Books published by Cornell University Press

For the specialist in the study of narrative structure, this is a solid and very perceptive exploration of the issues salient to the telling of a story-whatever the medium.

Beginning with Aristotle and the Greeks and ending with semiotics and post-structuralism, Theories of the Theatre is the first comprehensive survey of Western dramatic theory. In this expanded edition the author has updated the book and added a new...

While recounting how past generations have personified evil, Jeffrey Burton Russell deepens our understanding of the ways in which people have dealt with the enduring problem of radical evil.

Mephistopheles is the fourth and final volume of Jeffrey Burton Russell's critically acclaimed history of the concept of the Devil, continuing in this volume the story from the Reformation to the present.

Rosen argues that armies and navies are not forever doomed to "fight the last war." Rather, they are able to respond to shifts in the international strategic situation.

Youens addresses the different aspects of the Winterreise: its cultural milieu, the genesis of both the poetry and the music, Schubert's transformation of poetic cycle into music, the philosophical dimension of the work, and its musical structure.

Combining a sensitivity to historical detail with a judicious search for general patterns, Empires will engage the attention of social scientists in many disciplines.

Osiris, Horus, Isis, Thoth, Anubis - the many strange and compelling figures of the Egyptian gods and goddesses seem to possess endless fascination. The renowned Egyptologist Erik Hornung here studies the ancient Egyptians' conceptions of god, basing his account on a thorough reappraisal of the primary sources. His book, now available in...

The atlas of contemporary capitalism is curious indeed. A desperately poor and civil-war-wracked nation, Liberia, is the world's shipping superpower; the Cayman Islands the fifth-largest financial center in the world; land-locked Zurich a venerable...

Katzenstein maintains that democratic corporatism is an effective way of coping with a rapidly changing world-a more effective way than the United States and several other large industrial countries have yet managed to discover.

Barry R. Posen explores how military doctrine takes shape and the role it plays in grand strategy-that collection of military, economic, and political means and ends with which a state attempts to achieve security.

"Michael Kazin enables us to begin to understand the way in which populism has changed from a politics of the left to a politics of the right. The important questions raised by the success of the populist right in the United States are illuminated in...

The Reenchantment of the World is a perceptive study of our scientific consciousness and a cogent and forceful challenge to its supremacy. Focusing on the rise of the mechanistic idea that we can know the natural world only by distancing ourselves...

Drawing on the unfamiliar genre of the death liturgy, he arrives at a remarkably comprehensive view of the religion of death in ancient Egypt.

Michael Urban chronicles the advent of blues music in Russia and explores the significance of the genre in the turbulent, postcommunist society. Russians, he explains, have taken a music originating in the "low" culture of the American South and...

In the last thirty years, work in analytic philosophy of art has flourished, and it has given rise to considerably controversy. Stephen Davies describes and analyzes the definition of art as it has been discussed in Anglo-American philosophy during...

In order to understand today's Russia and former Soviet republics, it is vital to consider their socialist past. Caroline Humphrey, one of anthropology's most highly regarded thinkers on a number of topics including consumption, identity, and ritual...

In most countries in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the fall of communism opened up the possibility for individuals to acquire land. Based on Katherine Verdery's extensive fieldwork between 1990 and 2001, The Vanishing Hectare explores...

Liberalism is doomed to failure, John Kekes argues in this penetrating criticism of its basic assumptions. Liberals favor individual autonomy, a wide plurality of choices, and equal rights and resources, seeing them as essential for good lives. They oppose such evils as selfishness, intolerance, cruelty, and greed. Yet the more autonomy...

In a dark departure from our standard picture of whistleblowers, C. Fred Alford offers a chilling account of the world of people who have come forward to protest organizational malfeasance in government agencies and in the private sector. The...

Sandra Harding here develops further the themes first addressed in her widely influential book, The Science Question in Feminism, and conducts a compelling analysis of feminist theories on the philosophical problem of how we know what we...

Christopher D. Johnson traces several thematic sequences in the panels of Aby Warburg's encyclopedic Mnemosyne (Atlas of Images), begun in earnest in 1927, and left unfinished at the time of Warburg's death in 1929.

Ilana Gershon investigates how and when the categories "cultural" and "acultural" become relevant for Samoans as they encounter cultural differences in churches, ritual exchanges, welfare offices, and community-based organizations.

How are alliances made? In this book, Stephen M. Walt makes a significant contribution to this topic, surveying theories of the origins of international alliances and identifying the most important causes of security cooperation between states. In...

"Menis opens for consideration an immense range of significant poetic possibilities, not the least of which is that of an ethical sense for the term."-Bryn Mawr Classical Review "Henceforth no one will be able to claim that menis merely connotes...