Books published by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

Justice, Women, and Power in English Renaissance Drama is a collection of essays that explores the relationship of gender and justice as represented in English Renaissance drama. Many of the essays are concerned with interrogating the ways that women relied upon and/or reacted to the legal (and overarching political) systems in early modern England. Other essays examine issues involving the role of narrative, evidence, and gendered expectations about justice in the plays of this time period. An implicit concern of these essays is whether women were empowered or disempowered in this interaction with the legal/political system.

A Huguenot on the Hackensack is the first full-length study of David Demarest, an early European settler of northeastern New Jersey and progenitor of a large and locally influential family. The book examines Demarest's life, the legacy of his family, and the wider "Jersey Dutch" community in which the family played a prominent part. The book looks beneath accumulated layers of legend and older historical interpretations to formulate a new and more realistic (and more interesting) account of Demarest's life and legacy.Demarest, a Huguenot (French Protestant), was born about 1620 in the French province of Picardy. He first appears in history with the record of his marriage to Marie Sohier in Middleburg, the Netherlands, in 1643. After marriage and the start of a family, his life unfolded in four sojourns of about a decade or a bit more: Middleburg, 1643 to about 1651; Mannheim, Germany, from about 1651 to 1663; Staten Island and New Harlem, 1663-78, and finally the French Patent along the Hackensack River in New Jersey, 1678 to his death in 1693. New evidence and new interpretations provide a picture of Demarest as an ambitious and upwardly mobile entrepreneur with an unusual talent for balancing risk and opportunity, and a dedicated churchman and community leader under both Dutch and English rule. The book next considers the Demarests in the eighteenth century, when the family rose to prominence in Bergen County, played important roles in the Reformed Church in Hackensack and Schraalenburgh, and began to spread out to other parts of the country. Recapitulating Demarest's own career as an entrepreneur and land developer, some of his descendants settled parts of central Pennsylvania, upstate New York, and Kentucky. Many of those who remained in New Jersey were active in public affairs and the Revolutionary War.By the end of the nineteenth century, enormous changes in Bergen County, including the spread of railroads and the transition from a farming economy to a suburban one, spelled the beginning of the end for the cohesiveness and influence of old, locally prominent Jersey Dutch families such as the Demarests. With further economic and demographic changes following World War II, such families were subsumed into the general population.The book concludes with an assessment of the Demarest family's American experience, looks at how pioneer students of Demarest family history shaped and interpreted his life and legacy against the background of changes in American society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and suggests what might yet be learned about Demarest through genetic evidence and the increasing availability of digitized records. Demarest's life and legacy are of interest not just to the large number of his descendants and the numerous descendants of other Jersey Dutch families, but more broadly to those interested in regional history, New Netherland, and American social history.

This book recovers the earliest epistolary activity of one of America's most innovative and influential modernist poets. From 1902 to 1912, William Carlos Williams wrote more than 300 letters to his younger brother Edgar, an accomplished architect with whom Williams shared the desire to become 'a great artist'. This collection of 200 letters sheds new light on the aesthetic thoughts and practices with which Williams was engaged for a full decade before his unique voice emerged in the forerunner to 'Paterson', 'The Wanderer' (1914). Providing a comprehensive introduction, exhaustive annotation, images of poetry and artwork, and hundreds of letters never before seen by scholars, this critical edition provides substantially new material on Williams and will be an important addition to the study of early American modernism.

This study demonstrates that jazz as it appeared in narrative fiction was often used as a forum to address the nation's anxieties in the turbulent years during which the United States gradually changed from a nation dedicated to an isolationist policy to a superpower likely to intervene in foreign conflicts. The jazz narrative became one of the means through which this paradigm shift was justified to an American audience.

This is the first edition of the complete works of William Heminge (1602-c.1653), son of Shakespeare's colleague and first co-editor, John Heminge. It contains a biography, critical old-spelling texts of his two surviving plays, The Jewes Tragedy and The Fatal Contract, and the small group of poems assigned to him in contemporary manuscripts. Heminge's tragedies in particular reveal him to be an innovative writer deserving far greater critical attention than he has previously received. He is both the first dramatist in English to see the theatrical potential of Josephus's account of 'the Fall of the Temple', and the first to challenge the conventions of revenge drama by presenting a fully autonomous female avenger on the English stage.

In this well-illustrated text, Dr. Denney asserts that the artists who image Diana, Princess of Wales, have framed her according to a cultural memory based on traditions of royal portraiture and according to twentieth-century reassertions (that is, reframings) of the debate over feminism and femininity in visual culture. Art historians and literary critics have examined the visual culture of Queen Victoria, Queen Elizabeth I, Queen Elizabeth II, and more recently, images of women in the court of Charles II, but no one has addressed, as the author does here, the impact of imaging Diana, Princess of Wales, at a time in British culture when feminism and femininity collide. Dr. Denney critiques art historical traditions of portraiture in order to argue that a princess must perform a constructed role of femininity, one that corresponds to Victorian codes of royal protocol, visual practice, and behavior. The book encompasses themes of marriage, motherhood, philanthropy, royal dress, and autobiography.

This book sets out to reconstruct and analyze the rationality of Phineas Fletcher's use of figurality in The Purple Island (1633) a poetic allegory of human anatomy. To this end, textual analyses of The Purple Island lead via bibliographical, biographical, conceptual, formal, and linguistic connections to other works of literature, natural philosophy and theology, and to anatomical demonstrations.

To reconstruct the sexual and cultural history of Tiresias, the author examines a wide range of technological, medical, and sexual discourses. The strangely hybrid body of Tiresias--offers an index of the proliferating discourses of sexual identity, especially as voice or performance can be read as a symptom of sexual deviance. Tracing the intersections of sexual difference, this book explores not only the cultural history of a sexual myth, but also the cultural representations of homosexuality, illuminating the persistent sexological images of homosexuality as gender inversion.

Indispensable to the Western observer for a full understanding of the complexities of the conflicts in the Middle East, this study analyzes and documents the historical, social, and spiritual realities of the dhimmi peoples_ the non-Arab and non-Muslim communities subjected to Muslim domination after the conquest of their territories by Arabs.

Mussolini's National Project in Argentina offers new perspectives on the politics of identity formation while providing a transatlantic example of the dynamic interplay between the Italian state and its emigrant communities. It is in short, a transnational perspective on what it means to belong to a nation.

Widely hailed as perhaps the most intensively planned city of the early modern age, St Petersburg, established by Peter the Great in 1703, soon developed in many ways beyond the purview of its planners. This book examines the city's administration, economic life, and demographic and social realities.

To explore the depth of the literary connection between William Carlos Williams and Frank O'Hara, particularly in relation to their American roots, this book examines their distinct responses to Abstract Expressionism, or the New York School artists. Although an outsider to this movement, Williams paid attention to its increasing popularity and ultimately valued its importance in the progression of American art. As an outsider, O'Hara functioned as a vital critic and promoter of this group. Foremost among the artists discussed here are Jackson Pollack, Robert Motherwell, and David Smith.

Germaine de Stal and German Women: Gender and Literary Authority (1800-1850) investigates Stals significance as an icon of female artistic genius and political engagement for two generations of German women, including Caroline A. Fischer, Caroline Pichler, Johanna Schopenhauer, Bettina von Arnim, Ida Hahn-Hahn, and Luise Muhlbach. These authors drew a significant impetus from Stals exemplary life and writings, especially her influential novels of political and artistic heroines, Delphine (1802) and Corinne, or Italy (1807), referring to them in order to authorize their own discourses on art and politics, and to buttress their identity as writers in a period when female authorship generated intense controversy. Taking references to Stal and her texts as a starting point opens fresh perspectives on German womens novels, while at the same time revealing their authors participation in the broader European womens literary tradition. Whereas several novels from the first decade of the century echo Delphine by uniting domestic fiction with political themes, Stals epoch-making novel of female poetic genius, Corinne, left a more lasting literary legacy in a tradition of German female artist novels. Corinne exemplified the creative womans dilemma between fame and love, and subsequent German novelists explore this conflict, while several also emulate Stals myth-making in Corinne as a strategy for attributing transcendent genius to their heroines. Reading for subtexts of female self-expression and development brings to light counter-narratives of female creative transcendence, often evoked through allusions to mythological figures. Martin suggests a revision of German literary history by uncovering a neglected tradition of artist novels positioned between the German Kunstlerroman and Stals newly inaugurated international dialogue on womens role in public culture.

History and National Ideology in Greek Postmodernist Fiction investigates the ways postmodernist literary techniques have been adopted by Greek authors. Taking into consideration the global impetus of postmodernism, the book examines its local implications. Framed by a discussion of major postmodernist thinkers, the book argues for the ability of local cultures to retain their uniqueness in the face of globalization while at the same time adapting to the new global situation. The combination of external global influences and the specific internal concerns of Greek national literature makes the emergence of postmodernism in Greece distinctive from that of other national contexts. The book engages in larger theoretical debates about the ';crisis' of national identity in the context of postmodern globalization and the resurgence of nationalist ideology either as a response to globalization or the exigencies of historical events. This crisis has been brought on in part by the very postmodernist and poststructuralist questioning of the ideologies upon which nation-states construct themselves. The central argument of the book is that postmodernist Greek writers question the idea of national identity based on both the impact of globalization and a reexamination of the discourses of national ideology: they suggest a turn away from the traditional concerns with cultural homogeneity towards an acceptance of multiplicity and diversity, which is reflected through experimentation with postmodernist literary techniques. Consequently, the unifying idea of this book is ';national identity' as it is reconfigured in recent contemporary novels. My analysis incorporates the view that metafiction is a ';borderline' or ';marginal' discourse that exists on the boundary between fiction and criticism. The book illuminates the connections between the formal concerns of contemporary authors and the larger debates and philosophical underpinnings of postmodernism in general.

This collection brings together new perspectives on the novels, memoirs, poetry, and journalism concerning Paris written by Americans. By examining the implications of foreignness as a creative device, this volume offer an innovative approach to understanding the role of the French capital in American Literatures, one that would be compelling for the literary scholar and the avid reader.

Tracing the eighteenth-century origins of sentimentalism, the collection illustrates its proliferation in nineteenth-century America. Contributors explore motherhood, education, reform, loss and mourning, and the Civil War's explosion of the faith in universal feelings and ideas on which sentimentalism was based.

During a period when African-American education was at the epicenter of the civil rights movement, Thompson's Journal documented the rapid growth of educational discrimination in the South despite significant increases in public school funding, providing irrefutable evidence that racially segregated public education was inherently discriminatory, hence, unconstitutional. Between 1932 and 1954, Thompson's editorials provided a nuanced, insider's account of one of the most successful policy research ventures in American history: the movement to overturn racial segregation as public policy, chronicling the rise during the Depression, World War II and the postwar period of a policy community committed to expanding human rights nationally and internationally. A brilliant essayist, Thompson sought to close the gap between America's democratic precepts and its undemocratic practices by molding public opinion favorable to a significant expansion of civil rights among scholars, policymakers and the public. An expert witness in several landmark higher education cases argued before the U. S. Supreme Court including Sipuel (1948), Sweatt (1950) and McLaurin (1950), Thompson's editorials provided an informed, eyewitness account of African-American teachers' pivotal role in the NAACP litigation campaign culminating in the landmark Brown et al v. Board of Education of Topeka et al (1954) desegregation ruling. As the first, full-length study of Charles H. Thompson's contributions to American education and the civil rights movement, Derrick P. Aldridge has described this study as a ';widely anticipated,' and a valuable addition to the literature.

This book traces the life of Giacomo Leopardi by examining four different yet interrelated aspects: his social origins and class in relation to his evolving conception of nobility; the mixture of idealism and misogynism in his attitude toward women and in his conception of love; his poems and prose on the theme of Italian independence; and his philosophical materialism as expressed in his poetry, intellectual diary, and essays. Frank Rosengarten pays particular attention to the ways in which the thought of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche illuminates Leopardi's world view. He also devotes a section of the book to the different personal, moral, and philological components of Leopardi's humanism. Throughout, he maintains a sharp focus on the connections between Leopardi's life and the historical period in which he lived. The major themes and human concerns expressed in Leopardi's writings relate to his life experiences and to the historical period in which he lived. Of central interest are nobility and love, since Leopardi's perception of these two themes evolved and changed as he acquired a more general and universal conception of life. This fascinating combination of classical and modern perspectives on life and literature is highlighted throughout the book.

This collection attempts to answer the question of how do people who are defined as outsiders create agency how do they become agents of change, of social, political, spiritual, and cultural power outside of those spaces that we traditionally understand as belonging to the powerful? The subjects in this collection vary: authors discuss contemporary hip-hop music; early twentieth-century literature; prison publications;post-Civil War treatment of free African Americans; queer culture; and more. They are loosely categorized as covering issues of race, class, gender, and contemporary issues of technology and globalization. The common thread in each essay is the study of how the groups have managed to successfully use rhetoric to exert social power and establish agency in a world that denies them privileged status. Each of these groups work helps to establish a constitutive rhetoric of otherness, a contribution to a genre of Outsider Rhetoric in which the rhetor(s) create a narrative in which they as subjects have legitimacy as rhetors, and in which the audience is then reconstituted to perceive this legitimacy.

Compelling Confessions: The Politics of Personal Disclosure is a collection of essays whose shared purpose is to offer an accessible interdisciplinary exploration of the social dynamics behind confessional discourse. As various contributors to this collection demonstrate, confession is ubiquitous in contemporary culture, not only within psychological or therapeutic frameworks or literary analysis, but also in internet discussion groups, in the criminal justice system, in political rhetoric, in so-called reality and interview-style television programming, in writing pedagogy and, increasingly, in the testimonial strain observable in contemporary scholarship. Yet, telling ones story raises questions, not only about authorial intent or authenticity, but also about the pressures disclosure can impose upon its audiences. Far less ubiquitous than confessions themselves, as these contributors suggest, are the critical tools that general audiences might employ in order to better evaluate the rhetoric of personal disclosure. It is, in fact, the shortage of such tools responses and procedures that could be stated plainly and implemented by any reader or viewer that Compelling Confessions sets out to address.

Visual poetry can be defined as poetry that is meant to be seen. Combining painting and poetry, it attempts to synthesize the principles underlying each discipline. Visual poems are immediately recognizable by their refusal to adhere to a rectilinear grid and by their tendency to flout their plasticity. In contrast to traditional poetry, they are conceived not only as literary works but also as works of art. Although they continue to provide visual cues that aid in deciphering the text, they function simultaneously as visual compositions. Whether the visual elements form a rudimentary pattern or whether they constitute a highly sophisticated design, they transform the poem into a picture. Reading Visual Poetry examines works created in Spain, Latin America, France, Italy, Brazil, and the United States. While it attempts to recreate the historical and cultural context surrounding each of the works in question, it is conceived primarily as a series of readings-or rather as a series of readings about reading. This book seeks to interpret a number of poems, which, despite their apparent simplicity, can be difficult to decipher. It explores the process of interpretation itself, which, like the compositions, can be surprisingly complex.

Race as Narrative in Italian Womens Writing Since Unification explores racist ideas and critiques of racism in four long narratives by female authors Grazia Deledda, Matilde Serao, Natalia Ginzburg, and Gabriella Ghermandi, who wrote in Italy after national unification. Starting from the premise that race is a political and socio-historical construction, Melissa Coburn makes the argument that race is also a narrative construction. This is true in that many narratives have contributed to the historical construction of the idea of race; it is also true in that the concept of race metaphorically reflects certain formal qualities of narration. Coburn demonstrates that at least four sets of qualities are common among narratives and central to the development of race discourse: intertextuality; the processes of characterization, plot, and tropes; the tension between the projections of individual, group, and universal identities; and the processes of identification and otherness. These four sets of qualities become organizing principles of the four sequential chapters, paralleling a sequential focus on the four different narrative authors. The juxtaposition of these close, contextualized readings demonstrates salient continuities and discontinuities within race discourse over the period examined, revealing subtleties in the historical record overlooked by previous studies.

Tracing the eighteenth-century origins of sentimentalism, the collection illustrates its proliferation in nineteenth-century America. Contributors explore motherhood, education, reform, loss and mourning, and the Civil War's explosion of the faith in universal feelings and ideas on which sentimentalism was based.

Mary Norton of New Jersey: Congressional Trailblazer tells the compelling story of Mary Norton, who served in the United States House of Representatives for 13 terms from 1925 to 1951, featuring her significant role as a congressional pioneer for women and American workers. The daughter of Irish immigrants, Norton grew up in a Roman Catholic, working-class family and was prodded to enter politics by Jersey City mayor Frank Hague. One of the first five women elected to the United States Congress, she cut a fresh path for women of ordinary means as the first female elected to the House from the Democratic Party, an eastern state, or urban center east of the Mississippi River.Norton's political career paralleled mayor Hague's tight control of Jersey City and president Franklin Roosevelt's national leadership during the Depression and World War II. Norton's connection with Hague's Jersey City Democratic Party political machine clouded her career, but Hague seldom tried to influence her legislative behavior. Norton, the first woman to chair four House committees including a major committee, consistently supported legislation helping economically disadvantaged Americans and encouraged women to enter politics. At the helm of the District of Columbia Committee from 1931 to 1937, she served as unofficial mayor of Washington, D.C. and helped enact long-needed political, economic, and social legislation for its citizens. Her most valuable work came as head of the powerful Labor Committee from 1937 to 1947. Norton helped secure House passage of the landmark Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, establishing a national minimum hourly wage and maximum workweek. She sought to improve working conditions for America's newly industrialized workers and defended the Wagner Act of 1935, allowing employees to bargain collectively for the value of their work. Norton also helped secure federal funding for several Hudson County projects benefitting her Irish, Roman Catholic, working-class constituents. The expansion of mayor Hague's gargantuan Medical Center Complex and the construction of Roosevelt Stadium provided numerous jobs for unemployed Hudson County residents. Norton, who never lost an election and was reelected by decisive margins, was the first woman elected as a freeholder in New Jersey and to direct a state Democratic Party.

As a major member of the New York School, Barnett Newman is celebrated for his radical explorations of color and scale and, as a precursor to the Minimalist movement, for his significant contribution to the development of twentieth-century American art. But if his reputation and place in history have grown progressively more secure, the work he produced remains highly resistant to interpretation. His paintings are rigorously abstract, and his writings full of references to arcane metaphysical concepts. Frustrated over their inability to reconcile the works with what the artist said about them, some critics have dismissed the paintings as impenetrable. The art historian Yve-Alain Bois called Newman ';the most difficult artist' he could name, and the philosopher Jean-Franois Lyotard declared that ';there is almost nothing to ';consume' [in his work], or if there is, I do not know what it is.' In order to advance interpretation, this book investigates both Newman's writings and paintings in light of ideas articulated by one of Germany's most important and influential philosophers: Martin Heidegger. Many of the themes explored in Newman's statements, and echoed in the titles of his paintings, betray numerous points of intersection with Heidegger's philosophy: the question of origins, the distinctiveness of human presence, a person's sense of place, the sensation of terror, the definition of freedom, the importance of mood to existence, the particularities of art and language, the impact of technology on modern life, the meaning of time, and the human being's relationship to others and to the divine. When examined in the context of Heideggerian thought, these issues acquire greater concreteness, and, in turn, their relation to the artist's paintings becomes clearer. It is the contention of this book that, at the intersection of art history and philosophy, an interdisciplinary framework emerges wherein the artist's broader motivations and the specific meanings of his paintings prove more amenable to elucidation.

Imperial Designs is the first text in English to deal comprehensively with the subject of the Italian colonial experience in China in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Recent scholarship on both the Liberal and Fascist Italian colonial enterprises centers on the Mediterranean and Northern Africa: expeditions, wars, ultimate occupation of territories, and their effect on Italy. This study looks at three Italian enclaves on the other side of the globe: Beijing, Tianjin, and Shanghai. These present both a window into the Italian experience in the Far East and confirmation of imperial policy. Their very presence confirms the rhetoric of conquest. Journalist Luigi Barzini, Sr.; diplomats Salvago Raggi, Vare, and Ciano; various military personnel; and other foreign nationals tell the story through letters and diaries. They all interact with the local metropolitan and rural poor and cultivate a generalized colonial white man's detachment from their surroundings. A brief summary of the presence of chinoiserie in the Italian imaginary shows how the Celestial Empire has continued to function in the construction of Italian identity as part of the dichotomy between self and other.

William Ellery Leonard was an eccentric poet, professor, and critic whose romantic ideals were set against a world whose aesthetics were fast turning away from his own. He lived a life marked by both success and dramatic failure, both personally and professionally. His first wife's suicide would haunt him and mark one of his greatest poems, the sonnet sequence Two Lives; his translations of Lucretius and Beowulf stood as hallmarks of the craft for decades after they were published; and his political satires written in response to the University sphere he lived and worked in remain as effective today as they once were.