Books published by Harvard University Press

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.

Theocritus (early third century BCE) was the inventor of the bucolic genre, also known as pastoral. The present edition of his work, along with that of his successors Moschus (fl. mid-second century BCE) and Bion (fl. around 100 BCE), replaces the earlier Loeb Classical Library volume of Greek Bucolic Poets by J. M. Edmonds (1912).

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.

Apollonius Rhodius' Argonautica, composed in the third century BCE, is an epic retelling of Jason's quest for the golden fleece. It greatly influenced Roman authors such as Catullus, Virgil, and Ovid, and was imitated by Valerius Flaccus.

Aeschylus (c. 525-456 BCE) is the dramatist who made Athenian tragedy one of the world's great art forms. Seven of his eighty or so plays survive complete, including the Oresteia trilogy and the Persians, the only extant Greek historical drama. Fragments of his lost plays also survive.

Aeschylus (c. 525-456 BCE) is the dramatist who made Athenian tragedy one of the world's great art forms. Seven of his eighty or so plays survive complete, including the Oresteia trilogy and the Persians, the only extant Greek historical drama. Fragments of his lost plays also survive.

This book uses broad synthesis and close textual analysis to reconstruct the kinds of books and the ways of organizing scholarly inquiry and collaboration among the Christians of Caesarea in Roman Palestine. It explores the dialectic between intellectual history and history of the book and expands our understanding of early Christian scholarship.

Posner explores the causes of Europe's emergence as a global financial power, addressing classic and new questions about the origins of markets and their relationship to politics and bureaucracy.

Eric Rentschler argues that cinema in the Third Reich emanated from a Ministry of Illusion and not from a Ministry of Fear. His analysis of the sophisticated media culture of this period demonstrates in an unprecedented way the potent and destructive powers of fascination and fantasy.

Sartre has written a long overdue and comprehensive history of the Semitic Near East (modern Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel) from the eve of the Roman conquest to the end of the third century C.E. and the rise of Christianity. His perspective takes in all aspects of this history-political, military, economic, social, cultural, and religious.

Sternberg explores the marvelously rich nexus of mind and body, perception and place. The book shows how a Disney theme park or a Frank Gehry concert hall, a labyrinth or a garden can trigger or reduce stress, induce anxiety, or instill peace.

Gibbard considers how our actions, and our realities, emerge from the questions and decisions we form for ourselves. He investigates the very nature of the questions we ask ourselves when we ask how we should live, and clarifies the concept of "ought" by understanding the patterns of normative concepts involved in beliefs and decisions.

As the driving force behind the Allied effort in World War I, France willingly shouldered the heaviest burden. In this masterful book, Robert Doughty explains how and why France assumed this role and offers new insights into French strategy and operational methods.

Morrison brings her genius to this personal inquiry into the significance of African-Americans in the American literary imagination. Through her investigation of black characters, narrative strategies, and idiom in the fiction of white American writers, Morrison provides a perspective sure to alter conventional notions about American literature.

As Hegel famously noted, the goddess Minerva's owl brought back wisdom only at dusk, when it was too late to shine light on actual politics. Abramson provides a guide for discovering the tradition of political thought that dates back to Socrates and Plato, with contemporary examples that illustrate the enduring nature of political dilemmas.

Accident law, if properly designed, is capable of reducing the incidence of mishaps by making people act more cautiously. Since the 1960s, a group of legal scholars and economists have focused on identifying the effects of accident law on people's behavior. Steven Shavell's book is the definitive synthesis of research to date in this new field.

In this book, Casanova shows us the state of world literature behind the stylistic refinements-a world of letters relatively independent from economic and political realms, and in which language systems, aesthetic orders, and genres struggle for dominance.

Drawing on recently opened archives, ethnography, and oral interviews that were unavailable a decade ago, A Biography of No Place reveals Stalinist and Nazi history from the perspective of the remote borderlands, thus bringing the periphery to the center of history.

A mere "symbol" of medicine the placebo nonetheless sometimes produces "real" results. Medical science has largely discounted the placebo effect, but Harrington argues that the phenomenon is a "real" entity in its own right, one that has much to teach us about how symbols, settings, and human relationships literally get under our skin.

In this widely acclaimed work, now revised and expanded, Edward N. Luttwak unveils the peculiar logic of strategy level by level, from grand strategy down to combat tactics. In the tradition of Carl von Clausewitz, Strategy goes beyond paradox to expose the dynamics of reversal at work in the crucible of conflict.

In the first conceptual, methodological overview of German Idealism, Franks offers a reconstruction true to the movement's own times but also deeply relevant to contemporary thought. The result is a characterization of German Idealism that reveals its sources as well as its pertinence-and its challenge-to contemporary philosophical naturalism.

Sunstein shows that organizations and nations are far more likely to prosper if they welcome dissent and promote openness. Attacking "political correctness" in all forms, Sunstein demonstrates that corporations, legislatures, even presidents are likely to blunder if they do not cultivate a culture of candor and disclosure.

How do we account for the disparate ideas, writings, and practices that have been placed under the Gnostic rubric? King's book is both a thorough and innovative introduction to the twentieth-century study of Gnosticism and a revealing exploration of the concept of heresy as a tool in forming religious identity.

This lively account of the foundations of quantum mechanics is at once elementary and deeply challenging. It is an introduction accessible to anyone with high school mathematics and, at the same time, a rigorous discussion of the most important recent advances in our understanding of quantum physics, a number of them made by the author himself.

Hadot shows how the schools, trends, and ideas of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy strove to transform the individual's mode of perceiving and being in the world. For the ancients, philosophical theory and the philosophical way of life were inseparably linked. Hadot asks us to consider whether and how this connection might be reestablished today.