When theater and related forms of live performance explore the borderlands labeled animal and autism, they both reflect and affect their audiences’ understanding of what it means to be human. Affect, Animals, and Autists maps connections across  performances that question the borders of the human whose neurodiverse experiences have been shaped by the diagnostic label of autism, and animal-human performance relationships that... more...

In Bloodflowers W. Ian Bourland examines the photography of Rotimi Fani-Kayode (1955–1989), whose art is a touchstone for cultural debates surrounding questions of gender and queerness, race and diaspora, aesthetics and politics, and the enduring legacy of slavery and colonialism. Born in Nigeria, Fani-Kayode moved between artistic and cultural worlds in Washington, DC, New York, and London, where he produced the bulk of his... more...

Modernist literature is inextricable from the history of obscenity. The trials of figures like James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Radclyffe Hall loom large in accounts twentieth century literature. Filthy Material: Modernism and The Media of Obscenity reveals the ways that debates about obscenity and literature were shaped by changes in the history of media. Judgments about obscenity, which hinged on understanding how texts were circulated and read, were... more...

Guillaume de Machaut, the most important poet and musician of fourteenth-century France, had considerable influence on subsequent generations of writers in both France and England. With this scholarly translation, Minnette Gaudet and Constance B. Hieatt made his long-neglected narrative poem, the Dit de l’alerion – a treatise on love and falconry – available to students of medieval literature. In the poem, Machaut defines the... more...

Arabic literary salons emerged in ninth-century Iraq and, by the tenth, were flourishing in Baghdad and other urban centers. In an age before broadcast media and classroom education, salons were the primary source of entertainment and escape for middle- and upper-rank members of society, serving also as a space and means for educating the young. Although salons relied on a culture of oral performance from memory, scholars of Arabic literature have... more...

Hualien, on the Pacific coast of eastern Taiwan, and its mountains, especially Mount Qilai, were deeply inspirational for the young poet Yang Mu. A place of immense natural beauty and cultural heterogeneity, the city was also a site of extensive social, political, and cultural change in the twentieth century, from the Japanese occupation and the American bombings of World War II to the Chinese civil war, the White Terror, and the Cold War. Taken as a... more...

Citizenship defines the U.S. political experiment, but the modern legal category that it now names is a relatively recent invention. There was no Constitutional definition of citizenship until the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, almost a century after the Declaration of Independence. Civic Longing looks at the fascinating prehistory of U.S. citizenship in the years between the Revolution and the Civil War, when the... more...

Partners in Wonder revolutionizes our knowledge of women and early science fiction. Contrary to accepted interpretations, women fans and writers were a welcome and influential part of pulp science fiction from the birth of the genre. Davin finds that at least 203 female authors, under their own female names, published over a thousand stories in science fiction magazines between 1926 and 1965. This work explores the distinctly different form of science... more...

What is it about lawyers that has made them the butt of hundreds and hundreds of jokes over the centuries? Whatever the reason, everyone—including lawyers and judges themselves—has had a hearty chuckle over attorney-aimed humor. Hilarious Lawyer Jokes pokes the most fun (and malice) at a profession that has been targeted with humorous jabs for centuries. From this single hilarious source, with full-color illustrations, get your one-liners (Q: How... more...

In a series of articles published in Tait's Magazine in 1834, Thomas DeQuincey catalogued four potential instances of plagiarism in the work of his friend and literary competitor Samuel Taylor Coleridge. DeQuincey's charges and the controversy they ignited have shaped readers' responses to the work of such writers as Coleridge, Lord Byron, William Wordsworth, and John Clare ever since. But what did plagiarism mean some two hundred... more...