Books published by Stanford University Press

Through an extended reading of the noh play Aoi ne Ue, as well as briefer examinations of several other plays, this book sheds new light on the circulation of power and desire in the middle and late medieval periods in Japan. It argues that these plays constituted an active force in the theater of the medieval cultural imaginary by engaging specific sociopolitical issues and problems.

This book investigates the mappings of ideas about sexual and ethnic difference in Galilee during the centuries following the last Jewish revolt against the Roman Empire.

This text addresses a central question in the history of modern France and modern colonialism: how did the Third Republic, highly regarded for its professed democratic values, allow itself to be seduced by the insidious and persistent appeal of a civilizing ideology with distinct racist overtones?

Why would one country impose economic sanctions against another in pursuit of foreign policy objectives? How effective is the use of such economic weapons? This book examines how and why the United States and its allies instituted economic sanctions against the People's Republic of China in the 1950s, and how the embargo affected Chinese domestic policy and the Sino-Soviet alliance.

This final volume of the first comprehensive edition of all of Robinson Jeffers's completed poems, both published and unpublished, consists of commentary: various procedural explanations and textual evidence for the edition's texts, transcriptions of working notes for the poems and of alternate and discarded passages, a chronology of Jeffers's career, appendixes, and indexes.

Adding an important new dimension to the history of U.S.-Japan relations, this book reveals that an unofficial movement to promote good feeling between the United States and Japan in the 1920s and 1930s only narrowly failed to achieve its goal: to modify the so-called anti-Japanese exclusion clause of the 1924 U.S. immigration law.

It has often been said that rich pagan women, much more so than men, were attracted both to early Judaism and Christianity. This book provides a new reading of sources from which this truism springs, focusing on two texts from the turn of the first century, Josephus's Antiquities and Luke's Acts.

This book is about ending guerrilla conflicts in Latin America through political means. It discusses peace processes aimed at ending military conflicts in the context of agreements that touch on some of the principal political, economic, social, and ethnic imbalances that led to conflict in the first place.

This is the first in a series of books in which one of the most influential of contemporary art theorists revised from within the conceptions underlying the history of art. The author's basic idea is that the rigor of linear perspective cannot encompass all of visual experience and that it could be said to generate an oppositional factor with which it interacts dialectically: the cloud.

This translation is a 20-volume English-language edition of "The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche", the first complete, critical, and annotated translation of all of Nietzsche's work.

This detailed study examines the social, religious, and institutional conflicts accompanying the Russian Schism of the 17th century. By analyzing who opposed the reforms of Patriarch Nikon (1652-58) and under what circumstances, the author presents a complex and multifaceted world of popular religious resistance that has been hidden from view for centuries.

What makes a work of literature readable? This book asks that question of one of the classics of Japanese literature, the Tsurezuregusa (Essays in Idleness) by Kenko (1283-1352), a collection of brief, fragmentary reflections on a number of subjects.

This book explores the complex relations among the hegemonic triad of territory, nation, and national literature that have characterized the modern European nation-state. In the case of Hebrew literature, this triad was unattainable and its components fiercely contested, hence the literary field itself was responsible for shaping the nation, preceding the nation-state itself.

This title explores the seemingly unorthodox alliance of the arts, management and marketing. Using case studies of successful art managers, the author illustrates the creative role - so central to value-making in contemporary economies - performed by aesthetic play in art firms.

This ethnographic study of a Chinese Catholic village reveals how the rapid penetration of transnational processes into the People's Republic of China during the post-Mao period has redefined and created new social and cultural structures in rural communities. In examining the resurfacing of a Catholic community, the book shows what it means to be part of a global and modern rural village.

This is a poineering study of the 19th centruy Hasidic movement as shown through the life of one of its most controversial and influential leaders, Rabbi Israel Friedman of Ruzhin (1796-1850). The dramatic episodes of his life are echoed by the contradictory and highly critical opinions of his personal charachter and leadership.

Lawyers in the US are frequently described as "hired guns," willing to fight for any client or advance any interest. But there are others, those the authors call cause lawyers, who refuse to put aside their own convictions while they do their legal work. This book explores their work and the role of moral and political commitment in their practice

The author examines the work of key figures in the early history of Jewish literature through the prism of their allusions to classical Jewish texts, focusing on the highly complex strategies the maskilim employed to achieve their potential and ideological goals.

Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism, made a powerful impact on several major areas of thought and policy, yet his ideas have always been prone to misunderstanding. Dinwiddy introduces Bentham's ideas, examining the various components of his philosophy.

This book confronts the question of who and what is a Nikkei, that is, a person of Japanese descent, by presenting 18 case studies from throughout the Americas-including Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Paraguay, Peru, and the United States.

An exploration of corporate purpose - a company's expressed overriding reason for existing - and its effect upon strategy, executive leadership, employees, and ultimately, on competitive performance. It argues that the path to financial success lies in a customer-focused corporate purpose.

With a combination of erudition and insight, this work investigates the major aspects of Yiddish language and culture, showing where Yiddish came from and what it has to offer, even as it ceases to be a living language.

This book offers the first full-length English-language biography of Avraam Uri Kovner, a fascinating and peculiar Russian-Jewish writer and criminal who lived at the end of the nineteenth century. It is also an examination of Russo-Jewish identity in the modern period and of larger questions of hybridity and performativity.

In the aftermath of the French Revolution, "freedom" came to have a host of meanings. This volume examines these contested visions of freedom both inside and outside of revolutionary situations in the nineteenth century, as each author explores and interprets the development of nineteenth-century political culture in a particular national context.

In 1800, the per capita income of the United States was twice that of Mexico and roughly the same as Brazil s. By 1913, it was four times greater than Mexico s and seven times greater than Brazil's. This volume seeks to explain the 19th-century lag in Latin American economic development.

Tracing the evolution of state military institutions from the seventh to the twelfth centuries, this book challenges much of the received wisdom of Western scholarship on the origins and early development of warriors in Japan.

Examining the emergence of modernism from the fin-de-siecle primitivist project this volume shows how ethnographic materials shaped a variety of high and low discourses (ethnology, social theory, gender construction, classical scholarship, as well as travel photography) at the turn of the century. Illustrated with 98 photographs and drawings.

A systematic account of Brazil's historical development from 1798 to 1852, this book analyzes the process that brought the sprawling Portuguese colonies of the New World into the confines of a single nation-state.

In launching modern economics, Adam Smith paved the way for laissez-faire capitalism, Marxism, and contemporary social science. This book scrutinizes Smith's disparagement of politics and religion to illuminate the subtlety of his rhetoric, the depth of his thought, and the ultimate shortcomings of his project.

The institutional features and the past and future role of the state should be a central concern of contemporary sociological and political theory, but until now they have been sadly neglected. Lately, in particular, the state''s increasing involvement in the management of industrial and industrializing societies has made it even more important to understand its past development, its current activities, and the related trends in its structure and in its relation to the larger society.As a contribution to this task, Gianfranco Poggi reviews the main phases in the institutional history of the modern state. Restating a typology elaborated, among others by Max Weber, he outlines first the feudal system of rule, then the late-medieval Ständestaat and the absolutist state. Next the book discusses the nineteenth-century constitutional state, seen as the most accomplished embodiment of the modern, Western state. Finally, it points out the major developments which have occurred since the end of the last century in the relationship between the state and society, and identifies the threat these pose to the persistence of Western political values. Throughout, the discussion draws upon an impressive body of literature on the modern state (much of it not available in English) from the fields of history, law, and the social sciences.