Books in the Parallax: Re-visions of Culture and Society series

Representationalism and its subject mark the beginning of political modernity; Shakespeare's tragedies greet political representationalism with skepticism, bleakness, and despair.

"-Donald E. Pease, Dartmouth College

By careful attention to philosophical inquiry into possible worlds, especially Saul Kripke's and Jaakko Hintikka's, and through long familiarity with literary theory, Dolezel brings us an unprecedented examination of the notion of fictional worlds.

Miller contends that the modern capitalist state musters a variety of mixed messages about the nature of citizenship and the self. Using case studies, he examines mass entertainment, political discourse, and methods of resistance to powerful cultural forces.

Arguing for the "social logic of the text,Spiegel provides historians with a way to retrieve the social significance and conceptual claims produced by these medieval or any historical writings.

Considered in its full poetic and philosophical dimensions, the Romance of the Rose thus acquires an altogether new significance in the history of literature: it appears as a work that incessantly explores its own capacity to be other than it is.

Contributors: Annemarie Weyl Carr, Southern Methodist University; Rebecca W.

Throughout, Chartier keeps his focus on historians who have stressed the relations between the products of discourse and social practices.

While traditional scholarship emphasizes the influence of newspapers and books on the French Revolution, Maslan's erudite analysis reveals the rich and powerful impact of theater on France's fledgling democracy.