Books published by Cornell University Press

Applying linguistic theory to the study of Homeric style, Egbert J. Bakker offers a highly innovative approach to oral poetry, particularly the poetry of Homer. By situating formulas and other features of oral style within the wider contexts of spoken language and communication, he moves the study of oral poetry beyond the landmark work of Milman Parry and Albert Lord.One of the book's central features, related to the research of the linguist Wallace Chafe, is Bakker's conception of spoken discourse as a sequence of short speech units reflecting the flow of speech through the consciousness of the speaker. Bakker shows that such short speech units are present in Homeric poetry, with significant consequences for Homeric metrics and poetics. Considering Homeric discourse as a speech process rather than as the finished product associated with written discourse, Bakker's book offers a new perspective on Homer as well as on other archaic Greek texts. Here Homeric discourse appears as speech in its own right, and is freed, Bakker suggests, from the bias of modern writing style which too easily views Homeric discourse as archaic, implicitly taking the style of classical period texts as the norm. Bakker's perspective reaches beyond syntax and stylistics into the very heart of Homeric-and, ultimately, oral-poetics, altering the status of key features such as meter and formula, rethinking their relevance to the performance of Homeric poetry, and leading to surprising insights into the relation between "e;speech"e; and "e;text"e; in the encounter of the Homeric tradition with writing.

Research in Outdoor Education is a peer-reviewed, scholarly journal seeking to support and further outdoor education and its goals, including personal growth and moral development, team building and cooperation, outdoor knowledge and skill development, environmental awareness, education and enrichment, and research that directly supports...

Strategic Adjustment and the Rise of China demonstrates how structural and domestic variables influence how East Asian states adjust their strategy in light of the rise of China, including how China manages its own emerging role as a regional great power.

Presents an analysis of the economics of slavery and a picture of Neo-Babylonian society as a whole.

A study of the British perspective of the Revolutionary War. It offers a look at the British press as a whole - including analysis of London newspapers, provincial newspapers, and monthly magazines. It leads readers on an exploration into the varied national debates that raged throughout Britain during the American Revolution.

Focusing on the years 1921-1934, this book explores the great upsurge in documentary methods and approaches in the arts and reveals how the documentary impulse influenced the development of Stalinist culture. It is suitable for readers of Russian history, cultural history, literature, and film studies.

This book traces the complex process by which Budapest became a Hungarian city. Few cities grew as rapidly, and in none was nationalism woven so tightly into the urban fabric. Nemes views modern nationalism as expressed in daily events and maps its inroads into every corner of urban life.

Today, John Deere is remembered - some say mistakenly - as the investor of the steel plow. Who was this legendary man and how did he create the internationally renowned company that still bears his name?

This work explores how early Soviet language culture gave rise to unparalleled verbal creativity and utopian imagination, while sowing the seeds for perhaps the most notorious forms of Orwellian "newspeak" known to the modern era.

How did educated 18th-century Russians view society? In this study, historian Elise Wirtschafter turns to literary plays to reconstruct the social thinking of the past and to discover how Russians of the Enlightenment understood themselves.

Russian monarchs have long been regarded as majestic and despotic, ruling mute and servile subjects in a vast empire isolated from the rest of Europe. Challenging this view, Whittaker uncovers a political dialogue about the nature and limitations of monarchy in 18th-century Russia.

This comprehensive history of the Chicago and North Western Railway chronicles the developments of one of America's great railroads.

The first decade of Alexander II's reign is known in Russian history as the Era of the Great Reforms, a time recognized as the major period of social, economic, and institutional transformation between the reign of Peter the Great and the Revolution of 1905. Coming directly after the notoriously repressive last decade of the Nicholas era, the appearance of such dramatic reform has led scholars to seek its causes in dramatic events. Surely some great, even cataclysmic, force must have driven Alexander II and his advisers to initiate what appears to be such an astonishing change in policy. In their search for the origins of these Great Reforms, historians generally have focused upon two phenomena. The first of these was Russia's defeat in the Crimean War by a relatively small, ineptly commanded Allied expeditionary force. The second was the serf revolts, which increased dramatically in the 1850s. From these events, most historians have concluded that the economic failings of serfdom, the problem of preserving domestic peace, and the need to restore Russia's tarnished military prestige were the major forces that convinced Alexander II's government to embark upon a new reformist path. As Lincoln's examination of the long-unstudied Russian archival evidence shows, there are good reasons to question whether such crises of policy and failings of Russia's servile economy impelled Alexander II and his advisers along a previously uncharted reformist path after the Crimean War. Further, in light of the Russian bureaucracy's slowness in drafting much less complex administrative reforms during the previous century, Lincoln argues that the Great Reform legislation simply was too complex and required too much sophisticated knowledge about the Empire's economic, administratvive, and judicial affairs to have been formulated in the brief half-decade after the war's end.

This study challenges traditional interpretations of the roles of royal women in a patriarchial society. Drawing upon sources in anthropology, sociology, art history and literature, the author demonstrates that the wives of the early tsars played complex roles in government.

Research in Outdoor Education is a peer-reviewed, scholarly journal seeking to support and further outdoor education and its goals, including personal growth and moral development, team building and cooperation, outdoor knowledge and skill development, environmental awareness, education and enrichment, and research that directly supports...

Intellectual history has never been more relevant and more important to public life in the United States. In complicated and confounding times, people look for the principles that drive action and the foundations that support national ideals. American Labyrinth demonstrates the power of intellectual history to illuminate our public life and...

In 1941 the magazine publishing titan Henry R. Luce urged the nation's leaders to create an American Century. But in the post-World-War-II era proponents of the American Century faced a daunting task. Even so, Luce had articulated an animating idea that, as William O. Walker III skillfully shows in The Rise and Decline of the American Century...

Historians have become increasingly interested in material culture as both a category of analysis and as a teaching tool. And yet the profession tends to be suspicious of things; words are its stock-in-trade. What new insights can historians gain about the past by thinking about things? A central object (and consequence) of modern warfare is...