Vincent Blanchard (Bloomsbury Press; 262 pages; $30). Examines the history and mystique of the foreign-born, all-volunteer force, with a focus on campaigns in Vietnam, Madagascar, and Morocco.

Aurangzeb: The Life and Legacy of India’s Most Controversial King by Audrey Truschke (Stanford University Press; 136 pages; $60 hardcover, $19.95 paperback). Offers a reassessment of the Mughal emperor, who reigned from 1658 to his death, in 1707, and who continues to be hated by Hindus through the present.

Baking Powder Wars: The Cutthroat Food Fight That Revolutionized Cooking by LInda Civitello (University of Illinois Press; 272 pages; $95 hardcover, $19.95 paperback). Focuses on Rumford, Calumet, Clabber Girl, and Royal in a study of American companies’ battle to get market control over baking powder, a formula first patented in 1856.

Bodies and Ruins: Imagining the Bombing of Germany, 1945 to the Present by David F. Crew (University of Michigan Press; 288 pages; $85). Documents how German identity and collective memory was shaped by photographic and other accounts of the “bombing war” as early as the immediate postwar period.

Britain and Interwar Danubian Europe: Foreign Policy and Security Challenges, 1919-1936 by Dragan Bakic (Bloomsbury Academic; 264 pages; $114). Draws on previously untapped Yugoslav archives in a study of how the British Foreign Office viewed and addressed tensions in the Central/South European region between the world wars.

Brothers and Friends: Kinship in Early America by Natalie R. Inman (University of Georgia Press; 184 pages; $49.95). Focuses on the Chickasaw Colbert family, the Anglo-American Donelson family, and the Cherokee families of Attakullakulla and Major Ridge in a study of natal, marital, and fictive kin relationships as social forces.

The Cemeteries of New Orleans: A Cultural History by Peter B. Dedek (Louisiana State University Press; 296 pages; $38). Focuses on marble cutters, burial-society members, journalists, and tourists in a study of the city’s famed cemeteries.

Churchill and the Dardanelles by Christopher M. Bell (Oxford University Press; 464 pages; $34.95). Examines the origins, execution, and aftermath of an ill-fated naval campaign in 1915 that ultimately led to Winston Churchill’s removal from office as First Lord of the Admiralty.

Diminishing the Bill of Rights: “Barron v. Baltimore” and the Foundations of American Liberty by William Davenport Mercer (University of Oklahoma Press; 283 pages; $34.95). Discusses the significance of an 1833 case in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against two Baltimore wharf owners who claimed that the city owed them damages for taking their property without compensation, in violation of the Fifth Amendment.

The English Conquest of Jamaica: Oliver Cromwell’s Bid for Empire by Carla Gardina Pestana (Harvard University Press; 362 pages; $35). Examines Cromwell’s plan to take Spain’s American colonies, an effort that narrowed to Jamaica, which was surrendered after 16 years of resistance by the Spanish.

Frustrated Democracy in Post-Soviet Azerbaijan by Audrey L. Altstadt (Woodrow Wilson Center Press/Columbia University Press; 317 pages; $60). Combines history and political science in a study of Azerbaijan since the 1988-94 Nagorno-Karabagh War; analyzes why the post-Soviet republic abandoned a democratic trajectory in favor of corrupt authoritarianism.

Gifford Pinchot: Selected Writings edited by Char Miller (Penn State University Press; 255 pages; $24.95). Writings by the founding chief of the U.S. Forest Service, who was also elected twice as Pennsylvania’s governor.

Heading Out: A History of American Camping by Terence Young (Cornell University Press; 400 pages; $35). Topics include such figures as William H.H. Murray, whose book on the Adirondacks helped launch a craze for camping in 1869, and William Trent Jr., who worked to end segregation in national park camp grounds before World War II.

Jenkins of Mexico: How a Southern Farm Boy Became a Mexican Magnate by Andrew Paxman (Oxford University Press; 509 pages; $34.95). Explores the interplay of business and politics in post-revolutionary Mexico through a biography of a controversial American entrepreneur (1878-1963) active in sugar, banking, movie theaters, and other sectors.

Kitchen Table Politics: Conservative Women and Family Values in New York by Stacie Taranto (University of Pennsylvania Press; 296 pages; $55). Focuses on the key role played by white, largely Catholic homemakers in Long Island and nearby suburbs in the rise of anti-abortion, anti-ERA, and other conservative movements in New York in the 1970s and 80s.

Max Eastman: A Life by Christoph Irmscher (Yale University Press; 434 pages; $40). A biography of the American poet, editor, and activist (1883-1969), who edited The Masses and The Liberator, but later in life shifted to the right; draws on unprecedented access to family archives.

The Medieval Invention of Travel by Shayne Aaron Legassie (University of Chicago Press; 302 pages; $90 hardcover, $29 paperback). Documents the influence of writings by growing numbers of traveling merchants, pilgrims, diplomats, missionaries, and adventures over the course of the Middle Ages.

“Misfits” in Fin-de-Siecle France and Italy: Anatomies of Difference by Susan A. Ashley (Bloomsbury Academic; 300 pages; $114). Discusses Cesare Lombroso, Jean-Martin Charcot, Theodule Ribot, and lesser-known figures in a study of how authorities in criminology, neurology, sexology, and other fields explained crime, vagrancy, insanity, and sexual deviance.

The Mongols and the Islamic World: From Conquest to Conversion by Peter Jackson (Yale University Press; 614 pages; $40). Discusses the conquest of Muslim territories by Genghis Khan and his successors, as well as the eventual conversion of Mongol leaders to Islam.

Moscow 1956: The Silenced Spring by Kathleen E. Smith (Harvard University Press; 434 pages; $29.95). Draws on newly declassified archives in a month-by-month account of a pivotal year marked by upheaval in response to Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin.

The Naqab Bedouins: A Century of Politics and Resistance by Mansour Nasasra (Columbia University Press; 288 pages; $60). Combines archival, oral-historical, and interview data in a study of the Bedouin of southern Palestine; emphasizes their agency and resistance under Israeli military rule and today.

The Native South: New Histories and Enduring Legacies edited by Tim Alan Garrison and Greg O’Brien (University of Nebraska Press; 279 pages; $60). Writings by ethnohistorians on indigenous history in the South from the 16th to the 21st centuries; topics include race, kinship, and belonging among the Florida Seminoles, and how the 18th-century Choctaws and the Chickasaws stopped fighting.

Peace Weavers: Uniting the Salish Coast Through Cross-Cultural Marriages by Candace Wellman (Washington State University Press; 280 pages; $27.95). Focuses on the lives of four women whose marriages were part of strategic alliances in the mid-19th century between coastal and interior Salish in the Puget Sound region: Caroline Davis Kavanaugh (Samish-Swinomish), Mary Fitzhugh Lear Phillips (S’Klallam), Clara Tennant Selhameten (Lummi-Duwamish), and Nellie Carr Lane (Sto:lo).

The Power of the Steel-tipped Pen: Reconstructing Native Hawaiian Intellectual History by Noenoe K. Silva (Duke University Press; 270 pages; $94.95 hardcover, $25.95 paperback). Focuses on writings by Joseph Ho‘ona‘auao Kanepu‘u (1824--ca. 1885) and Joseph Moku‘ohai Poepoe (1852--1913) in a study of intellectual history preserved in Hawaiian-language newspapers.

Psychedelic Chile: Youth, Counterculture, and Politics on the Road to Socialism and Dictatorship by Patrick Barr-Melej (University of North Carolina Press; 344 pages; $34.95). Topics include the collision between the sensibilities of Chile’s youth counterculture and more hard-core leftists in the “Age of Allende.”

The Religious Life of Robert E. Lee by R. David Cox (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing; 336 pages; $26). A biographical study of the Confederate general that examines his Episcopalian faith and the role of religion in his life and decision making.

Rogue Empires: Contracts and Conmen in Europe’s Scramble for Africa by Steven Press (Harvard University Press; 371 pages; $39.95). Describes how an English adventurer’s purchase of a kingdom in Borneo inspired similar actions by rogue businessmen and companies in Africa.

Sisters in Spirit: Christianity, Affect, and Community Building in East Africa, 1860--1970 by Andreana C. Prichard (Michigan State University Press; 339 pages; $39.95). Focuses on Tanzania and Zanzibar in a study of African female lay evangelists and the activities of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa.

Treating the Public: Charitable Theater and Civic Health in the Early Modern Atlantic World by Rachael Ball (Louisiana State University Press; 216 pages; $42.50). Contrasts theaters in Madrid, Seville, Mexico City, and Puebla de los Angeles with theaters in London, Bristol, Dublin, and Williamsburg, Va., in the 16th and 17th centuries.

An Uncertain Age: The Politics of Manhood in Kenya by Paul Ocobock (Ohio University Press; 368 pages; $80 hardcover, $34.95 paperback). Examines how an evolving concept of youth energized both colonial power and anti-colonialism in the former British colony.

HISTORY OF MEDICINE

The Invisible Injured: Psychological Trauma in the Canadian Military from the First World War to Afghanistan by Adam Montgomery (McGill-Queen’s University Press; 352 pages; US$34.95). Combines archival and interview data in a study documenting the neglect and at times stigma experienced by Canadian soldiers suffering psychological trauma.

HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY

The Draining of the Fens: Projectors, Popular Politics, and State Building in Early Modern England by Eric H. Ash (Johns Hopkins University Press; 416 pages; $54.95). Topics include the long-term environmental impact of the project, which drained wetlands to create farmland.

INFORMATION STUDIES

The Stuff of Bits: An Essay on the Materialities of Information by Paul Dourish (MIT Press; 244 pages; $35). Examines the material forms in which digital data are represented, and how those forms influence experience and lines of action; topics include emulation and the creation of a virtual computer inside another.

LABOR STUDIES

Labor Under Fire: A History of the AFL-CIO since 1979 by Timothy J. Minchin (University of North Carolina Press; 414 pages; $39.95). Draws on previously untapped archives and oral-historical data in a study of the labor federation’s survival in an era of growing hostility.

Redefining the Muslim Community: Ethnicity, Religion, and Politics in the Thought of Alfarabi by Alexander Orwin (University of Pennsylvania Press; 250 pages; $59.95). Draws lessons for communal strife today from the writings of the medieval philosopher and his combined religious and cultural understanding of the umma or Muslim community.

LAW

Deportation: The Origins of U.S. Policy by Torrie Hester (University of Pennsylvania Press; 243 pages; $45). Focuses on the first decades of deportation policy, which didn’t exist in a formal sense until after 1882, when the federal government made Chinese workers eligible for deportation and later extended the law to anarchists, the sick, prostitutes, and others.

The Racial Glass Ceiling: Subordination in American Law and Culture by Roy L. Brooks (Yale University Press; 240 pages; $35). Links the persistence of racial inequality to a type of subordination defined as “the act of impeding racial progress in pursuit of nonracist interests.”

LINGUISTICS

Morphological Length and Prosodically Defective Morphemes by Eva Zimmermann (Oxford University Press; 350 pages; $99). A work in theoretical phonology and morphology that draws on data from a wide range of languages, including Aymara, Yine, Upriver Halkomelem, Wolof, Hungarian, Tohono O’odham, and Southern Sierra Miwok.

Parts of a Whole: Distributivity as a Bridge between Aspect and Measurement by Lucas Champollion (Oxford University Press; 312 pages; $105 hardcover, $55 paperback). Uses mathematical models of language to examine constraints that block certain constructions, as for example why we can say five pounds of books but not five pounds of book.

LITERATURE

The Algerian New Novel: The Poetics of a Modern Nation, 1950-1979 by Valerie K. Orlando (University of Virginia Press; 344 pages; $75 hardcover, $35 paperback). A study of novels by Rachid Boudjedra, Mohammed Dib, Assia Djebar, Nabile Fares, Yamina Mechakra, and Kateb Yacine; topics include how their avant-garde style was influenced by early 20th-century American modernism, the mid-century French New Novel, and African-American writers of the 50s and 60s.

Anti-Literature: The Politics and Limits of Representation in Modern Brazil and Argentina by Adam Joseph Shellhorse (University of Pittsburgh Press; 258 pages; $29.95). Writers discussed include Clarice Lispector, Oswald de Andrade, and the concrete poets Osman Lins and David Vinas.

Archives of Labor: Working-Class Women and Literary Culture in the Antebellum United States by Lori Merish (Duke University Press; 312 pages; $94.95 hardcover, $26.95 paperback). A study of working-class women as writers and readers in the antebellum era, with a focus on Lowell, Mass., “mill women,” African-American “free laborers,” Mexicana mission workers, urban seamstresses, and prostitutes.

Charles Henri Ford: Between Modernism and Postmodernism by Alexander Howard (Bloomsbury Academic; 251 pages; $114). A critical study of the American writer and artist (1908-2002), who edited the surrealist magazine View; draws on his correspondence with such figures as Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, and Parker Tyler.

The Collected Letters of Charles Olson and J. H. Prynne edited by Ryan Dobran (University of New Mexico Press; 242 pages; $75). Edition of previously unpublished letters exchanged between the American poet and the English poet from 1961 to 1970, just days before Olson’s death.

Cormac McCarthy and Performance: Page, Stage, Screen by Stacey Peebles (University of Texas Press; 256 pages; $90 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). Topics include unpublished screenplays of the 1980s that became the basis for McCarthy’s Border Trilogy novels and No Country for Old Men.

Equatorial Guinean Literature in its National and Transnational Contexts by Marvin A. Lewis (University of Missouri Press; 241 pages; $65). A study of literature from the West African country, a former Spanish colony, with a focus on works from 2007 to 2013; writers discussed include Juan Tomas Avila Laurel, Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo, and Guillermina Mekuy.

From Tongue to Text: A New Reading of Children’s Poetry by Debbie Pullinger (Bloomsbury Academic; 261 pages; $114). Draws on Iain McGilchrist’s theory of brain laterality and Walter Ong’s theory of orality in a study of acoustic, phonic, and other aspects of poetry written for children.

Iain M. Banks by Paul Kincaid (University of Illinois Press; 206 pages; $95 hardcover, $22 paperback). A study of the Scottish author (1954-2013) that explores the blurred boundaries between his mainstream and science-fiction writings.

John Joseph Mathews: Life of an Osage Writer by Michael Snyder (University of Oklahoma Press; 280 pages; $34.95). Draws on previously untapped sources in a biography of the Osage Indian writer (1894-1979), who was born in what became Oklahoma.

Melville’s Philosophies edited by Branka Arsic and K.L. Evans (Bloomsbury Academic; 410 pages; $120). Essays that defend the writer as a rigorous philosopher and explore his works in relation to materialist, post-humanist, and other thought today; topics include science, philosophy, and aesthetics in “The Apple-Tree Table.”

Multilingual Subjects: On Standard English, Its Speakers, and Others in the Long Eighteenth Century by Daniel DeWispelare (University of Pennsylvania Press; 344 pages; $69.95). A study of how varieties of English became sidelined as dialects in the British colonies.

Nabokov and his Books: Between Late Modernism and the Literary Marketplace by Duncan White (Oxford University Press; 234 pages; $85). Draws on previously unpublished material in a study of how the Russian-born writer reinvented himself in the United States; topics include his quest for authorial control of the paratextual material of his books.

A New Literary History of Modern China edited by David Der-wei Wang (Harvard University Press; 1,001 pages; $45). Essays by Chinese and non-Chinese scholars on the country’s literature since the late 18th century, extended to include such texts as political speeches and pop-music lyrics.

On Not Defending Poetry: Defence and Indefensibility in Sidney’s “Defence of Poesy” by Catherine Bates (Oxford University Press; 299 pages; $105). Disputes prevailing interpretations of Sir Philip Sidney’s 1595 treatise, considered a foundational text of English poetics; argues that the poet diverges from the official “speaker” of the treatise to put forth a “de-idealist” model of poetry not grounded in use-value.

Proust and His Banker: In Search of Time Squandered by Gian Balsamo (University of South Carolina Press; 265 pages; $39.99). Examines the financial situation of an author with a penchant for extravagant gift giving and reckless ventures; draws on Proust’s correspondence with his financial advisor and cousin, Lionel Hauser.

Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies after Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell by Toril Moi (University of Chicago Press; 290 pages; $90 hardcover, $30 paperback). New and previously published writings on the transformative potential of ordinary language philosophy for literary study.

Revolutionary Damnation: Badiou and Irish Fiction from Joyce to Enright by Sheldon Brivic (Syracuse University Press; 319 pages; $65 hardcover, $34.95 paperback). Draws on the French philosopher Alain Badiou in a study of the theme in Irish fiction of embracing damnation to gain freedom; focuses on Joyce, Beckett, Flann O’Brien, Patrick McCabe, and Anne Enright.

Shakespeare’s Legal Ecologies: Law and Distributed Selfhood by Kevin Curran (Northwestern University Press; 192 pages; $99.95 hardcover, $34.95 paperback). Examines the playwright’s view of agency, personhood, responsibility, and other issues key to law and philosophy; focuses on Richard II, The Merchant of Venice, Macbeth, Hamlet, The Winter’s Tale, and the sonnets

The Short Story in Midcentury America: Countercultural Form in the Work of Bowles, McCarthy, Welty, and Williams by Sam V.H. Reese (Louisiana State University Press; 224 pages; $42). A study of how Paul Bowles, Mary McCarthy, Eudora Welty, and Tennessee Williams used the genre to contest the dominant narratives of U.S. literary and political culture.

So Famous and So Gay: The Fabulous Potency of Truman Capote and Gertrude Stein by Jeff Solomon (University of Minnesota Press; 276 pages; $108 hardcover, $27 paperback). Examines how the two writers became mass-market celebrities and eventually canonical authors in a homophobic era.

TransCanadian Feminist Fictions: New Cross-Border Ethics by Libe Garcia Zarranz (McGill-Queen’s University Press; 192 pages; US$85). A study of transnational feminist and queer writing in Canada in the post-9/11 era; focuses on works by Dionne Brand, Emma Donoghue, Hiromi Goto, and Larissa Lai.

The Transferred Life of George Eliot by Philip Davis (Oxford University Press; 410 pages; $35). A biography of that centers on the act of realist writing and Eliot’s creation of the “writer within her work.”

Unnatural Ecopoetics: Unlikely Spaces in Contemporary Poetry by Sarah Nolan (University of Nevada Press; 168 pages; $44.95). Focuses on A.R. Ammons’s Garbage, Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, Susan Howe’s The Midnight, and Kenneth Goldsmith’s Seven American Deaths and Disasters.

Victorian Dogs, Victorian Men: Affect and Animals in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture by Keridiana W. Chez (Ohio State University Press; 173 pages; $69.95). Analyzes works by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Margaret Marshall Saunders, Bram Stoker, and Jack London.

Writing against War: Literature, Activism, and the British Peace Movement by Charles Andrews (Northwestern University Press; 248 pages; $99.95 hardcover, $34.95 paperback). Topics include how Aldous Huxley, Storm Jameson, Siegfried Sassoon, Rose Macaulay, and Virginia Woolf attempted to use fiction in the cause of peace during the interwar period.

MUSIC

It’s Just the Normal Noises: Marcus, Guralnick, No Depression, and the Mystery of Americana Music by Timothy Gray (University of Iowa Press; 252 pages; $21). Discusses Peter Guralnick, Greil Marcus, the editors and writers of No Depression magazine, and others who have written on Americana, roots rock, and alt.country music.

Listening for the Secret: The Grateful Dead and the Politics of Improvisation by Ulf Olsson (University of California Press; 200 pages; $65 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). Draws on Adorno, Benjamin, Foucault, and other theorists in a study of the band’s music, improvisational performance style, and creation of a counterculture community.

Psychedelic Popular Music: A History Through Musical Topic Theory by William Echard (Indiana University Press; 291 pages; $85 hardcover, $35 paperback). Traces psychedelia’s history since its emergence as a genre in the 1960s and explores its fusion of rock, soul, funk, folk, and electronic music.

Sex Pistols: Poison in the Machine by John Scanlan (Reaktion Books, distributed by University of Chicago Press; 270 pages; $22.50). Traces the brief history but enduring impact of the punk band, described here as the first successful art project of Malcolm McLaren.

PHILOSOPHY

A Comparative Analysis of Cicero and Aquinas: Nature and the Natural Law by Charles P. Nemeth (Bloomsbury Academic; 192 pages; $88). Explores affinities and differences in the two men’s approach to natural law.

Exemplarist Moral Theory by Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski (Oxford University Press; 274 pages; $65). Develops a moral theory in direct reference to actual heroes, saints, sages, and other exemplars.

A Naive Realist Theory of Colour by Keith Allen (Oxford University Press; 204 pages; $74). Defends a view of colors as mind-independent properties of things in our environment.

Not Even a God Can Save Us Now: Reading Machiavelli after Heidegger by Brian Harding (McGill-Queen’s University Press; 224 pages; US$110 hardcover, US$34.95 paperback). Focuses on Heidegger, Derrida, and Girard in a study of how the Renaissance Italian thinker anticipated contemporary theories of violence.

Questions of Phenomenology: Language, Alterity, Temporality, Finitude by Francoise Dastur, translated by Robert Vallier (Fordham University Press; 249 pages; $115 hardcover, $32 paperback). Translation of a 2004 work by the French philosopher organized around the themes of language and logic; the self and the other; temporality and history; and finitude and mortality; discusses such figures as Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and Patocka.

The Rationality of Perception by Susanna Siegel (Oxford University Press; 220 pages; $55). Develops a theory of how perceptual experiences can be rational or irrational, and explores the implications of that notion epistemically; pays particular attention to racism.

Rethinking Race: The Case for Deflationary Realism by Michael O. Hardimon (Harvard University Press; 240 pages; $39.95). Offers a philosophical perspective on ways in which races do and do not exist.

POLITICAL SCIENCE

African Americans in White Suburbia: Social Networks and Political Behavior by Ernest McGowen III (University Press of Kansas; 207 pages; $45 hardcover, $22.95 paperback). Compares the political views and behavior of African-Americans in largely white, affluent suburbs of Philadelphia, with their counterparts in the city and in “black ring” suburbs.

After Europe by Ivan Krastev (University of Pennsylvania Press; 120 pages; $16.95). Discusses mass migration, right-wing populism, and other phenomena threatening the European Union.

Combative Politics: The Media and Public Perceptions of Lawmaking by Mary Layton Atkinson (University of Chicago Press; 211 pages; $85 hardcover, $27.50 paperback). Documents how media coverage of lawmaking, with its emphasis on partisan conflict, leads to negative public perceptions of legislation that might otherwise be supported.

A Defense of Rule: Origins of Political Thought in Greece and India by Stuart Gray (Oxford University Press; 274 pages; $74). Draws on ancient Greek and Sanskrit sources in a study of how early concepts of rule evolved to justify divisions between the human and nonhuman.

Democracy and the Nature of American Influence in Iran, 1941-1979 by David R. Collier (Syracuse University Press; 417 pages; $75 hardcover, $44.95 paperback). Topics include the erosion of what had been a patron-client relationship between the United States and the Shah.

The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age by James Kirchick (Yale University Press; 273 pages; $27.50). Focuses on crises involving Russia, Hungary, Germany, France, Britain, Greece, Ukraine, and the collective European Union.

Framing the Solid South: The State Constitutional Conventions of Secession, Reconstruction, and Redemption, 1860-1902 by Paul E. Herron (University Press of Kansas; 360 pages; $45 hardcover, $24.95 paperback). Links the emergence of a politically cohesive region to the 44 times Southerners from 11 states met to revise their constitutions during the period.

Mediating Morality: The Politics of Teen Pregnancy in the Post-Welfare Era by Clare Daniel (University of Massachusetts Press; 224 pages; $90 hardcover, $27.95 paperback). Links the major overhaul of welfare policy in 1996 to a shift from regarding teen pregnancy as a social problem to seeing it as an individual failure.

Phenomena of Power: Authority, Domination, and Violence by Heinrich Popitz, translated by Gianfranco Poggi (Columbia University Press; 202 pages; $60). First English translation of an influential 1992 work by the German sociologist (1925-2002).

Radical Arab Nationalism and Political Islam by Lahouari Addi, translated by Anthony Roberts (Georgetown University Press; 288 pages; $69.95 hardcover, $34.95 paperback). Examines the rise and decline of pan-Arabist radical nationalism, and considers that movement’s legacy for political Islam.

Voting Together: Intergenerational Politics and Civic Engagement Among Hmong Americans by Carolyn Wong (Stanford University Press; 304 pages; $65). A study of how the South East Asian immigrants and their American-born children came to see political involvement as key to inclusion and advancement.

PSYCHOLOGY

The Wealth Paradox: Economic Prosperity and the Hardening of Attitudes by Frank Mols and Jolanda Jetten (Cambridge University Press; 220 pages; $64.99 hardcover, $24.99 paperback). Disputes the notion that harsh times produce harsh politics; presents evidence that prejudice and intergroup hostility can flourish just as easily in times of economic prosperity, and among the most affluent.

RELIGION

Antoine Frederic Ozanam by Raymond L. Sickinger (University of Notre Dame Press; 412 pages; $60). A biography of the French Catholic scholar (1813-53), who was among the founders of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul and was beatified in 1997.

Beauty in Sufism: The Teachings of Ruzbihan Baqli by Kazuyo Murata (State University of New York Press; 198 pages; $75). Examines writings by the Sufi Muslim scholar and saint (1128-1209) on beauty in the world and oneself as the goal of Muslim life.

The Beginning of Politics: Power in the Biblical Book of Samuel by Moshe Halbertal and Stephen Holmes (Princeton University Press; 211 pages; $27.95). Examines power, paranoia, and the political lessons provided by the book’s narratives of David and Saul.

Catholics and Anti-Catholicism in Choson Korea by Don Baker with Franklin Rausch (University of Hawai’i Press; 328 pages; $69). Examines the violent Confucian response to Catholicism and Korean Catholic converts during the late Choson period; draws on an anti-Catholic tract written in the 1780s by a Confucian scholar, and a firsthand account of persecution by a religious leader martyred in 1801.

Educating Monks: Minority Buddhism on China’s Southwest Border by Thomas A. Borchert (University of Hawai’i Press; 230 pages; $68). Discusses monasticism in Sipsongpanna, a region on China’s border with Myanmar and Laos, where the Dai-lue are a “double minority” as both an ethnicity and as Theravada Buddhists.

Franciscans and the Elixir of Life: Religion and Science in the Later Middle Ages by Zachary A. Matus (University of Pennsylvania Press; 201 pages; $59.95). Focuses on Roger Bacon, John of Rupescissa, and Vitalis of Furno in a study of the Franciscan order and the medieval alchemical quest for the “sovereign remedy.”

Redescribing the Gospel of Mark edited by Barry S. Crawford and Merrill P. Miller (Society of Biblical Literature; 691 pages; $109.95 hardcover, $89.95 paperback). Topics include the southern Levant, possibly Tyre, as Mark’s site of creation.

Secularization in the Long 1960s: Numerating Religion in Britain by Clive D. Field (Oxford University Press; 269 pages; $90). Combines historical and social-science perspectives in a a study of changes in religious belief and behavior in Britain, excluding Northern Ireland.

Thomas Aquinas’s Relics as Focus for Conflict and Cult in the Late Middle Ages: The Restless Corpse by Marika Rasanen (Amsterdam University Press, distributed by University of Chicago Press; 308 pages; $124). Focuses on the Cistericians, the Dominicans, and the laity of southern Italy in a study of the attention accorded the theologian’s remains as holy relics, as well as the ways in which the presence of his corpse was devotionally recreated in other media.

The Virgin in Song: Mary and the Poetry of Romanos the Melodist by Thomas Arentzen (University of Pennsylvania Press; 288 pages; $59.95). Examines the portrayal of Mary in the kontakia or hymns composed by the Byzantine poet (circa 485-560), whose works centered on the Virgin’s encounter with the Angel Gabriel and the birth and death of her son.

SOCIOLOGY

Exceptional America: What Divides Americans From the World and From Each Other by Mugambi Jouet (University of California Press; 360 pages; $29.95). Examines the extreme polarization in American society as well as the United States’ tendency to be an outlier among peer nations in terms of inequality, religiosity, penal policies, and other issues.

Pre-Occupied Spaces: Remapping Italy’s Transnational Migrations and Colonial Legacies by Teresa Fiore (Fordham University Press; 250 pages; $125 hardcover, $35 paperback). Draws on literature, history, sociological research, and other realms in a study of outbound and inbound migrations, including to former African colonies.

Under the Cover: The Creation, Production, and Reception of a Novel by Clayton Childress (Princeton University Press; 320 pages; $35). A work in cultural sociology that examines the trajectory, from inspiration to critical and public reception, of a single contemporary novel: Jarrettsville, a work of historical fiction by Cornelia Nixon published in 2009.

SPORTS STUDIES

Football and Manliness: An Unauthorized Feminist Account of the NFL by Thomas P. Oates (University of Illinois Press; 232 pages; $95 hardcover, $25.95 paperback). Draws on feminist theory in a study of the National Football League and the shifting nature of masculinity.