Books published by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

This collection of essays brings together innovative scholarship on Shakespeare's afterlives in tribute to Christy Desmet. Contributors explore the production and consumption of Shakespeare in acts of adaptation and appropriation across a range of performance topics, from book history to the novel to television, cinema, and digital media.

The Legal Exhibitionist explores Morris Ernst's use of "exhibitionism" to transform himself from insecure youth into America's most popular lawyer. Though Ernst later abandoned his progressive values to defend the FBI and a Dominican dictator and is today largely unknown, his story presaged the phenomenon of the modern celebrity attorney.

Longfellow's Imaginative Engagement is a first-of-its-kind study of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's late-career poems and biography from 1861 until 1882, covering the poet's posthumous publications and the handling of his literary estate. Using never-before-discussed archival materials from Harvard's Houghton Library and the Longfellow HouseWashington's Headquarters National Historic Site, including unpublished poems and poem fragments, this literary biography presents Longfellow's vibrant and complex final two decades. After the tragic death of his beloved second wife, Frances (Fanny) Elizabeth Appleton, Longfellow reinvented himself as a creative artist, transforming his loss and the nation's suffering in the Civil War and postwar period into compelling art. In this book, Jeffrey Hotz interprets the distinct phases of Longfellow's late career, exploring his narrative poetry, translations, personal lyrics, religious poetry, aesthetic verse, and end-of-life vision of mortality as a journey. He considers Longfellow's friendships and family life, publication strategies and literary reputation, and the recurrent theme of longing for an ideal female figure in his poems and private life. Interweaving unpublished poems and poem fragments with interpretations of published collections, Longfellow's Imaginative Engagement examines the poet's complex voice, which captured the public's imagination, making him America's most famous poet in the nineteenth century.

For the 250th anniversary of the founding of Dartmouth College, the Political Economy Project at Dartmouth assembled a stellar cast of junior and senior scholars to explore the systemic conditions facing those seeking to found a new college two hundred fifty years ago. What were the key political, economic and religious parameters operating in the Atlantic world at the time of the College's founding? What was the religious scene like at the moment when the Rev. Samson Occom of the Mohegan nation and the Rev. Eleazar Wheelock of Connecticut, two men from very different backgrounds whose improbable meeting occurred during the Great Awakening of the early 1740s, set about establishing a new school in the northern woods in the 1760s? How were the agendas of contemporaries differently mediated by the religious beliefs with which they acted, on the one hand, and the emerging thought world of political economy, very broadly understood, on the other? These are among the rich and variegated topics addressed in Dartmouth and the World, which breaks the mold of the traditional commemorative volume.

David Fincher's Zodiac, the first book-length study of the critically acclaimed 2007 release, offers various critical approaches to the film ranging from early influences, studies in genre and narrative, and media analysis including cinema history, game theory, musicology, and extensions in television studies.

The Unpopular Realism of Vincenzo Padula provides a microhistory of life in a Southern Italian province in the decade following Unification and of Vincenzo Padula, who wrote single-handedly from March 1864 to July 1865 a period when pro-Bourbon loyalists were attempting to exploit the discontent of the Region's poor masses by fomenting brigantry and reverse the Unification Il Bruzio, a pro-Government periodical published in Cosenza. The pro-government reformist Padula pointed out not only the successes but also the shortcomings and failures of the Savoy regime, so as to consolidate their rule. He gave particular attention to the problems of daily life through the correspondence of a literary creation, Mariuzza Sbrffiti. The difficult integration of the South, in Padula's view, was often exacerbated by the unwillingness of the ';piemontesi' to learn the social, political, and economic realities of the South. Padula enables us to view from multiple angles both macroscopic issues, such as the relationship between the Church and the New Italy, and the dire state of the infrastructure and economy, and microscopic ones, such as the peasantry's misplaced hopes in Garibaldi, clerical obscurantism, popular beliefs and culture, contradictions in the structure of the new liberal regime, and the status and role of women in such a society. He views his subjects from a unique perspective, one is defined by its empathy for and identification with the marginalized ';persons of Calabria.'

In No Place for Ethics, Hill argues that contemporary judicial review by the U.S. Supreme Court rests on its mistaken positivist understanding of lawlaw simply because so orderedas something separate from ethics. Further, to assert any relation between the two is to contaminate both, either by turning law into an arm of ethics, or by making ethics an expression of law. This legal positivism was on full display recently when the Supreme Court declared that the CDC was acting unlawfully by extending the eviction moratorium to contain the spread of the Covid-19 Delta variant, something that, the Court admitted, was of indisputable benefit to the public. How mistaken however to think that acting for the good of the public is to act unlawfully when actually it is to act ethically and must therefore be lawful.To address this mistake, Hill contends that an understanding of natural law theory provides the basis for a constitutive relation between ethics and law without confusing their distinct role in answering the basic question, how should I behave in society? To secure that relation, the Court has an overriding responsibility when carrying out its review to do so with reference to normative ethics from which the U.S. Constitution is derived and to which it is accountable. While the Constitution confirms, for example, the liberty interests of individuals, it does not originate those interests which have their origin in human rights that long preceded it. Essential to this argument is an appreciation of ethics as objective and based on principles, like those of justice, truth, and reason that ought to inform human behavior at its very springs. Applied in an analysis of five major Supreme Court cases, this appreciation of ethics reveals how wrongly decided these cases are.

Warfare, Trade, and the Indies in British Literature, 16521771 demonstrates how British travel narratives of the long eighteenth century distinguished between Mughal and American ';Indians.' Through a New Historical and postcolonial lens, it argues that the distinction between East and West ';Indians' was widely recognized and shaped British people's tendency to view Mughal Indians as similar and in some ways even superior to Europeans while they disdained native populations in the Americas. Drawing on representations of ';Indians' in Peter Heylyn's critically neglected 1652 Cosmographie as well as representations in the works of canonical literary authors such as John Dryden, Richard Steele, and Henry Mackenzie, this monograph provides a more nuanced account of the origins and (d)evolution of ';Indian' stereotypes than scholars have to date. A text committed to the exposure and eradication of colonial rhetoric and violence, Peter Craft's Warfare, Trade, and the Indies in British Literature, 16521771 proposes a modification of Saidian postcolonial theory that better applies to texts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Contemporary Italian Diversity in Critical and Fictional Narratives brings together creative literary works and scholarly articles. Both address the changes and challenges to identity formation in an Italy marked by the migrations, populism, nationalism, and xenophobia, and analyze diversity and the affirmation of belonging.

Monsters, Law, Crime, an edited collection composed of essays written by prominent U.S. and international experts in Law, Criminology, Sociology, Anthropology, Communication and Film, constitutes a rigorous attempt to explore fertile interdisciplinary inquiries into ΓÇ£monstersΓÇ¥ and ΓÇ£monster-talk,ΓÇ¥ and law and crime. ΓÇ£MonstersΓÇ¥ may refer to allegorical or symbolic fantastic beings (as in literature, film, legends, myths, etc.), or actual or real life monsters, as well as the interplay/ambiguity between the two general types of ΓÇ£monsters.ΓÇ¥ This edited collection thus explores and updates contemporary discussions of the emergent and evolving fronts of monster theory in relation to cutting-edge research on law and crime, and may be seen as extensions of a Gothic Criminology, generally construed. Gothic Criminology refers to a theoretical framework initially developed by Caroline Joan ΓÇ£KayΓÇ¥ S. Picart, a Philosophy and Film professor turned Attorney and Law professor, and Cecil Greek, a Sociologist (Picart and Greek 2008). Succinctly paraphrased, noting the proliferation of Gothic modes of narration and visualization in American popular culture, academia and even public policy, Picart and Greek proposed a framework, which they described as a ΓÇ£Gothic CriminologyΓÇ¥ to attempt to analyze the fertile lacunae connecting the ΓÇ£realΓÇ¥ and the ΓÇ£reelΓÇ¥ in the flow of Gothic metaphors and narratives that abound around criminological phenomena that populate not only popular culture but also academic and public policy discourses.

Weird Mysticism: Philosophical Horror and the Mystical Text examines the nature of modern mystical writing and explains the interconnections among horror fiction, philosophy, and apophatic mysticism.

How Non-being Haunts Being explores the many different modes of absence and non-being that pervade life, language, thought, and culture. A highly readable book of great interest to a wide audience, it ensures that readers will never think of life, death, or themselves, the same way again.

Sicilian Elements in Andrea Camilleri's Narrative Language examines Camilleri's unique linguistic repertoire provides a systematic analysis of the distribution of Sicilian features in selected historical and mystery (Montalbano) novels, and assesses their function as indices of salient aspects of topics, settings and characters.

Muse of Fire is a collection of the four-time Tony Award-winning playwright's meditations on the power of theater to change minds by first changing hearts, and on the responsibilities of the playwright as a member of the theater community.

Portrait of the Artist and His Mother in Twentieth-Century Italian Culture examines how the strong mother-son relationship not only affected, but actually shaped the work of Italian artists as different as Pirandello, Carlo Levi, Buzzati, Pasolini, Fellini, concluding on with a look at mammismo/vitellonismo in some Italian film comedies.

Herbert Rowland argues that the American reception of Hans Christian Andersen in the nineteenth century has a respectable place in the international reception of Andersen and his work. Rowland demonstrates that American critics used Andersen's works to support their views of key American issues in the nineteenth century.

In this keen examination of Alfredo de Palchi's lyrical oeuvre, Giorgio Linguaglossa refers to de Palchi as the missing link in Italian poetry in the second half of the twentieth century. Through brilliant analysis, Linguaglossa gives us a complete picture of de Palchi's asymptomatic creative paradigm.

Shih-I Hsiung: A Glorious Showman narrates the transnational life story of Shih-I Hsiung, a Chinese writer known for his English language play Lady Precious Stream. It focuses on Hsiung's extraordinary literary accomplishments, broad theatrical experiences, and major social engagements at various stages of his life in China, England, and Hong Kong.

Shaped by politics and policy, Gender Justice and the Law presents a collection of essays that contribute to understanding how theoretical practices of intersectionality relate to structures of inequality and relations formed as a result of their interaction.

Like a King argues that strategic casting positions Shakespeare's histories as spaces for American political discourse. Drawing from the archive and the rehearsal room, the book examines productions of Richard II, Henry V and King John in the renaissance and the twenty-first century.

Shakespeare's Auditory Worlds examines special listening situations like overhearing, eavesdropping, and asides; it explores complex relationships between sound and sight, dialogue and blocking, non-English languages, and non-verbal relationships inherent in noise, sounds, and music, ending with a discussion with ASC Actors.

Values, Virtues, and Vices, Italian Style is an interdisciplinary study that examines the lives and work of four historical figures: Caesar, Dante, Machiavelli, or Garibaldi, as well as Italian culture and the moral psychology of pride, arrogance, justification, excuse, repentance, and the concept of honor.

This third volume of the Yearbook of Transnational History offers readers new perspectives with regards to urban history. This Yearbook is the worldwide only periodical dedicated to the publication of research in the field of transnational history.

Killing the Buddha examines the influence of Zen Buddhism throughout Henry Miller's life and work, specifically charting the evolution of key Buddhist concepts through close readings of his novels, letters and pamphlets.

This collection of essays by both theatre scholars and practitioners examines the political and aesthetic consequences of the marriage of Shakespearean text and realist performance style, considering productions ranging from the early twentieth century to 2016.

This collection examines the multifaceted opus of Pier Paolo Pasolini through a contemporary critical lens. It offers new interpretations to some classic works such as Salo or the 120 Days of Sodom and Decameron while considering some lesser studied pieces, for example Orestiade and his Friulian verse.