Books published by University of Wisconsin Press

Latin plays were written for audiences whose gender perspectives and expectations were shaped by life in Rome, and the crowds watching the plays included both female citizens and female slaves. This is the first book to confront directly the role of women in Roman Republican plays of all genres, as well as to examine the role of gender in the influence of this tradition on later dramatists.

What exactly is popular culture? How should it be studied? What forces come together in producing, disseminating, and consuming it? This collection offers responses to these and similar questions. Edited by Harold E. Hinds, Jr., Marilyn F. Motz, and Angela M. S. Nelson, the book charts some of the key turning points in the ""culture wars.

Intertextual encounters occur whenever an author or the author's text recognizes, references, alludes to, or otherwise elicits an audience member's familiarity with other texts. This work ranges from the 1830s to the 1990s and from the canonical American novel to Bugs Bunny and Jerry Seinfield.

Readers of detective stories turn to historical crime fiction to learn about life in past societies and how citizens and crime fighters coped with laws and restrictions. This study covers all recorded history - from ancient Egypt, through Classical Greece and Rome, to medieval Europe.

This work addresses some of the multi-faceted conceptual and theoretical issues connected with symbolic construction of reality through human memory and its subsequent representation. It presents a synthesis of the multiple meanings of memory and representation within the context of truth.

In journeys of self-discovery, quests to define our national identity, opportunities to escape from the daily routine, and expressions of social protest - the American road narrative has been a significant and popular literary genre for four decades. Romance of the Road captures America's love affair with roads, cars, travel, speed, and the lure of open spaces. With roots reaching back to quest romance and pilgrimage, the literature of the American highway explores our diverse and often conflicted cultural values. This comprehensive study of an important American art form examines how road narratives create dialogues between travelers, authors, and readers about who we are, what we value, and where we hope to be going.

At the memorial held after Martin Ritt's death in 1990, he was hailed as this country's greatest maker of social films. From No Down Payment early in his career to Stanley & Iris, his last production, he delineated the nuances of American society. In between were other social statements such as Hud, Sounder, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, Norma Rae, and The Great White Hope. He was a leftist who embraced various radical movements of the 1930s and, largely because of this involvement, was blacklisted from television in the early 1950s. His film The Front, about the blacklisting, was his most autobiographical. He was a Jew from New York; yet he went to a small college in North Carolina, Elon, where he played football for "The Fighting Christians". His school days in the South gave him a lifelong love for the region. Thus, in his movies, he was just as much at home with southern as with northern topics. He did not deal totally in his southern experience with racism and poverty. He directed The Long Hot Summer and The Sound and the Fury, both of which described conflicts between and among white social groups. He once remarked, "I have spent most of my film life in the South". Some referred to his films as "think movies", and perhaps this is why he never won an Oscar for best directing. But he gave moviegoers all over the world an opportunity to see what America was really like - from the viewpoint both of the wealthy and of the poor. It may be, unfortunately, that we will never see his likes again.

In Keating s novels, set in India, the bumbling, but always human, Inspector Ghote manages to solve crimes with a post-colonial mix of inherited Scotland Yard/Holmesian deductive methods and his understanding of his native country s culture. This book is based on the premise that successful sleuths have much in common with cultural anthropologists indeed the latter have often been termed detectives of cultures. Keating s Ghote novels are in the tradition of Tony Hillerman s Navajo Indian mysteries, and James McClure s South African novels, which serve up the human, experiential aspects of the cultural and ethnic conflicts that newspapers miss."

Gender is the mine field we pass through every day. In the United States of materialism, gender is all too often determined by which anatomical sex you are. From birth we are bombarded with gender propaganda that supports a repressive dual gender system that pits the sexes and the genders against each other. Transgenderists as gender nonconformists challenge us to rethink traditional discourses on sex and gender. Transgender Nation dares to look at the male-to-woman transgenderist and transsexual from a sociocultural and socio-political perspective and maintains that it is not the individual transgenderist that is sick and in need of treatment but rather the culture that must be treated. Transgender Nation explores historical sexological categories and decodes contemporary medical transsexual ideology, charging that contemporary "treatments" like sex reassignment surgery all too often encourage assimilation and negate differences. Proposals for endocrinological euthanasia are examined for what they reveal about persona and cultural attitudes about gender. In addition popular cultural representations of transgenderists as homocidal maniacs dressed to kill are contrasted with the grim reality that in a transgenderphobic, homophobic, and misogynistic culture they are more likely to be killed because they dress.

In this volume of the Beyond the Stars series, the subject of the various individual essays are discrete conventions of movie locales, but the subject of the volume as a whole as with the other books in the series is the viability of film convention studies as a tool for the study of film and American culture."

Staying Tuned: Contemporary Soap Opera Criticism examines serials. Broadcast first in 1926 on radio and since 1956 on television Monday through Friday 52 weeks a year, soap operas provide a clear promise to continue for as long as mass medicated entertainment exists. Over the last sixty years, billions have happily suffered along with the gallant men and women of the afternoon.

In this volume, almost two dozen essays consider political, moral and technological issues raised by the film.

Often, the decade of the 1920s has been stereotyped with such labels as The Roaring Twenties, The Jazz Age, or The Lost Generation. Historical perspective has forced reevaluation of this decade. Articles in this collection are presented in the most definitive anthology dealing with 1920s America."

These essays, written by experts in their fields, demonstrate how necessary it is in the study of the humanities and social sciences to realize the interdependency of the fields and how rich the resulting study can be."

This book discusses the figure of the unchaste woman in a wide range of fiction written between 1835 and 1880; serious novels by Dickens, Mrs. Gaskell, Meredith, and George Eliot; popular novels that provided light reading for middle-class women (including books by Dinah Craik, Rhoda Broughton, and Ouida); sensational fiction; propaganda for social reform; and stories in cheap periodicals such as the "Family Herald" and the "London Journal," which reached a different and far wider audience than either serious or popular novels.

A collection of twenty-five essays from eight countries, illustrating the many approaches to science fiction.

Born to a wealthy family in West Africa around 1770, Omar Ibn Said was abducted and sold into slavery in the United States, where he came to the attention of a prominent North Carolina family after filling "the walls of his room with piteous petitions to be released, all written in the Arabic language," as one local newspaper reported. Ibn Said soon became a local celebrity, and in 1831 he was asked to write his life story, producing the only known surviving American slave narrative written in Arabic. In A Muslim American Slave, scholar and translator Ala Alryyes offers both a definitive translation and an authoritative edition of this singularly important work, lending new insights into the early history of Islam in America and exploring the multiple, shifting interpretations of Ibn Said's narrative by the nineteenth-century missionaries, ethnographers, and intellectuals who championed it. This edition presents the English translation on pages facing facsimile pages of Ibn Said's Arabic narrative, augmented by Alryyes's comprehensive introduction, contextual essays and historical commentary by leading literary critics and scholars of Islam and the African diaspora, photographs, maps, and other writings by Omar Ibn Said. The result is an invaluable addition to our understanding of writings by enslaved Americans and a timely reminder that "Islam" and "America" are not mutually exclusive terms. This edition presents the English translation on pages facing facsimile pages of Ibn Said's Arabic narrative, augmented by Alryyes's comprehensive introduction and by photographs, maps, and other writings by Omar Ibn Said. The volume also includes contextual essays and historical commentary by literary critics and scholars of Islam and the African diaspora: Michael A. Gomez, Allan D. Austin, Robert J. Allison, Sylviane A. Diouf, Ghada Osman, and Camille F. Forbes. The result is an invaluable addition to our understanding of writings by enslaved Americans and a timely reminder that "Islam" and "America" are not mutually exclusive terms.Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the American Association of School Librarians

United Artists was a unique motion picture company in the history of Hollywood. Providing the history of United Artists from 1919 through 1951, this title chronicles the company's struggle for survival, its rise to prominence as the Tiffany of the industry, and its near extinction in the 1940s.

Spanning a quarter century of work, the essays in Helen Barolini's Chiaroscuro explore her personal search; literature as a formative influence; and the turning of the personal into the political.

This is the first book by this author, a first-generation Ukrainian-American, resident in Alaska. The collection was the winner of the 1997 Brittingham Prize in Poetry.

Women's labour has long been the linchpin of male status and power throughout Africa. This work interprets the intricate relations of gender to state-building in Africa by looking historically at control over production and reproduction from the 19th century to the 1990s.

This text explores taboos against eating certain kinds of flesh from a historical and cultural perspective. New research on the use and avoidance of flesh foods, from antiquity to the present day, is integrated in this edition.

Payne's study places Spain's Second Republic within the historical framework of Spanish liberalism, and the rapid modernisation of inter-war Europe. He aims to present a consistent and detailed interpretation, demonstrating striking parallels to the German Weimar Republic.

This study of the relations of the peoples of West Africa in the precolonial period covers a period of four or five hundred years, up to the last decades of the nineteenth century. Smith addresses outside influences but focuses primarily on what happened between African states before the partition and the establishment of colonies.

A collection of essays addressing the role of rhetoric for inquiries of all kinds in various disciplines, ranging from sociology and political science, through anthropology and psychology, to mathematics and economics. It also explores communications in women's issues, religion and law.