Books published by Northwestern University Press

Originally published in 1947, Ann Petry's classic Country Place depicts a predominantly white community disillusioned by the indignities and corruption of small-town life. Accompanied by a new foreword from Farah Jasmine that builds on the legacy of a literary celebrity and one of the foremost African American writers of her time.

Charts a modern history of form as emergent from force. Offering a provocative alternative to the imagery of crisis and estrangement that has preoccupied scholarship on modernism, Malika Maskarinec shows that German modernism conceives of human bodies and aesthetic objects as shaped by a contest of conflicting and reciprocally-intensifying forces.

The poems in Dulce are at once confession and elegy that admit the speaker's attempt and possible failure to reconcile intimacy toward another and toward the self. The collection asks: what's the point in any of this? - meaning, what's the use of longing beyond pleasure; what's the use of looking for an origin if we already know the ending?

Offers the first sustained examination of the relationship between law and selfhood in Shakespeare's work. Taking five plays and the sonnets as case studies, Kevin Curran argues that law provided Shakespeare with the conceptual resources to imagine selfhood in social and distributed terms, as a product of interpersonal exchange or as a gathering of various material forces.

Explores the key role of dramatic episodes that occur offstage and beyond the knowledge-generating faculty of playgoers' sight. Does Ophelia drown? Is Desdemona unfaithful to Othello? Does Macbeth murder Duncan in his sleep? Site Unscene considers how the drama's non-visible and eccentric elements embellish, alter, and subvert visible action on the stage.