Books published by Harvard University Press

Since Dawkins popularized the notion of the selfish gene, the question of how these selfish genes work together to construct an organism remained a mystery. Now, standing atop a wealth of new research, Itai Yanai and Martin Lercher-pioneers in the field of systems biology-provide a vision of how genes cooperate and compete in the struggle for life.

Lee Konstantinou examines irony in American literary and political life, showing how it migrated from the countercultural margins of the 1950s to the 1980s mainstream. Along the way, irony was absorbed into postmodern theory and ultimately became a target of recent writers who have moved beyond its limitations with a practice of "postirony."

Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Major Poetry presents a selection of definitively edited texts that remind us why Emerson's poetry matters and why he remains one of our most important theoreticians of verse. Drawn chiefly from the multivolume Collected Works, each poem is accompanied by a headnote for the student and general reader.

Distinction is at once a vast ethnography of contemporary France and a dissection of the bourgeois mind. Bourdieu's subject is the study of culture, and his objective is most ambitious: to provide an answer to the problems raised by Kant's Critique of Judgment by showing why no judgment of taste is innocent.

Here is a lively study of marriage and the family during the Reformation, primarily in Gemany and Switzerland, that dispels the commonly held notion of fathers as tyrannical and families as loveless.

Flannery and Marcus demonstrate that the rise of inequality was not simply the result of population increase, food surplus, or the accumulation of valuables but resulted from conscious manipulation of the unique social logic that lies at the core of every human group. Reversing the social logic can reverse inequality, they argue, without violence.

Art, William Kentridge says, is its own form of knowledge. It does not simply supplement the real world, and cannot be purely understood in the rational terms of academic disciplines. The studio is where linear thinking is abandoned and the material processes of the eye, the hand, the charcoal and paper become themselves the guides of creativity.

Scholars have long claimed that the Eastern Roman Empire, a Christian theocracy, bore little resemblance to ancient Rome. Here, Anthony Kaldellis reconnects Byzantium to its Roman roots, arguing that it was essentially a republic, with power exercised on behalf of, and sometimes by, Greek-speaking citizens who considered themselves fully Roman.

In this significant study, Fritz Ringer offers a new approach to Weber's work, interpreting his methodological writings in the context of the lively German intellectual debates of his day, and demonstrating how Weber was able to bridge the divide between humanistic interpretation and causal explanation in historical and cultural studies.

The Well-Laden Ship is an eleventh-century Latin poem composed of ancient and medieval proverbs, fables, and folktales. It was one of the few surviving works from the Middle Ages written explicitly for schoolroom use. Most of the content derives from the Bible, especially the wisdom books, from the Church Fathers, and from the ancient poets.

Drawing inspiration from philosophy, history, and literature, Martha C. Nussbaum takes us to task for our religious intolerance, identifies the fear behind it, and offers a way past fear toward a more equitable, imaginative, and free society, through the consistent application of universal principles of respect for conscience.

Victor Brombert reassesses in a modern perspective the power and originality of Hugo's work, and provides a new interpretation of Hugo's narrative art as well as a synthesis of his poetic and moral vision. The twenty-eight drawings by Hugo reproduced in this book are further testimony to the visionary nature of Hugo's imagination.

Karen L. King offers an illuminating reading of this ancient text, said to be Christ's revelation to his disciple John. In her analysis, the Revelation becomes a comprehensible religious vision--and a window on the religious culture of the Roman Empire. A translation of the complete Secret Revelation of John is included.

Published in 1818, Frankenstein has spellbound readers for generations and has inspired numerous retellings and sequels in every medium, making the myth familiar even to those who have never read a word of Mary Shelley's novel. This freshly annotated, illustrated edition illuminates the novel and its electrifying afterlife.

Perhaps the most accomplished of Austen's novels, Emma is also, after Pride and Prejudice, her most popular. Film and television adaptations testify to the world's enduring affection for headstrong, often misguided Emma Woodhouse and her romantic schemes. Emma: An Annotated Edition is an illuminating gift edition that will be treasured by readers.

Slow violence from climate change, toxic drift, deforestation, oil spills, and the environmental aftermath of war takes place gradually and often invisibly. Rob Nixon focuses on the inattention we have paid to the lethality of many environmental crises, in contrast with the sensational, spectacle-driven messaging that impels public activism today.

This provocative biography tells the story of how an ambitious young Londoner became England's greatest novelist. Focused on the 1830s, it portrays a restless, uncertain Dickens who could not decide on a career path. Through twists and turns, the author traces a double transformation: in reinventing himself Dickens reinvented the form of the novel.

Terada revisits debates about appearance and reality in order to make a startling claim: that the purpose of such debates is to police feelings of dissatisfaction with the given world.

By the middle of the 19th century, as scientists explored the frontiers of polar regions and the atmosphere, the ocean remained silent and inaccessible. The history of how this changed-of how the depths became a scientific passion and a cultural obsession, an engineering challenge and a political attraction-is the story that unfolds in this book.

Arguably no other 19th-century German composer was as literate or as finely attuned to setting verse as Robert Schumann. Finson challenges assumptions about Schumann's Lieder, engaging traditionally held interpretations. Arranged in part thematically, rather than by strict compositional chronology, this book speaks to the heart of Schumann's music.

How do civilians control the military? In his book, Feaver proposes a new theory that treats civil-military relations as a principal-agent relationship, with the civilian executive monitoring the actions of military agents, the "armed servants" of the nation-state.

Benjamin Gomes-Casseres presents the first detailed account of the new world of business alliances and shows how collaboration has become integral to modern competition, particularly in the global high-technology sector.

What did it take to cause the Roman aristocracy to turn to Christianity, changing centuries-old beliefs and religious traditions? Salzman takes a fresh approach to this much-debated question by focusing on a sampling of individual aristocratic men and women as well as on writings and archeological evidence.

Anthropologist Jean L. Briggs spent seventeen months living on a remote Arctic shore as the "adopted daughter" of an Inuit family. Through vignettes of daily life she unfolds a warm and perceptive tale of the behavioral patterns of the Utku people, their way of training children, and their handling of deviations from desired behavior.

The theory of perspective, which allowed Florentine artists to depict the world from a spectator's point of view, originated in Baghdad with an eleventh-century mathematician. Using the metaphor of the mutual gaze, Belting narrates the encounter between science and art, Arab Baghdad and Renaissance Florence, that revolutionized Western culture.

After the collapse of the Han dynasty, China divided along a north-south line. Lewis traces the changes that underlay and resulted from this split in a period that saw China's geographic redefinition, more engagement with the outside world, significant changes to family life, literary and social developments, and the introduction of new religions.

Umberto Eco published his first novel, The Name of the Rose, in 1980, when he was nearly fifty. In these "confessions" the author, now in his late seventies, looks back on his long career as a theorist and his more recent work as a novelist and explores their fruitful conjunction. This book takes readers on a tour of Eco's own creative method.

Jurists of the nascent Maliki, Hanafi, and Shafi'i legal schools frequently compared marriage to purchase and divorce to manumission. This title presents an analysis of how these jurists conceptualized marriage - its rights and obligations - using the same rhetoric of ownership used to describe slavery.

Europe and the World Beyond focuses geographically on peoples of South America and the Mediterranean as well as Africa, but conceptually it emphasizes the ways that visual constructions of blacks mediated between Europe and a faraway African continent that was impinging ever more closely on daily life in cities and ports engaged in the slave trade.

Dealing with taxation, this title states that the tax system in a democracy is shaped by competing factions, each seeking to minimize its burden. It aims to examine (and debunk) 3 major ideologies, namely, the ideology of ability, the ideology of deterrents, and the ideology of equity, which are used to justify various reforms of the tax system.