Books published by Cornell University Press

As Samuel Richardson's 'exemplar to her sex,' Clarissa in the eponymous novel published in 1748 is the paradigmatic female victim. In Clarissa's Ciphers, Terry Castle delineates the ways in which, in a world where only voice carries authority, Clarissa is repeatedly silenced, both metaphorically and literally. A victim of rape, she is first a victim of hermeneutic abuse. Drawing on feminist criticism and hermeneutic theory, Castle examines the question of authority in the novel. By tracing the patterns of abuse and exploitation that occur when meanings are arbitrarily and violently imposed, she explores the sexual politics of reading.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Russians from all ranks of society were bound together by a culture of honor. Here one of the foremost scholars of early modern Russia explores the intricate and highly stylized codes that made up this culture. Nancy Shields Kollmann describes how these codes were manipulated to construct identity and enforce social norms-and also to defend against insults, to pursue vendettas, and to unsettle communities. She offers evidence for a new view of the relationship of state and society in the Russian empire, and her richly comparative approach enhances knowledge of statebuilding in premodern Europe. By presenting Muscovite state and society in the context of medieval and early modern Europe, she exposes similarities that blur long-standing distinctions between Russian and European history.Through the prism of honor, Kollmann examines the interaction of the Russian state and its people in regulating social relations and defining an individual's rank. She finds vital information in a collection of transcripts of legal suits brought by elites and peasants alike to avenge insult to honor. The cases make clear the conservative role honor played in society as well as the ability of men and women to employ this body of ideas to address their relations with one another and with the state. Kollmann demonstrates that the grand princes-and later the tsars-tolerated a surprising degree of local autonomy throughout their rapidly expanding realm. Her work marks a stark contrast with traditional Russian historiography, which exaggerates the power of the state and downplays the volition of society.

Using archival materials never previously accessible to Western scholars, Michael David-Fox analyzes Bolshevik Party educational and research initiatives in higher learning after 1917. His fresh consideration of the era of the New Economic Policy and cultural politics after the Revolution explains how new communist institutions rose to parallel and rival conventional higher learning from the Academy of Sciences to the universities. Beginning with the creation of the first party school by intellectuals on the island of Capri in 1909, David-Fox argues, the Bolshevik cultural project was tightly linked to party educational institutions. He provides the first account of the early history and politics of three major institutions founded after the Revolution: Sverdlov Communist University, where the quest to transform everyday life gripped the student movement; the Institute of Red Professors, where the Bolsheviks sought to train a new communist intellectual or red specialist; and the Communist Academy, headquarters for a planned, collectivist, proletarian science.

Why did France spawn the radical poststructuralist rejection of the humanist concept of 'man' as a rational, knowing subject? In this innovative cultural history, Carolyn J. Dean sheds light on the origins of poststructuralist thought, paying particular attention to the reinterpretation of the self by Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille, and other French thinkers. Arguing that the widely shared belief that the boundaries between self and other had disappeared during the Great War helps explain the genesis of the new concept of the self, Dean examines an array of evidence from medical texts and literary works alike. The Self and Its Pleasures offers a pathbreaking understanding of the boundaries between theory and history.

The revolution of 1905 in the Russian-ruled Kingdom of Poland marked the consolidation of major new influences on the political scene. As he examines the emergence of a mass political culture in Poland, Robert E. Blobaum offers the first history in any Western language of this watershed period. Drawing on extensive archival research to explore the history of Poland's revolutionary upheavals, Blobaum departs from traditional interpretations of these events as peripheral to an essentially Russian movement that reached a climax in the Russian Revolution of 1917. He demonstrates that, although Polish independence was not formally recognized until after World War I, the social and political conditions necessary for nationhood were established in the years around 1905.

The Electrification of Russia, 1880-1926 is the first full account of the widespread adoption of electricity in Russia, from the beginning in the 1880s to its early years as a state technology under Soviet rule. Jonathan Coopersmith has mined the archives for both the tsarist and the Soviet periods to examine a crucial element in the modernization of Russia. Coopersmith shows how the Communist Party forged an alliance with engineers to harness the socially transformative power of this science-based enterprise. A centralized plan of electrification triumphed, to the benefit of the Communist Party and the detriment of local governments and the electrical engineers. Coopersmith's narrative of how this came to be elucidates the deep-seated and chronic conflict between the utopianism of Soviet ideology and the reality of Soviet politics and economics.

In this forceful and compelling book, Alison Booth traces through the novels, essays, and other writings of George Eliot and Virginia Woolf radically conflicting attitudes on the part of each toward the possibility of feminine greatness.

Marc Redfield maintains that the literary genre of the Bildungsroman brings into sharp focus the contradictions of aesthetics, and also that aesthetics exemplifies what is called ideology. He combines a wide-ranging account of the history and theory of aesthetics with close readings of novels by Goethe, George Eliot, and Gustave Flaubert. For...

In a book that has been called "a love song to nature," the author documents the latest decade of his explorations of the Baja peninsula and the Sea of Cortez. While much of the book narrates his experience as a writing professor taking undergraduates on sea kayak expeditions to the Isla Espiritu Santo archipelago each year during spring break...

Understanding the risks involved in hiring new faculty is becoming increasingly important. In Managing Risk in High-Stakes Faculty Employment Decisions Julee T. Flood and Terry Leap critically examine the landscape of US institutions of higher learning and the legal and human resource management practices pertinent to college and university...

In the 2000s, Laos was treated as a model country for the efficacy of privatized, "sustainable" hydropower projects as viable options for World Bank-led development. By viewing hydropower as a process...

Investing in Financial Research is a guidebook for conducting financial investigations and lays out Cheryl Strauss Einhorn's AREA Method-a research and decision-making system...

U.S. military conflicts abroad have left nine million Americans dependent on the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) for medical care. Their "wounds of war" are treated by the largest hospital system in the country-one that has come under fire from critics in the White House, on Capitol Hill, and in the nation's media. The resulting public...

Mass Violence and the Self explores the earliest visual and textual depictions of personal suffering caused by the French Wars of Religion of 1562-98, the Fronde of 1648-52, the French Revolutionary Terror of 1793-94, and the Paris Commune of 1871.

Why do some European welfare states protect unemployed and inadequately employed workers ("outsiders") from economic uncertainty better than others? Philip Rathgeb's study of labor market policy change in three somewhat-similar small states-Austria, Denmark, and Sweden-explores this fundamental question. He does so by examining the distribution...

At the crossroads between international relations and anthropology, The Migrant Passage analyzes how people from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala navigate the dangerous and uncertain clandestine journey across Mexico to the United States. However much advance planning they do, they survive the journey through improvisation. Central American...

Poetic elegies for lost or fallen cities are seemingly as old as cities themselves. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, this genre finds its purest expression in the book of Lamentations, which mourns the destruction of Jerusalem; in Arabic, this genre is known as the ritha al-mudun. In The City Lament, Tamar M. Boyadjian traces the trajectory of...

As anyone who has read Chaucer's Canterbury Tales knows, Middle English literature is rife with sexually explicit language and situations. Less canonical works can be even more brazen in describing illicit acts of sexual activity and sexual violence. Such scenes and language were not, however, included exclusively for titillation. In Obscene...

Remaking the Chinese Empire examines China's development from an empire into a modern state through the lens of Sino-Korean political relations during the Qing period. Incorporating Korea into the historical narrative of the Chinese empire, it demonstrates that the Manchu regime used its relations with Choson Korea to establish, legitimize, and...

Over the past two decades, many states have heard demands that they recognize and apologize for historic wrongs. Such calls have not elicited uniform or predictable responses. While some states have apologized for past crimes, others continue to silence, deny, and relativize dark pasts. What explains the tremendous variation in how states deal...

Why do great powers accommodate the rise of some challengers but contain and confront others, even at the risk of war? When Right Makes Might proposes that the ways in which a rising power legitimizes its expansionist aims significantly shapes great power responses. Stacie E. Goddard theorizes that when faced with a new challenger, great powers...

After years of teaching law courses to undergraduate, graduate, and law students, Michael Evan Gold has come to believe that the traditional way of teaching - analysis, explanation, and example - is superior to the Socratic Method for students at the outset of their studies.In courses taught Socratically, even the most gifted students can...

Picture your downtown vacant, boarded up, while the malls surrounding your city are thriving. What would you do?In 1974 the politicians, merchants, community leaders, and business and property owners, of Ithaca, New York, joined together to transform main street into a pedestrian mall. Cornell University began an Industrial Research Park to...

In The One, Other, and Only Dickens, Garrett Stewart casts new light on those delirious wrinkles of wording that are one of the chief pleasures of Dickens's novels but that go regularly unnoticed in Dickensian criticism: the linguistic infrastructure of his textured prose. Stewart, in effect, looks over the reader's shoulder in shared...

In The Perraults, Oded Rabinovitch takes the fascinating eponymous literary and scientific family as an entry point into the complex and rapidly changing world of early modern France. Today, the Perraults are best remembered for their canonical fairy tales, such as "Cinderella" and "Puss in Boots," most often attributed to Charles Perrault, one...

How the European Union handles posted workers is a growing issue for a region with borders that really are just lines on a map. A 2008 story, dissected in Ines Wagner's Workers without Borders, about the troubling working conditions of migrant meat and construction workers, exposed a distressing dichotomy: how could a country with such strong...

Empire of Hope asks how emotions become meaningful in political life. In a diverse array of cases from recent Japanese history, David Leheny shows how sentimental portrayals of the nation and its global role reflect a durable story of hopefulness about the country's postwar path. From the medical treatment of conjoined Vietnamese children...

Bolder economic policy could have addressed the persistent bouts of deflation in post-bubble Japan, write Gene Park, Saori N. Katada, Giacomo Chiozza, and Yoshiko Kojo in Taming Japan's Deflation. Despite warnings from economists, intense political pressure, and well-articulated unconventional policy options to address this problem, Japan's...

Improvisational Islam is about novel and unexpected ways of being Muslim, where religious dispositions are achieved through techniques that have little or no precedent in classical Islamic texts or concepts. Nur Amali Ibrahim foregrounds two distinct autodidactic university student organizations, each trying to envision alternative ways of...

Modernism a la Mode argues that fashion describes why and how literary modernism matters in its own historical moment and ours. Bringing together texts, textiles, and theories of dress, Elizabeth Sheehan shows that writers, including Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, W.E.B. Du Bois, Nella Larsen, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, turned to fashion to...