Books published by The University of Chicago Press

James Boyd White addresses questions about how we imagine the world, and ourselves, and others within it. Also how we use imagination to give meaning to past experiences and to shape future ones.

The Ait Mazine of northern Morocco reenact the story of Abraham as a ritual sacrifice, a symbolic observance of submission to the divine. After comes a bacchanalian masquerade which seems to violate every principle the sacrifice affirmed. This study reunites them as a single ritual process.

A collection of writing on the experience of teaching.

With a perpetually tight job market, the road to an academic career can be a rocky and frustrating one. There are lots of questions, and this book attempts to provide good, frank answers to them.

This text, using examples ranging from Samuel Johnson and Jane Austen to Donald Barthelme and Anita Brookner, examines the influence that the concept of "boredom" exerts on the literary imagination.

This collection of 12 theoretical essays spans more than 40 years of research in order to explore the bases of human action and society. Framed by a new introduction and an extensive epilogue, the essays trace the major developments of contemporary sociological theory and analysis.

Through the figure of the "heterological historian", this text creates a framework for the understanding of history and the ethical duties of the historian. It also weighs the impact of modern archival methods, such as film and the Internet, which add new constraints to the writing of history.

The gypsies of central France, the Manus, do not speak of their dead and burn or discard all the deceased belongings. Patrick Williams argues that this view of death is central to how the Manus see the world and their place in it.

Postcolonial novelists such as Salman Rushdie and V.S. Naipaul are widely celebrated, yet the achievements of postcolonial poets have been strangely neglected. This work argues that postcolonial poets have also dramatically expanded the atlas of literature in English.

When we think about what constitutes being a good citizen, routine activities like voting, letter-writing, and paying attention to the news spring to mind. This title argues that these activities play only a small part in democratic citizenship - a form of citizenship that requires creative thinking, talking, and acting.

In this volume Levi-Strauss explores the mythologies of the Americas, with occasional incursions into European and Japanese folklore, tales of sloths and squirrels are interwoven with discussions of Freud, Saussure, "signification," and plays by Sophocles and Labiche.

From autobiographical writings, this book reconstructs the extraordinary life of Thomas Platter and the lives of his sons. It expands the historical contexts of these accounts and, in the process, brings to life the customs, perceptions and character of an age on the threshold of modernity.

Addresses the 20th-century study of mysticism as a kind of mystical tradition in its own right, with its own unique histories, discourses, sociological dynamics, and rhetorics of secrecy. Jeffrey J. Kripal examines the lives and works of five historians of mysticism.

In this ethnography of babies, Alma Gottlieb focusses on the Beng people of West Africa. A Beng infant is thought to begin life filled with spiritual knowledge, having been reincarnated after a rich life in a previous world.

This work discusses whether Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" was revolutionary. Steve Fuller argues that Kuhn held a profoundly conservative view of science and how one ought to study its history.

How is historical knowledge produced? And how do silence and forgetting figure in the knowledge we call history? This exploration of these questions exposes the circumstantial nature of history, revealing the economic, social and political forces at play in history's production.

In this account of metrical stress theory, the author builds on the notion that stress constitutes linguistic rhythm. Through an extensive typological survey of word stress rules that uncovers widespread asymmetries, he identifies a fundamental distinction between iambic and trochaic rhythm.

Completely bilingual, this dictionary focuses on two contemporary international languages, American English and a worldwide Spanish rooted in both Latin American and Iberian sources. It has been updated with six thousand new words and meanings selected for their frequency of use, rising popularity, and situational necessity.

In "Ecce Homo" (1888), Nietzsche quoted that before him `... there simply was no psychology'. This study focuses on this pronouncement, examining the contours of Nietzsche's psychology in the context of his life, work and psychological make-up.

This is a practical guide to the Arctic's natural history - sky, atmosphere, terrain, ice, the sea, plants, birds, mammals, fish and insects - for those who will experience the Arctic firsthand and also for armchair travellers.

How do people practice religion in their everyday lives? Courtney Bender spent more than a year working as a volunteer for a non-profit organisation called God's Love We Deliver, helping to prepare food for people with AIDs, this volume tells the story of that time.

A study of biodiversity in which the author argues for a pluralistic approach, showing how ecologists might enhance their ability to tackle global problems by incorporating broader spatial and temporal perspectives into their research. He suggests that statistical methods can identify processes that operate across broad geographic scales.

At the start of the 18th century, literary "characters" referred as much to letters and typefaces as it did to persons in books. However, this text shows how, by the 19th century, readers used transactions with characters to accommodate themselves to newly-commmercialized social relations.

Explores this delay in the development of the culture concept and its relation to the description of difference in late nineteenth-century America. The author weaves together the histories of American literature and anthropology. His study brings to life not only the regionalist fiction of the time but also revives a range of neglected materials.

The story behind the historic Mineral King Valley case, which reveals how the Sierra Club battled Disney's ski resort development and launched a new environmental era in America. In our current age of climate change-induced panic, it's hard to imagine a time when private groups were not actively enforcing environmental protection laws in the courts. It wasn't until 1972, however, that a David and Goliath-esque Supreme Court showdown involving the Sierra Club and Disney set a revolutionary legal precedent for the era of environmental activism we live in today. Set against the backdrop of the environmental movement that swept the country in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Dawn at Mineral King Valley tells the surprising story of how the US Forest Service, the Disney company, and the Sierra Club each struggled to adapt to the new, rapidly changing political landscape of environmental consciousness in postwar America. Proposed in 1965 and approved by the federal government in 1969, Disney's vast development plan would have irreversibly altered the practically untouched Mineral King Valley, a magnificently beautiful alpine area in the Sierra Nevada mountains. At first, the plan met with unanimous approval from elected officials, government administrators, and the press--it seemed inevitable that this expanse of wild natural land would be radically changed and turned over to a private corporation. Then the scrappy Sierra Club forcefully pushed back with a lawsuit that ultimately propelled the modern environmental era by allowing interest groups to bring litigation against environmentally destructive projects. An expert on environmental law and appellate advocacy, Daniel P. Selmi uses his authoritative narrative voice to recount the complete history of this revolutionary legal battle and the ramifications that continue today, almost 50 years later.