Bøger udgivet af Cornell University Press

Byzantine Media Subjects invites readers into a world replete with images--icons, frescoes, and mosaics filling places of worship, politics, and community. Glenn Peers asks readers to think themselves into a world where representation reigned and humans followed, and indeed were formed. Interrogating the fundamental role of representation in the making of the Byzantine human, Peers argues that Byzantine culture was (already) posthuman. The Byzantine experience reveals the extent to which media like icons, manuscripts, music, animals, and mirrors fundamentally determine humans. In the Byzantine world, representation as such was deeply persuasive, even coercive; it had the power to affect human relationships, produce conflict, and form self-perception. Media studies has made its subject the modern world, but this book argues for media having made historical subjects. Here, it is shown that media long ago also made Byzantine humans, defining them, molding them, mediating their relationship to time, to nature, to God, and to themselves.

A consistent factor throughout New York State's dynamic history has been the complex interactions between groups with divergent worldviews and conflicting ambitions. Such scenarios have proven at different times to be creative, exploitative, empowering, or contradictory. The Summer 2023 issue of New York History (104.1) offers a rich array of such interactions, with articles offering unique insights from diverse perspectives.

"Seeks to understand the nature and global impact of the Chinese lending by looking at China's national policy banks -- the China Development Bank and the Export-Import Bank of China -- and the financial giants that capitalize China's overseas infrastructure and industrial projects"-

"The book examines the discourse on attention emerging in the European Enlightenment (1650-1780) with a focus on German philosophy and literature. It argues that this discourse influenced the formation of aesthetic philosophy in the eighteenth century. Notable figures discussed include Renâe Descartes, G.W.F. Leibniz, Christian Wolff, and Alexander Baumgarten."--

"Account of James H. Billington's influence on US policy toward Russia in 1987 to 2015 and of Library of Congress programs in Russia aimed at promoting reform based on the revival of traditional Russian culture combined with democratic reforms based on Western models. Draws lessons for future US policy in Eurasia"--

The Equality of Flesh traces a new genealogy of equality before its formalization under liberalism. While modern ideas of equality are defined through an inner human nature, Brent Dawson argues that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries conceptualized equality as an ambivalent and profoundly bodily condition. Everyone was made from the same lowly matter and, as a result, shared the same set of vulnerabilities, needs, and passions. Responding to the political upheavals of colonialism and the intellectual turmoil of new natural philosophies, leading figures of the English Renaissance, including Spenser and Shakespeare, anxiously imagined that bodily commonality might undermine differences of religion, race, and class. As the period progressed, later authors developed the revolutionary possibilities of bodily equality even as new ideas of fixed racial inequality emerged. SomeâEUR"like the utopian radical Gerrard Winstanley and the republican poet John MiltonâEUR" challenged political absolutism through the idea of humans as base, embodied creatures. OthersâEUR"like the heterodox philosopher Margaret Cavendish, the French theologian Isaac La Peyrÿre, and the libertine Cyrano de BergeracâEUR"offered limited yet important interrogations of racial paradigms. This moment, Dawson shows, would pass, as bodily equality was marginalized in the liberal theories of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes. In its place, pseudoscientific racism would come to anchor inequality in the body during the Enlightenment. Contending with the lasting implications of material equality for modernity, The Equality of Flesh shows how increasingly vehement notions of racial difference eclipsed a nascent sense of human commonality rooted in the basic stuff of life.

"Beginning with Anglo-Egyptian colonialism and ending with Barack Obama's presidency, Bounds of Blackness explores the history of Black America's engagements with modern Sudan."--

"This book brings together twelve essays by senior historians who, after decades of study, reflect on the 'hows' and 'whys' of Stalinism as an authoritarian dictatorship determined to build a version of socialism in the Soviet Union at all costs"--

"Drawing on the evocative stories of unemployed Americans from a wide range of occupations, from day laborers to corporate managers, both immigrant and native-born, Strauss shows that the standard cultural description of workaholics driven by a Puritan work ethic homogenizes diverse work motivations"--

"An innovative approach to the history of Byzantine art that applies media theory to Byzantines' relationship to representations of their culture, faith, and history"-

"This book is about Presbyterian missionaries, other Americans with ideals, and their Iranian partners during the twentieth century. It analyzes the various ways in which their respective missions became manifest in Iran, particularly the national capital of Tehran, during the reign of the last Pahlavi shah"--

"This edited volume brings together contributions across multiple disciplines, weaving broad theoretical and empirical insights from Mozambique to India, Indonesia, Ecuador, Tanzania, Liberia, Cambodia, Scotland, Canada, Transylvania, Brazil, and the colonial United States. The authors draw on original research to analyze the lived experiences of land dispossession and repossession"--

In a series of essays-three published here for the first time-LaCapra explores the problems faced by historians, critics, and thinkers who attempt to grasp the Holocaust.

No literary figure has proved so elusive as Shakespeare. How, Courtney Lehmann asks, can the controversies surrounding the Bard's authorship be resolved when his works precede the historical birth of that modern concept? And how is it that Shakespeare...

Drawing on extensive research in the archives of Russia and Uzbekistan, Douglas Northrop here reconstructs the turbulent history of a Soviet campaign that sought to end the seclusion of Muslim women. In Uzbekistan it focused above all on a massive effort to eliminate the heavy horsehair-and-cotton veils worn by many women and girls. This campaign against the veil was, in Northrop's view, emblematic of the larger Soviet attempt to bring the proletarian revolution to Muslim Central Asia, a region Bolsheviks saw as primitive and backward. The Soviets focused on women and the family in an effort to forge a new, "liberated" social order.This unveiling campaign, however, took place in the context of a half-century of Russian colonization and the long-standing suspicion of rural Muslim peasants toward an urban, colonial state. Widespread resistance to the idea of unveiling quickly appeared and developed into a broader anti-Soviet animosity among Uzbeks of both sexes. Over the next quarter-century a bitter and often violent confrontation ensued, with battles being waged over indigenous practices of veiling and seclusion.New local and national identities coalesced around these very practices that had been placed under attack. Veils became powerful anticolonial symbols for the Uzbek nation as well as important markers of Muslim propriety. Bolshevik leaders, who had seen this campaign as an excellent way to enlist allies while proving their own European credentials as enlightened reformers, thus inadvertently strengthened the seclusion of Uzbek women--precisely the reverse of what they set out to do. Northrop's fascinating and evocative book shows both the fluidity of Central Asian cultural practices and the real limits that existed on Stalinist authority, even during the ostensibly totalitarian 1930s.

Why do nations cooperate even as they try to destroy each other? Jeffrey Legro explores this question in the context of World War II, the "total" war that in fact wasn't. During the war, combatant states attempted to sustain agreements limiting the use of three forms of combat considered barbarous--submarine attacks against civilian ships, strategic bombing of civilian targets, and chemical warfare. Looking at how these restraints worked or failed to work between such fierce enemies as Hitler's Third Reich and Churchill's Britain, Legro offers a new understanding of the dynamics of World War II and the sources of international cooperation.While traditional explanations of cooperation focus on the relations between actors, Cooperation under Fire examines what warring nations seek and why they seek it--the "preference formation" that undergirds international interaction. Scholars and statesmen debate whether it is the balance of power or the influence of international norms that most directly shapes foreign policy goals. Critically assessing both explanations, Legro argues that it was, rather, the organizational cultures of military bureaucracies--their beliefs and customs in waging war--that decided national priorities for limiting the use of force in World War II.Drawing on documents from Germany, Britain, the United States, and the former Soviet Union, Legro provides a compelling account of how military cultures molded state preferences and affected the success of cooperation. In its clear and cogent analysis, this book has significant implications for the theory and practice of international relations.

Literary studies are in danger of being left behind in the twenty-first century. Print culture risks becoming a thing of the past in the multimedia age; meanwhile, human life and society are undergoing rapid changes as a result of new technologies...

"The best thing ever done on how Tolstoy wrote War and Peace. Feuer shows us an incredible complexity in terms of the creative process. You see the seams and joints in the novel."--Gary Saul Morson, Northwestern University"In 1963, Kathryn B. Feuer had access to the manuscripts of the drafts for the novel, almost 4,000 pages. At Tolstoy's home, she concentrated on a dozen books that related to his earlier conceptions of War and Peace. She was indefatigable, with every detail at her fingertips, and she could express fine perceptions with something of the lucidity and measure of her admired Jane Austen.... Her daughter and Donna Tussing Orwin completed their task of editing in such a way that the book everywhere shows that concern with thoroughly tested evidence that above all makes it a landmark in Tolstoy studies."--Times Literary Supplement"The effectiveness of Feuer's account of the creation of War and Peace results from her remarkably cogent and uncluttered reading of the drafts and revisions that inform the description of Tolstoy's creative process. Tolstoy and the Genesis of 'War and Peace' is destined to remain a classic on the subject."--Slavic Review"Young novelists who listen to their creative writing teachers would be better served reading Feuer's brilliant study of the creation of War and Peace."--Common KnowledgeKathryn B. Feuer offers remarkable insights into Leo Tolstoy's creative process while he wrote War and Peace. She follows the novel through countless drafts and notes, illuminating its connection to earlier, unpublished, novels and to crucial new sources, both European and Russian. A novelist herself, Feuer explores the problems of character development, narrative voice, genre, and structure that Tolstoy ultimately resolved so brilliantly.

To what extent is it possible to know the past or to know other cultures? Can one describe the past without imposing one's own cultural, political, social, or personal preconceptions? Testing the current skepticism that insists that it is impossible not to read one's own moment onto other times and cultures, the essays in this collection use the Victorian era as a means of developing a theory and critique of historical reclamation.In Knowing the Past, a distinguished group of Victorian scholars reflect on the Victorian past and examine the Victorians' own sophisticated contributions to debates about historical and cultural knowledge. Confronting, confirming, and opposing the skeptics, the essays provide close readings of particular texts. They encompass the larger constellation of ideas and questions that went into the making of the texts while participating in larger theoretical debates about knowledge of the past and other cultures.

Since 1919, New York History has been the foremost scholarly journal on the Empire State's past. Now under the leadership of the Cornell University Press, and working closely with staff from the New York State Museum, New York History's mission is unifying the diverse field of New York State history and meeting the needs of a growing historical community that includes scholars, public historians, museum professionals, local government historians, and all those seeking an in-depth look at the Empire State's history. The journal promotes and interprets the state's history through the publication of historical research and case studies dealing with New York State, as well as its relationship to national and international events. New York History, published twice a year, presents articles dealing with every aspect of New York State history, as well as reviews of books, exhibitions, and media projects with a New York focus.

For many eighteenth-century European philosophers and writers, the beautiful soul was a symbol of enlightened humanity, carrying with it the possibility that aesthetic beauty and moral goodness would be fused in a new, indivisible unity. In the first book in English on the subject, Robert E. Norton follows the fortunes of this cultural icon, exploring the reasons for both its initial popularity and its subsequent decline as a cultural ideal during the Enlightenment. Tracing the emergence of the notion of moral beauty as it first appears in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Norton maintains that the attempt to combine the good and the beautiful was a response to the rise of secular authority. He draws on English, French, and German sources to show how writers in various intellectual traditions united philosophical, theological, and cultural themes in their elaboration of the beautiful soul. In Norton's view, this articulation of the beautiful soul was so persuasive that, by the second half of the eighteenth century, some version of moral beauty was introduced in nearly every discussion of morality. While writers such as Wieland, Rousseau, and Goethe employed the beautiful soul as a moral and aesthetic ideal in fiction, thinkers such as Kant explored it in philosophical works. Norton ends by demonstrating how the figure of the beautiful soul achieved its foremost expression in Schiller's writings and was definitively rejected in Hegel's Phenomenology.

Xenophon's masterpiece, The Education of Cyrus, is a work that was admired by Machiavelli for its lessons on leadership. Also known as the Cyropaedia, this philosophical novel is loosely based on the accomplishments of Cyrus the Great, founder of the vast Persian Empire that later became the archrival of the Greeks in the classical age. It offers an extraordinary portrait of political ambition, talent, and their ultimate limits.The writings of Xenophon are increasingly recognized as important works of political philosophy. In The Education of Cyrus, Xenophon confronts the vexing problem of political instability by exploring the character and behavior of the ruler. Impressive though his successes are, however, Cyrus is also examined in the larger human context, in which love, honor, greed, revenge, folly, piety, and the search for wisdom all have important parts to play.Wayne Ambler's translation captures the charm and drama of the work while also achieving great accuracy. His introduction, annotations, and glossary help the reader to appreciate both the engaging story itself and the volume's contributions to philosophy.

"This book examines the institutional evolution of central banks from the 1970s to the crises of the past decade. In examining central banks' deviation from monetary orthodoxy, the book recasts central banks as political actors whose actions are bound to the political environment in which they operate."--

"Italian Forgers takes an unorthodox approach to a popular topic: art forgery. Based on original published sources as well as current and past scholarship, Italian Forgers focuses not on art forgery per se, but on the major forgery scandals in the context of a shifting art market operated by a number of Italians who fashioned a very sophisticated and self-conscious response to the constant and often intense demand for Italian objects."--