Bøger udgivet af Harvard University Press

When the BBC ran a poll in 2001 to name the greatest Briton, Alfred, a ninth-century monarch, was the only king to make the top 20. Also the only English sovereign to be called "the Great," Alfred used to be remembered as much through folklore as through his accomplishments. Horspool sees Alfred as inextricably linked to the legends and stories that surround him, and rather than attempting to separate the myth from the "reality," he explores how both came together to provide a historical figure that was all things to all men. This book offers a vivid picture of Alfred's England, but also of the way that history is written, and how much myth has had to do with that.

Mark McGurl explores the connections between fiction and higher education in the United States by demonstrating how much literature comes to us mediated by writing programs.

They were not the Banquet Years, those anxious wartime years when poets and novelists were made to feel embarrassed by their impulse to write literature. And yet it was the attitude of those writers and critics in the 1930s and 1940s that shaped French literature - the ideas of Derrida, Foucault, de Man, Deleuze, and Ricoeur - and has so influenced literary enterprise in the English-speaking world since 1968. This literary history, the prehistory of postmodernism, is what Denis Hollier recovers in his interlocking studies of the main figures of French literary life before the age of anxiety gave way to the era of existentialist commitment.

One of the minor miracles of art history is the extraordinary flowering of Indian painting that began in the mid-sixteenth century under the early Mughal emperors of Indian, notably Akbar the Great. Only in recent decades has the consummate artistry of early Mughal painting come to be widely appreciated in the West. Scholars have noted the innovations--departures from both Islamic and native Indian tradition--of the new, highly distinctive school of painting, among them natural history studies, a concern for portraiture, and the documentation of contemporary court events. Milo Beach traces, with an abundance of captivating illustrations, the evolution of the Mughal style. While acknowledging the influence of Akbar's interests and changing tastes (related in turn to historical and biographical circumstances), he shows that many of the new tendencies were evident during the short reign of Akbar's father, the Emperor Humayun, whose role as patron of the arts is thereby reassessed. Beach also stresses the traditionalism of the individual painters, who only gradually changed their concepts and compositions in response to foreign influences and to imperial taste. Mughal art, he affirms, can no longer be regarded as simply a reflection of its imperial patrons. The book takes account of recently discovered material and reproduces for the first time important paintings from unpublished manuscripts and albums. It will appeal to the general reader as well as the scholar.

Bombs are as old as hatred itself. But it was the twentieth century--one hundred years of incredible scientific progress and terrible war--that brought forth the Big One, the Bomb, humanity's most powerful and destructive invention. In The Bomb: A Life, Gerard DeGroot tells the story of this once unimaginable weapon that--at least since 8:16 a.m. on August 6, 1945--has haunted our dreams and threatened our existence. The Bomb has killed hundreds of thousands outright, condemned many more to lingering deaths, and made vast tracts of land unfit for life. For decades it dominated the psyches of millions, becoming a touchstone of popular culture, celebrated or decried in mass political movements, films, songs, and books. DeGroot traces the life of the Bomb from its birth in turn-of-the-century physics labs of Europe to a childhood in the New Mexico desert of the 1940s, from adolescence and early adulthood in Nagasaki and Bikini, Australia and Kazakhstan to maturity in test sites and missile silos around the globe. His book portrays the Bomb's short but significant existence in all its scope, providing us with a portrait of the times and the people--from Oppenheimer to Sakharov, Stalin to Reagan--whose legacy still shapes our world.

Under the Athenian democracy, litigants were expected to speak for themselves, though they could memorize a speech written for them. The texts of about one hundred judicial speeches of the genos dikanikon (the forensic genre) have survived, all attributed to Demosthenes or another of the ten writers of canonical status. These professionals wrote either for themselves or members of a small elite. Victor Bers argues that men too poor to afford a professionally written speech frequently spoke before judicial bodies in procedures crucial to their status, wealth, or even their lives, and that these amateur performances often manifested an unmanly yielding to emotions of anger or fear; professional speech, Bers seeks to demonstrate, was to a large degree crafted in reaction to amateur stumbling.

Devoted fans and scholars of Jane Austen--as well as skeptics--will rejoice at Tony Tanner's superb book on the incomparable novelist. Distilling twenty years of thinking and writing about Austen, Tanner treats in fresh and illuminating ways the questions that have always occupied her most perceptive critics. How can we reconcile the limited social world of her novels with the largeness of her vision? How does she deal with depicting a once-stable society that was changing alarmingly during her lifetime? How does she express and control the sexuality and violence beneath the well-mannered surface of her milieu? How does she resolve the problems of communication among characters pinioned by social reticences? Tanner guides us through Austen's novels from relatively sunny early works to the darker, more pessimistic Persuasion and fragmentary Sanditon--a journey that takes her from acceptance of a society maintained by landed property, family, money, and strict propriety through an insistence on the need for authentication of these values to a final skepticism and even rejection. In showing her progress from a parochial optimism to an ability to encompass her whole society, Tanner renews our sense of Jane Austen as one of the great novelists, confirming both her local and abiding relevance.

This volume brings together Pierre Bourdieu's highly original writings on language and on the relations among language, power, and politics. Bourdieu develops a forceful critique of traditional approaches to language, including the linguistic theories of Saussure and Chomsky and the theory of speech-acts elaborated by Austin and others. He argues that language should be viewed not only as a means of communication but also as a medium of power through which individuals pursue their own interests and display their practical competence. Drawing on the concepts that are part of his distinctive theoretical approach, Bourdieu maintains that linguistic utterances or expressions can be understood as the product of the relation between a "linguistic market" and a "linguistic habitus." When individuals use language in particular ways, they deploy their accumulated linguistic resources and implicitly adapt their words to the demands of the social field or market that is their audience. Hence every linguistic interaction, however personal or insignificant it may seem, bears the traces of the social structure that it both expresses and helps to reproduce. Bourdieu's account sheds fresh light on the ways in which linguistic usage varies according to considerations such as class and gender. It also opens up a new approach to the ways in which language is used in the domain of politics. For politics is, among other things, the arena in which words are deeds and the symbolic character of power is at stake. This volume, by one of the leading social thinkers in the world today, represents a major contribution to the study of language and power. It will be of interest to students throughout the social sciences and humanities, especially in sociology, politics, anthropology, linguistics, and literature.

Fusing the methods of comparative literature, intellectual history, and philosophical analysis, Harold Skulsky explores a motif that has fascinated storytellers since antiquity: the miraculous transformation of a character into a plant, an animal, or a different human being. The thesis of the study is that the fantasy of metamorphosis challenges the narrator and his audience to confront certain basic anxieties about the human condition: Is the mind reducible to physical properties? What constitutes personhood? How does physical form affect personal identity and continuity of the self? Testing instances in which these and related perplexities appear in literature, Skulsky systematically and provocatively interprets ten major illustrative texts drawn from diverse epochs and languages, including the works of Homer, Ovid, Apuleius, Marie de France, Dante, Donne, Spenser, Keats, Kafka, and Woolf. Through Skulsky's masterly analysis the victims of metamorphosis in narrative literature--whether werewolf, ass, beetle, swine, or tree--provide a profound insight into the complexities of human experience.

The concept of global cultures such as postcolonial, hybrid, nationalism, and cosmopolitanism are common. This book aims to expose the drama played out under the guise of globalism and to present a critique of cosomopolitanism, while exploring forces acting against globalism.

Since first reported to the world in 1780, the death of Captain Cook on a Hawaiian beach the previous year has been revered, celebrated, and shrouded in mystery. Simultaneously called a hero and an antihero, a ruthless invader, and a torchbearer of the Enlightenment, Cook's reputation grew as much out of the moving story of his death as out of his adventures while he lived. In a style that is more detective story than conventional biography, Glyn Williams explores the multiple narratives of Cook's death. He reveals how the British Admiralty first attempted to censor accounts of Cook's erratic behavior and how the "authorized" version of his death--a lengthy narrative serialized in the leading publications of the day--reduced the story to the final hours of a noble leader who gave his life to save others. Williams argues that the contrary evidence of a chaotic bloody fracas on the beach at Kealakekua Bay was ignored, and that the unexplained disappearance of Cook's own journal helped the process of concealment. He believes that Cook was not entirely the man sanctified by the British public. More than two hundred years later, an explosive interplay between academic controversy and nationalist feelings has once more drawn attention to a life that has attracted praise and controversy, abhorrence and admiration. In short, Williams examines the story of Cook's progress from obscurity to fame and, eventually, to infamy--a story that, until now, has never been fully told.

Here is an analysis of Tennyson's major poetry that clarifies the poet's relationship to the artistic traditions he so extensively exploited and so radically modified. It is a portrait of Tennyson as manipulator, not mere borrower, of forms.Tennyson and Tradition traces the threads that at the same time unite Tennyson's work and tie it to the traditions the poet believed he had inherited. Pattison shows why Tennyson considered the venerable idyll form a fitting vehicle for his modern portraits--above all the Idylls of the King. Analysis of In Memoriam brings further understanding of Tennyson's poetic credo.

From an array of intellectual reference points, Stephanson (history, Rutgers U.) has written a serious assessment of this complicated, often controversial, highly respected American policymaker. A work of general significance for a wide range of contemporary issues in foreign and domestic politics a

In contrast to the large indigent population in Japan in the 1950s, very few Japanese live in poverty in the 1990s. This text explains the Japanese government's decision to respond to poverty by promoting equality as the basis for a social compromise. Deborah Milly argues that to account for why and how political actors crafted a programme that won acceptance, we must look beyond them and identify how they relied on knowledge and normative arguments.

This book examines the great contraction of 2007 2010 within the context of the neoliberal globalization that began in the early 1980s. This new phase of capitalism greatly enriched the top 5 percent of Americans, including capitalists and financial managers, but at a significant cost to the country as a whole. Declining domestic investment in manufacturing, unsustainable household debt, rising dependence on imports and financing, and the growth of a fragile and unwieldy global financial structure threaten the strength of the dollar. Unless these trends are reversed, the authors predict, the U.S. economy will face sharp decline. Summarizing a large amount of troubling data, the authors show that manufacturing has declined from 40 percent of GDP to under 10 percent in thirty years. Since consumption drives the American economy and since manufactured goods comprise the largest share of consumer purchases, clearly we will not be able to sustain the accumulating trade deficits. Rather than blame individuals, such as Greenspan or Bernanke, the authors focus on larger forces. Repairing the breach in our economy will require limits on free trade and the free international movement of capital; policies aimed at improving education, research, and infrastructure; reindustrialization; and the taxation of higher incomes."

The new classical approach to macroeconomics, which assumes that people gather and use economic information efficiently, has been the most important theoretical advance since the Keynesian revolution of the 1930s. This book surveys the major contributions of the "second generation" of proponents of the new classical approach, emphasizing real business cycle theories and applying them to a variety of phenomena. The chapters include expositions of growth theory, real models of business fluctuations, the informational role of prices, consumption, fiscal policy, rules versus discretion in monetary policy, time consistency and policy, and monetary models. Although the chapters are aimed at advanced undergraduate- and graduate-level students, they will also be of interest to researchers who are looking for a compact and original exposition of the new classical macroeconomics.

Bernard Williams is an eloquent member of that small but important group of distinguished thinkers who are trying to erase the borders between the experts and all of us who grapple with moral issues in our own lives. In this book he delivers a sustained indictment of systematic moral theory from Kant onward and offers a persuasive alternative. Kant's ideas involved a view of the self we can no longer accept. Modern theories such as utilitarianism and contractualism usually offer criteria that lie outside the self altogether, and this, together with an emphasis on system, has weakened ethical thought. Why should a set of ideas have any special authority over our sentiments just because it has the structure of a theory? How could abstract theory help the individual answer the Socratic question "How should I live?" Williams's goal is nothing less than to reorient ethics toward the individual. He accuses modern moral philosophers of retreating to system and deserting individuals in their current social context. He believes that the ethical work of Plato and Aristotle is nearer to the truth of what ethical life is, but at the same time recognizes that the modern world makes unparalleled demands on ethical thought. He deals with the most thorny questions in contemporary philosophy and offers new ideas about issues such as relativism, objectivity, and the possibility of ethical knowledge. Williams has written an imaginative, ingenious book that calls for philosophers to transcend their self-imposed limits and to give full attention to the complexities of the ethical life.

Discusses the nature of equality and looks at examples related to medical care, employment, political rights and religion.

Because the world has long seen Sweden as a pioneer of democratic socialism, the success or failure of social experiments there has had momentous impact on the development of similar programs elsewhere. Now, in this penetrating inquiry undertaken by one of Sweden's leading political scientists, the problems and practices of Swedish trade unions are fully revealed. Leif Lewin is interested in finding answers to several central questions: How "democratic" are Sweden's unions? How are they governed? How have they avoided the institutional inequities that plague some American unions? What sacrifices have Swedish unions had to make in order to solve their problems? Lewin has gone directly to the people concerned, receiving from some 3,000 union members and leaders the information that forms the basis of his study. But his book is more than an empirical analysis of trade union democracy. It is also a strikingly successful example for all social scientists who have struggled to apply a hypothetical model of "democracy" to the ambiguous, often turbulent world around them. Above all, Lewin shows how the democratic ideal of individual intellectual and moral enrichment can be approached through participation in collective decision making. Thoughtful and balanced, his book addresses many of the problems that are just now being faced by social planners, economists, and union organizers everywhere.

The concept of generation as a historical category is used in Lost Comrades. The socialists of the Front Generation, young men in 1914, were driven into political activity and ideological exploration by the experience of World War I. Their efforts to renew socialism, to carry it beyond Marxism and beyond the working class, were profound and original, yet ultimately failed.

Relations between the Choson and Qing states are often cited as the prime example of the operation of the "traditional" Chinese "tribute system." In contrast, this work contends that the motivations, tactics, and successes (and failures) of the late Qing Empire in Choson Korea mirrored those of other nineteenth-century imperialists. Between 1850 and 1910, the Qing attempted to defend its informal empire in Korea by intervening directly, not only to preserve its geopolitical position but also to promote its commercial interests. And it utilized the technology of empire-treaties, international law, the telegraph, steamships, and gunboats. Although the transformation of Qing-Choson diplomacy was based on modern imperialism, this work argues that it is more accurate to describe the dramatic shift in relations in terms of flexible adaptation by one of the world's major empires in response to new challenges. Moreover, the new modes of Qing imperialism were a hybrid of East Asian and Western mechanisms and institutions. Through these means, the Qing Empire played a fundamental role in Korea's integration into regional and global political and economic systems.

From the 1920s through World War II, hundreds of thousands of Americans took part in a campaign to overcome racial, ethnic and religious prejudices. They celebrated the 'cultural gifts' that immigrant and minority groups brought to society and encouraged pluralism in many areas of American life.

Autism is a fascinating yet perplexing disorder that continues to intrigue researchers and clinicians studying brain and behavior. In this lucid and elegant book, Francesca Happé provides a concise overview of current psychological theory and research that synthesizes the established work on the biological foundations, cognitive characteristics, and behavioral manifestations of this disorder. She focuses her discussion on the cognitive approaches that deal with both thought and feeling--those hypotheses that link brain to action, deepen our understanding of the autistic person's view of the world, and offer better approaches to effectively managing the behavior of people with autism struggling to live in our world. The book reviews the latest research into the communication, socialization, and imagination impairments in autism, and further distinguishes the levels of severity in the spectrum of autistic disorders. Happé also includes a discussion of the talented few--high-functioning autistic individuals with Asperger's syndrome--and of the many childhood behavioral disorders, unrelated to autism, that manifest autistic-like symptoms. Autism is an important and much-needed contribution to the literature. It will be valued by parents and teachers of autistic children as well as by students and researchers interested in disorders of language and communication.

Much of our law is based on authoritative texts, such as constitutions and statutes. The common law, in contrast, is that part of the law that is established by the courts. Common law rules predominate in some areas of law, such as torts and contracts, and are extremely important in other areas, such as corporations. Nevertheless, it has been far from clear what principles courts use--or should use--in establishing common law rules. In this lucid yet subtly argued book, Melvin Eisenberg develops the principles that govern this process. The rules established in every common law case, he shows, are a product of the interplay between the rules announced in past precedents, on the one hand, and moral norms, policies, and experience, on the other. However, a court establishing a common law rule is not free, as a legislator would be, to employ those norms and policies it thinks best. Rather, it can properly employ only those that have a requisite degree of social support. More specifically, the common law should seek to satisfy three standards. First, it should correspond to the body of rules that would be arrived at by giving appropriate weight to all moral norms, policies, and experiential propositions that have the requisite support, and by making the best choices where norms, policies, and experience conflict. Second, all the rules that make up the body of the law should be consistent with one another. Third, the rules adopted in past precedents should be applied consistently over time. Often, these three standards point in the same direction. The central problems of legal reasoning arise when they do not. These problems are resolved by the principles of common law adjudication. With the general principles of common law adjudication as a background, the author then examines and explains the specific modes of common law reasoning, such as reasoning from precedent, reasoning by analogy, drawing distinctions, and overruling. Throughout the book, the analysis is fully illustrated by leading cases. This innovative and carefully worked out account of the common law will be of great interest to lawyers, law students, students in undergraduate legal studies programs, scholars interested in legal theory, and all those who want to understand the basic legal institutions of our society.

There were heroic lives and deaths before and after, but none quite like Socrates'. He did not die by sword or spear, braving all to defend home and country, but as a condemned criminal, swallowing a painless dose of poison. And yet Socrates' death in 399 BCE has figured large in our world ever since, shaping how we think about heroism and celebrity, religion and family life, state control and individual freedom, the distance of intellectual life from daily activity--many of the key coordinates of Western culture. In this book Emily Wilson analyzes the enormous and enduring power the trial and death of Socrates has exerted over the Western imagination. Beginning with the accounts of contemporaries like Aristophanes, Xenophon, and, above all, Plato, the book offers a comprehensive look at the death of Socrates as both a historical event and a controversial cultural ideal. Wilson shows how Socrates' death--more than his character, actions, or philosophical beliefs--has played an essential role in his story. She considers literary, philosophical, and artistic works--by Cicero, Erasmus, Milton, Voltaire, Hegel, and Brecht, among others--that used the death of Socrates to discuss power, politics, religion, the life of the mind, and the good life. As highly readable as it is deeply learned, her book combines vivid descriptions, critical insights, and breadth of research to explore how Socrates' death--especially his seeming ability to control it--has mattered so much, for so long, to so many different people.