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| AFTER THE HEAVENLY TUNE : English Poetry & the Aspiration to Song [Marc Berley] This study is the first of its kind to analyze the large questions about poetic authority and musical aspiration. After the Heavenly Tune will appeal to a broad audience including Renaissance, classical, and romantic literary scholars; philosophers; musicologists; theologians; and general readers interested in English poetry and literature. After the Heavenly Tune offers an expansive answer to a basic question central to the history of poetry and poetics: what do poets mean when they write "I sing?" Beginning with the complex relationship between music and poetry in the West -defined and refined by Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Boethius, and Sidney-Berley then examines the writings of such major poets as Shakespeare, Milton, Yeats and Stevens, all of whom return to the Pythagorean idea of speculative music, or "the trope of song." After the Heavenly Tune offers not only groundbreaking studies of The Merchant of Venice and Milton's theory of prophecy, but also compelling new readings of romanticism, and the resolutions of modernism. Its range of insight, as well as application, is uniquely wide. REVIEW: "An impressive work... The provocative readings advanced so clearly and forcibly in these pages must be part of any future discussion of the sublime..." -- Diane Kelsey McColley, Rutgers University. "This book displays considerable scholarship, both in primary sources and in critical ones. Its history of the philosophy of music makes a new and thought-provoking contribution to the understanding of poetry as song..." Edward W Tayler, Columbia University. { 420pp, 155x235mm, January 2000; HB, £39.50, 0820703168:9780820703169 , Duquesne University Press } |
| AGE OF MILTON & THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION [Angelica Duran] Angelica Duran reveals the way in which Milton's works interacted with the revolutionary work of his contemporaries in science to participate in the dynamic "advancement of learning" of the time period. Bringing together primary materials by early modern scientists, including Robert Boyle, William Gilbert, William Harvey, Isaac Newton, John Ray, and John Wilkins as well as educational reformers such as Samuel Hartlib and Henry Oldenburg, "The Age of Milton and the Scientific Revolution" positions Milton's literature as a coequal partner with the new cosmological theories, mathematical developments, telescopes, and scientific tracts that so thoroughly affected every aspect of recorded life in seventeenth century England. Duran shows, for example, how new developments in ornithology worked to shape the Lady’s power in the young Milton’s celebratory 'A Mask', how mathematics informed the sexual relationship of Adam and Eve in his mature epic Paradise Lost, and how developments in optics transformed the blinded hero of the blind author’s moving tragedy Samson Agonistes. While this study is indebted to the work of historians of science -- from C. P. Snow and Thomas Kuhn to Stephen Shapin and Stephen Jay Gould -- it is not a history of science per se, but rather a cultural study that appreciates poetry as a unique lens through which early modern England’s large-scale developments in education and science are clarified and reflected. What emerges is an intimate sense of how the enormous changes of the English Scientific Revolution affected individual lives and found their ways into Milton’s enduring poetry and prose. { 349pp, 160x235mm, November 2006; HB, £38.99, 0820703869:9780820703862 , Duquesne University Press } |
| ASPECTS OF SUBJECTIVITY : Society & Individuality from the Middle Ages to Shakespeare & Milton [Anthony Low] This book focuses on representative literary works that illustrate turns in the history of individuality and subjectivity and the changes in ones relations with community and society. In conjunction with The Wanderer, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Everyman, The Faerie Queene, Hamlet and Paradise Lost, Low considers pertinent historical beliefs, attitudes, and practices including: the experience of loneliness and exile; the development of sacramental confession from communal reconciliation to personal absolution from sin; the abolition of Purgatory and the traditional Christian solidarity with the ancestral dead; the role of conscience in the development of self; and the rise in Shakespeare and Milton of a typically modern sense of autonomous individuality and subjectivity. { 275pp, 155x230mm, January 2003; HB, £39.99, 0820703370:9780820703374 , Duquesne University Press } |
| BALLOON LADY & OTHER PEOPLE I KNOW [Jeanne Marie Laskas] This is the first title in a new series Emerging Writers in Creative Nonfiction. This collection of sixteen essays encompasses a wide range of fascinating characters: Tom Cruise, Geraldo Rivera, the woman who pilots balloons, the man who trains and races pigs and many other extraordinary people. Jeanne Marie Laskas is a highly talented story teller who looks at the world from her unique perspective. REVIEW: "Jeanne Marie Laskas is a wonderful writer, smart as they come, and a real joy to read. Annie Dillard She has a truly distinctive voice and her writing is punchy, perceptive, and utterly without pretention. And she's so funny! She is cheerfully irreverent, and yet underneath there is a current of seriousness. And a wonderful ability to interweave apparently disparate elements..." -- Laurie Graham. { 178pp, 140x215mm, January 1996; PB, £11.50, 0820702668:9780820702667 / HB, £16.99, 0820702714:9780820702711 , Duquesne University Press } |
| BIBLE OF THE POOR : A Facsimile & Edition of the British Library Blockbook [Albert C Labriola & John W Smeltz (eds)] 'The Bible of the Poor', with translation and commentary by Labriola and Smeltz, reprints a 15th-century illustrated blockbook. The 40-leaf blockbook presents 120 illustrations of significant episodes in Scripture, each page contains three illustrations. These depict related scenes, and the biblical passages and interpretation on each page highlight the relationship between Old and New Testaments. The original text (now housed in the British Library) is written in Latin, and in this present volume transcriptions of the Latin text are included, as well as complete English translations. In the extensive commentary section Labriola and Smeltz identify important visual details in the illustrations, and discuss the typological significance of elements in the drawings. In addition, the two scholars point out the important connections made between the Old and New Testaments by the anonymous medieval compiler. This volume is the key to understanding how the Bible was taught in the Middle Ages, and illustrates how friars taught the fundamentals of the Christian faith to the ordinary people. It may also be seen as a handbook for meditation and spirituality, enabling the reader to develop a much deeper insight into the meaning of the Bible. { 190pp, 175x255mm, January 1990; PB, £15.99, 0820702307:9780820702308 , Duquesne University Press } |
| BY WAY OF INTERRUPTION : Levinas & the Ethics of Communication [Amit Pinchevski] This book presents a radically different way of thinking about communication ethics. While modern communication thought has traditionally viewed successful communication as ethically favourable, Pinchevski proposes the contrary: that ethical communication does not ultimately lie in the successful completion of communication but rather in its interruption; that is, in instances where communication falls short, goes astray, or even fails. Such interruptions, however, do not mark the end of the relationship, but rather its very beginning, for within this interruption communication faces the challenge of alterity. Drawing mainly on the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, Pinchevski explores the status of alterity in prevalent communication theories and Levinas’s philosophy of language and communication, especially his distinction between the Said and the Saying, and demonstrates the extent to which communication thought and practice have been preoccupied with the former while seeking to excommunicate the latter. Moving through topics and issues as diverse as the tower of Babel, childhood autism, and the exclusionary dimensions of free speech, Pinchevski illustrates how 'communication' attempts to locate itself as a transcendental mode of locution, which he then 'dislocates' in order to reveal the interruptive possibilities that are compromised by this very act. With a strong interdisciplinary spirit, this work book proposes an intellectual adventure of risk, uncertainty and the possibility of failure in thinking through the ethics of communication as experienced by an encounter with the Other. { 294pp, 155x230mm, December 2005; PB, £18.99, 0820703761:9780820703763 , Duquesne University Press } |
| CHERISHED TORMENT : The Emotional Geography of Lady Mary Wroth's Urania [Sheila T Cavanagh] Cherished Torment offers the first detailed account of the intellectual foundation of the first prose romance published by a woman in English: The Countess of Montgomery's Urania, written by Lady Mary Wroth, the niece of Sir Philip Sidney. Part one, printed in 1621, prompted an intense outcry due to Lady Mary Wroth's thinly veiled representation of actual events in the lives of prominent families. It was not republished until 1995. The remainder of Urania, published in 2000, marks the first opportunity for most readers to experience this 600,000-word romance firsthand. The Urania's lengthy text may initially appear daunting, but Cavanagh argues that the romance rewards its readers with a richly textured narrative that artfully engages with numerous aesthetic, literary and intellectual concerns from the early seventeenth century, including race relations, tensions between Christianity and the occult, global expansion and the composition of the universe. A sophisticated and erudite study, Cherished Torment moves beyond the intriguing and scandalous events of Wroth's personal life that have understandably captivated the attention of many modern readers to a closer look at the latter's masterful integration of the issues fueling her era's political, scientific and philosophical debates. Cavanagh's important study will enable readers to better recognize and appreciate Urania's intellectual heritage. REVIEW: "This is an original, learned and gracefully written study that treats Wroth's ‘Urania' with the rigor it deserves..." -- Margaret P Hannay, Professor of English, Siena College. { 287pp, 155x230mm, January 2001; HB, £39.99, 0820703206:9780820703206 , Duquesne University Press } |
| COLLECTED PHILOSOPHICAL PAPERS [Emmanuel Levinas] This collection, now available in an affordable paperback edition, contains eleven of the most significant articles written by Emmanuel Levinas. One of the most important philosophers of the phenomenological-existential tradition, Levinas further explored and developed each of his theses in the classic philosophical work Otherwise than Being, or, Beyond Essence. { 192pp, 150x230mm, January 1998; PB, £16.99, 0820703060:9780820703060 , Duquesne University Press } |
| DIFFERENT EXISTENCE : Principles of Phenomenological Psychopathology [J H Van Den Berg] { 141pp, 140x210mm, January 1973; PB, £10.99, 0820702447:9780820702445 , Duquesne University Press } |
| DISCOVERING & (RE)COVERING THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY LYRIC [Eugene R Cunnar & Jeffrey Johnson (eds)] The seventeenth century gave rise to the greatest flowering of the religious lyric in the English language. While the whole range of the devotional verse of the period is distinguished by its nuanced complexity concerning issues of theology, politics, and the historical circumstances of the individuals who produced these lyrics, modern criticism has neglected the vast majority of these works and their authors. The purpose of this volume, therefore, is to discover and (re)cover the devotional lyricists who have historically been overlooked altogether or dismissed as not belonging to the first order of poets. Precisely focused on that end, this collection contains 15 original essays that broaden our understanding of the seventeenth century religious lyric by examining the contributions of writers such as Robert Southwell, Aemilia Lanyer, William Alabaster, William Drummond, William Austin, Patrick Carey and others. Our view of seventeenth century literature cannot be complete or accurate unless we account for these neglected writers and their cultural roles in the development of the religious lyric. To that end, each of the essays in this volume seeks either explicitly or implicitly to make the canon more inclusive rather than exclusive. { 408pp, 155x230mm, January 2001; HB, £39.50, 0820703176:9780820703176 , Duquesne University Press } |
| DIVINE SUBJECTION : The Rhetoric of Devotion in Early Modern England [Gary Kuchar] Combining theoretically engaged analyses with historically contextualised close readings. Divine Subjection posits new ways of understanding the relations between devotional literature and early modern English culture. Shifting the critical discussion from a 'poetics' to a 'rhetoric' of devotion, Kuchar considers how a broad range of devotional and metadevotional texts in Catholic and mainstream Protestant traditions register and seek to mitigate processes of desacralisation -- the loss of legible commerce between heavenly and earthly orders. This shift in critical focus makes clear the extent to which early modern devotional writing engages with some of the period's most decisive theological conflicts and metaphysical crises. { 297pp, 155x230mm, May 2005; HB, £38.99, 0820703702:9780820703701 , Duquesne University Press } |
| DOMESTIC ARRANGEMENTS IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND [Kari Boyd McBride (ed)] This book provides a varied and rich array of perspectives on a wide range of early modern English social roles and relationships as well as cultural norms and areas of contestation. It demonstrates the many ways in which the attitudes and activities that pertain to the domestic sphere are not in any way peripheral to the study of the period -- domestic arrangements are political arrangements. This rich collection of 11 essays illuminates the many ways in which the domestic sphere served as a stage for playing out the pressing questions that perplexed the writers and thinkers of early modern England -- questions about family (householding, marriage, children and parenting), as well as questions about emerging political realities. While 'home' may seem to invoke blood ties-the mother with a child at her breast or siblings at play -- it is finally the bonds that replace blood that demand the mythos of domestic arrangements in all their variety -- from the legal, social, economic and cultural ties of marriage, sealed by the exchange of women from man to man and house to house, to the relationships of stepparents and stepchildren, to the even more tenuous ties that bind class to class and citizen to citizen. { 265pp, January 2002; HB, £39.99, 0820703249:9780820703244 , Duquesne University Press } |
| DRIVEN BACK TO THE TEXT : The Premodern Sources of Levinas's Postmodernism [Oona Ajzenstat] The first extended study to discuss Levinas both as a Jew and a Philosopher. { 388pp, 155x230mm, January 2001; HB, £35.99, 0820703257:9780820703251 , Duquesne University Press } |
| EMMANUEL LEVINAS : His Life & Legacy [Salomon Malka; Translated by Michael Kigel & Sonja M Embree] Originally published in French, this book provides the only in-depth biography to appear in English of this interesting thinker, whose influence has continued to grow since his death in 1995. This informative biography follows the ascent of Emmanuel Levinas from solitary thinker to one who is universally influential, and includes personal accounts of his family, friends, colleagues and students. It is essential reading for all those interested in Levinas and his thought, but also for anyone who wishes to better understand contemporary continental thought and its foundations and implications. { 330pp, 140x215mm, June 2006; HB, £39.99, 0820703575:9780820703572 , Duquesne University Press } |
| ENCOUNTERING THE OTHER : The Artwork & the Problem of Difference in Blanchot & Levinas [Alain P Toumayan] Two of the most creative and compelling thinkers of the second half of the 20th century, Maurice Blanchot and Emmanuel Levinas, first encountered each other in the 1920s and began a friendship that was to span over seven decades. Their subsequent exchange of ideas and shared concerns, as well as their significant differences and influence on one another, have profound implications for the work of each. This work represents the most sustained analysis to date of the intersections of structure and content in Blanchot and Levinas's most representative and complex works { 231pp, 155x230mm, January 2004; PB, £15.50, 0820703486:9780820703480 / HB, £39.99, 0820703478:9780820703473 , Duquesne University Press } |
| ESSEX HOUSE MASQUE OF 1621 : Viscount Doncaster & the Jacobean Masque [Timothy Raylor] In the winter of 1621, in the early years of the crisis that became the Thirty Years War, a French ambassador came to London on a high-profile diplomatic visit. Though his mission was ostensibly to convey greetings from his monarch to King James I, the ambassador's true purpose was to arrest the growth of Spanish power in Europe by keeping England from aiding rebel Protestants in France and by discouraging English plans for a Spanish marriage. The ambassador was lavishly entertained with a series of feasts, banquets and masques. One of these masques was presented at Whitehall on behalf of the king; the other was presented for the king, court and visiting ambassador at Essex House, the London residence of James Hay, Viscount Doncaster. The Essex House Masque of 1621 presents an annotated critical edition of the recently discovered manuscript text of that masque. { 204pp, 155x230mm, January 2000; HB, £38.99, 0820703109:9780820703107 , Duquesne University Press } |
| ETHICS & INFINITY : Conversations with Philippe Nemo [Emmanuel Levinas] Levinas brings together the phenomenology of Husserl, the fundamental ontology of Heidegger, and the Bible. This book highlights his modesty and reserve and, above all, his rigor. It is ‘the best introduction' to his work. Chapters Include: Bible and Philosophy; Heidegger; The 'There Is'; The Solitude of Being; Love and Filiation; Secrecy and Freedom; Responsibility for the Other; The Glory of Testimony; The Hardness of Philosophy and the Consolations of Religion. REVIEW: "Levinas is one of those writers we like so much that we envy those who have not yet read him and so still have in store for themselves the pleasure of discovering him .[and] his conversations with Nemo, which, by their demanding simplicity, constitute the best possible introduction to his work..." -- Le Monde. { 126pp, 140x215mm, January 1985; PB, £11.50, 0820701785:9780820701783 , Duquesne University Press } |
| ETHICS AT A STANDSTILL : History & Subjectivity in Levinas & the Frankfurt School [Asher Horowitz] Asher Horowitz explores the philosophies of Levinas and the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School, demonstrating the ways in which their works diverge from and complement each other. As Horowitz explains, the manner in which these thinkers are here related to each other resembles Adorno's suggestion, or even program, for thinking in constellations. Demonstrating an authoritative command of both the thinkers themselves -- including Benjamin, Horkheimer, and Marcuse -- and the various philosophical contexts (German idealism, phenomenology, Marxism, psychoanalysis) in which they are embedded, Horowitz offers a politically thoughtful and philosophically provocative analysis based on a wide range of texts and a critical reconstruction and confrontation between the positions. While a few studies have previously addressed the philosophical relationship between Levinas and Adorno, in particular, Ethics at a Standstill is unique in arguing that each of these ways of thinking calls forth from the other, respectively, a social-critical and ethical supplement that is insufficiently developed in their own work. { 404pp, 155x230mm, February 2008; HB, £38.99, 0820704075:9780820704074 / PB, £16.99, 0820704083:9780820704081 , Duquesne University Press } |
| EXISTENCE & EXISTENTS [Emmanuel Levinas] Existence and Existents was written mostly during Levinas's imprisonment in World War II, and provides the first sketch of his mature thought -- later developed in Totality and Infinity and Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essence (also published by Duquesne University Press). Levinas's project in Existence and Existents is to move from anonymous existence to the emergence of subjectivity; to subjectivity's practice, theory and morality; to its encounter with the alterity of the other person. He is concerned here primarily with the time of the solitary subject; time is the inner structure of subjectivity, of the movement of existing. Existence and Existents introduces the major themes and concerns that occupied Levinas throughout his career. It is essential reading for understanding both Levinas's own philosophy and the developments in philosophical thought in the twentieth century. { 113pp, 140x215mm, January 2001; PB, £12.99, 0820703192:9780820703190 , Duquesne University Press } |
| FEIGNED COMMONWEALTHS : The Country-House Poem & the Fashioning of the Ideal Community [Hugh Jenkins] This wide-ranging treatment of the country-house poem greatly expands the parameters of earlier discussions of the topic and is the first book-length study of the country-house poem in some twenty years. The author persuasively demonstrates that far from being a rather narrow and short-lived genre, the country-house poem was the locus of a whole series of important cultural mediations between city and country, private and public, drama and novel. Also included in this work is a wealth of material that has not previously been associated with the genre, notably Comus, The Country Wife, The Alchemist, and Robinson Crusoe. { 265pp, 155x230mm, January 1998; HB, £31.99, 0820702927:9780820702926 , Duquesne University Press } |
| FIRST INTRODUCTION TO EXISTENTIAL PHENOMENOLOGY [William A Luijpen & Henry J Koren] { 242pp, 140x215mm, January 1969; PB, £12.50, 0820701106:9780820701103 , Duquesne University Press } |
| FREUD'S TRAUMATIC MEMORY : Reclaiming Seduction Theory & Revisiting Oedipus [Mary Marcel] This study is a comprehensive analysis of both the original Oedipus myths and the Greek myths of father-daughter incest. Marcel applies the most recent clinical work on trauma and recovered memory to Freud's own memories and uncovers why Freud turned away from the seduction theory, misconstrued Oedipus, and was able to cure his own neurosis. { 221pp, 155x230mm, February 2005; PB, £16.99, 0820703656:9780820703657 / HB, £37.50, 0820703648:9780820703640 , Duquesne University Press } |
| GENDER & THE POWER OF RELATIONSHIP : 'United as one individual soul' in Paradise Lost [Kristin A Pruitt] In this provocative study, the author offers a close reading of pivotal passages and critical concerns in 'Paradise Lost' and examines Milton's presentation of Adam and Eve's relationship through the intersections of theology and gender in the poem. Pruitt demonstrates the Miltonic 'marriage' of theme and structure through an emphasis on the dynamic and restorative power of relationships. { 196pp, 155x230mm, September 2003; HB, £39.99, 0820703400:9780820703404 , Duquesne University Press } |
| HEIDEGGER'S JEWISH FOLLOWERS : Essays on Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, Hans Jonas & Emmanuel Levinas [Samuel Fleischacker (ed)] Given Heidegger's eventual alliance with Nazism -- which many scholars feel had its roots in his thought from its inception -- it is remarkable that many of his students and followers were Jews. "Heidegger's Jewish Followers" addresses very important and relatively unexplored questions, namely, in what way did Heidegger's thought affect his most prominent Jewish students, and how did they respond to this influence? By focusing on four students who certainly came to be important philosophical figures in their own right -- Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, Hans Jonas, and Emmanuel Levinas -- these essays by a wide range of scholars weave together philosophical analysis, religious tradition, and historical background. { 302pp, 155x230mm, August 2008; HB, £37.50, 0820704121:9780820704128 / PB, £15.50, 0820704148:9780820704142 , Duquesne University Press } |
| HEIDEGGER'S PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION : From God to the Gods [Ben Vedder] Provides the first book-length study on Heidegger’s relation to the philosophy of religion, offering greater accessibility into an area that continues to fascinate philosophers, theologians, and all those interested in the philosophy of religion. The book deals intimately with hotly debated topics such as Heidegger’s interpretation of Saint Paul, Nietzsche and the death of God, ontotheology, and Heidegger’s discussion of the 'last god', taking into account the early, middle, and later texts of Heidegger. Significantly, Vedder draws heavily on Heidegger’s 'The Phenomenology of Religious Life', long available in German, but only recently available to English readers. Vedder describes the tension between religion and philosophy, on the one hand, and religion and poetic expression, on the other. If we grasp religion completely from a philosophical point of view, we tend to neutralise it; but if we conceive it in a simply poetic way, we tend to be philosophically indifferent to it. Vedder demonstrates how Heidegger speaks a 'poetry of religion', a description of humanity’s relationship to the divine, and why Heidegger’s thinking is ultimately a theological thinking. { 336pp, 155x230mm, December 2006; PB, £14.50, 0820703893:9780820703893 / HB, £39.99, 0820703885:9780820703886 , Duquesne University Press } |
| HIDDENNESS & ALTERITY : Philosophical & Literary Sightings of the Unseen [James Richard Mensch] In spite of the injunction of philosophy to "know oneself", we realise that we often act from mo-tives that are obscure; we realise that we often do not fully understand how we feel or react. In short, we understand ourselves as not completely knowable. In attempting to know ourselves, we recognize that some aspects of ourselves -- not unlike when we try to know others -- are hidden from us. Mensch seeks to de-fine how the hidden shows itself. In pursuing this issue, Mensch also raises a parallel one regarding the nature and origin of our self-concealment. In developing the theme of the exceeding quality of selfhood, in which part of our self is truly "other", Mensch presents a unified theory of alterity. He examines how our acknowledgment (and suppression) of the other shapes our thought in ethics, politics, epistemology and theology. Further, he demonstrates such "sightings of the unseen" through original readings of the major figures of the phenomenological movement: Husserl, Levinas, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Nietzsche, Lacan and Fackenheim. He draws further on works by Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad to examine the inherent alterity of our flesh and its implications for the ways in which we relate to the world around us. { 270pp, 155x230mm, April 2005; PB, £17.50, 0820703672:9780820703671 / HB, £37.99, 0820703664:9780820703664 , Duquesne University Press } |
| HORRID SPECTACLE : Violation in the Theater of Early Modern England [Deborah G Burks] Literate -- and political -- early modern England was a socially diverse nation to which London's theatres contributed politically inflected art and entertainment; torture, murder and infidelity were graphically depicted on the stage. This study of violation -- one of the most potent, ubiquitous, and durable tropes of the English reformation -- explores the connections between these theatrical representations and the use of violation imagery in a range of public and private discourses, from Protestant polemic, parliamentary legislation and political pamphlets, to aristocratic letters, royalist fiction and 'regicidal' histories. Burks considers private and political writing alongside literary texts; the disparate motives, modes of address and methods of transmission of each type of writing thus serve as foils for one another. Burks also places women writers in the company of their male peerswithout segregating or prioritising either gender group. The book is unusual for being a study of Restoration drama that understands the period from 1660 to 1684 not as a starting moment (of the 'long' 18th century), but as a reasonable ending point in a consideration of the English Reformation's literary and political afterlives. { 456pp, 155x230mm, June 2004; HB, £39.99, 0820703419:9780820703411 , Duquesne University Press } |
| HUMAN SCIENCE OF COMMUNICOLOGY : A Phenomenology of Discourse in Foucault & Merleau-Ponty [Richard L Lanigan] { 273pp, 155x230mm, January 1992; HB, £23.50, 0820702420:9780820702421 , Duquesne University Press } |
| IMAGINING BODIES : Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy of Imagination [James B Steeves] The book demonstrates how Maurice Merleau-Pobty's understanding of the body has broad implications for philosophy, aesthetics and the social sciences. By examining Merleau-Ponty's analysis of the body as a dialectic of habituation and creativity, Steeves unveils a deeper relation between self and the world that is meditated by images of embodiment. This creative embodiment forms the basis for all forms of imagining, including fanciful thinking, perception, aesthetic production and psychopathology. The book is a testament to the importance of the body and the imagination of our perception of reality at a time when the philosophy of the body is associated with metaphysical presence. { 206pp, 155x230mm, July 2004; HB, £38.99, 0820703427:9780820703428 , Duquesne University Press } |
| IN THE MARGINS OF DECONSTRUCTION : Jewish Conceptions of Ethics in Emmanuel Levinas & Jacques Derrida [Martin C Srajek] This work is an exceptionally rich account both of the connections and divergences between Levinas and Derrida as ethical thinkers. Against the backdrop of nineteenth and twentieth century philosophy and phenomenology, Srajek draws on Hermann Cohen's ethics of correlation so as to demonstrate how far it is possible to read Levinas and Derrida as constructing similar approaches to ethics. REVIEW: "...A ‘must read' for anyone interested in an original, meticulously researched discussion of these issues. Indeed, Srajek reveals an impressive control of the history of philosophy, of Biblical sources and of the structuralist and poststructuralist controversies that have animated recent French thought..." -- Edith Wyschogrod, Rayzor Professor of Philosophy and Religious Thought, Rice University. { 364pp, 155x230mm, January 2000; PB, £16.99, 0820703125:9780820703121 , Duquesne University Press } |
| INTERROGATING ETHICS : Embodying the Good in Merleau-Ponty [James Hatley, Janice McLane & Christian Diehm (eds)] The essays in this unique and timely volume focus on our embodied responsiveness to others, particularly as this is illuminated in the thought of French phenomenologist and psychologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Long an under-acknowledged influence on much contemporary thought, Merleau-Ponty’s work informs not only philosophy and psychology, but anthropology, visual art, dance and many other fields. 'Interrogating Ethics' now makes clear his influence on ethical theory and argues for a renewed sense of the ethical. In drawing out the many facets of ethical responsibility suggested by Merleau-Ponty’s writings, contributors here turn to the fields of aesthetics, political theory, developmental and depth psychology, interfaith relations, literary criticism, feminist and ecological critique, as well as to practices of phenomenological description, hermeneutical analysis and deconstructive reading. Merleau-Ponty is shown to be an ethical thinker, albeit one who poses the question of ethics and our interactions with others indirectly, implicitly offering a post-modern critique of the Enlightenment attempt to devise an ethics founded confidently and straightforwardly upon the autonomy of individual subjects. However, Merleau-Ponty’s careful account of lived and embodied responsibility does not render the ethical subject merely contingent or even superfluous, as many post-modern approaches have. Articles by both established Merleau-Ponty scholars and relative newcomers explore Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of human subjectivity, corporeality and active engagement in the world. From presentations of Merleau-Ponty’s convergences and divergences with his predecessors, to lively discussions of issues as contemporary as the significance of his thought for environmental ethics, these essays capture the depth and breadth of Merleau-Ponty’s significance to conversations about ethics, but also suggest the rich opportunities for much exploration still to be done in both interpreting and understanding this essential thinker. { 386pp, 155x230mm, June 2006; PB, £16.99, 0820703834:9780820703831 / HB, £46.99, 0820703826:9780820703824 , Duquesne University Press } |
| JOHN DONNE : An Annotated Bibliography of Modern Criticism, 1979-1995 [John R Roberts] The book covers a 17 year period (1979-1995) in John Donne studies and criticism. This third bibliography on Donne is a continuation of two bibliographies previously compiled by noted Donne scholar John R Roberts, spanning the years 1912-1978. Included are more than 1600 entries of descriptive annotations wherein Roberts quotes extensively from each item in order to convey a sense of its approach and the level of its critical sophistication and complexity. Entires are organised chronologically, and within each year, alphabetically by author. The bibliography contains annotations on books, monographs, essays, editions, poetry, prose and notes specifically on Donne published between 1979 and 1995; discussions of Donne that appear in studies not centrally concerned with him that add to our knowledge, understanding and appreciation of his life and work; translations into foreign languages; and editions and translations of Donne's own works as well as criticism and interpretation of Donne. The informative and concise annotations provide not only a summary of content but also indicate the critical approaches and themes under discussion. { 605pp, 180x255mm, June 2004; HB, £96.99, 0820703532:9780820703534 , Duquesne University Press } |
| JOHN DONNE'S 1622 GUNPOWDER PLOT SERMON : A Parallel-Text Edition [Jeanne Shami] This volume presents the only ‘authorial' manuscript ever discovered for any of John Donne's sermons. Jeanne Shami's discovery of this manuscript in the British Library's Royal Manuscripts Collection -- as a miscellaneous and unattributed sermon text -- is indeed a cause for celebration among Donne scholars. Manuscript sources exist for only 16 of Donne's 160 sermons, and this is the first to be identified as corrected in his own hand. The implications of Shami's discovery are profound. Transcribed immediately after Donne delivered the sermon on November 5th, 1622, this manuscript version and its corrections give us important new information about Donne's habits of composition and revision. In addition, the existence of an authorial manuscript version requires us to reconsider the textual status of George Potter and Evelyn Simpson's ten-volume California edition of Donne's sermons published in 1962. Their edition has, to date, been relied upon as ‘definitive.' Potter and Simpson's version was based on the only printed version of this sermon in Fifty Sermons printed in 1649. The substantive differences between this newly discovered manuscript and the version printed in 1649 reveal much about the political considerations impinging on Donne in 1622. The revisions suggest that he changed his sermons for stylistic and rhetorical reasons but also for political ones, and that his intentions for the sermons may have changed over time. { 200pp, 180x260mm, January 1996; HB, £29.99, 0820702617:9780820702612 , Duquesne University Press } |
| JOHN MILTON'S WRITINGS IN THE ANGLO-DUTCH NEGOTIATIONS 1651-1654 [Leo Miller] { 341pp, 155x230mm, January 1992; HB, £31.99, 0820702323:9780820702322 , Duquesne University Press } |
| LAST SETTLERS [Jennifer Brice & Charles Mason] When Jennifer Brice and Charles Mason began this project in 1991, examining the lives of two 20th century pioneer families in the Alaskan wilderness, neither realized that they were documenting the ending of American migration to the frontier. In 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner declared the closing of the American frontier, because westering settlement was lapping at the shore of the Pacific Ocean. However, the federal Homestead Act remained in effect for nearly a century in Alaska, and in 1934 the Homesite Act was enacted, providing up to five acres of preselected land to settlers committed to living on it. In 1981, blocks of land totalling 30,000 acres near Lake Minchumina were opened to homesites, businesses and mineral leases. Two Years later, 10,250 acres in eastern Alaska, near the Ahtna village of Slana, were opened to settlement as well. Would-be settlers besieged the Fairbanks office of the Bureau of Land Management with letters and phone calls. Over time, however, the hype and the illusions have faded. Fewer than 100 people now make their homes on what is truly the last federal frontier. Of these few last settlers, two families, the Hannans and the Spears, are at the centre of this clear, unsentimental portrait of people whose daily existence is forged out of the crucible of myth. The wilderness surrounding Minchumina and Slana has little in common with conventional beauty, this book tells us. Some patches of it, as Brice says, look downright blighted, bringing to mind the prophet Jeremiah's description of wilderness that was ‘desolate because no man layeth it to heart.' The Last Settlers is the story of unbeautiful land and the people who have laid it to heart. { January 1998; PB, £11.50, 0820702919:9780820702919 / HB, £16.99, 0820702900:9780820702902 , Duquesne University Press } |
| LEVINAS & BUBER : Dialogue & Difference [Peter Atterton et al (eds)] Emmanuel Levinas and Martin Buber -- considered by many the most important Jewish philosophers since the 12th century sage Maimonides -- knew each other as associates and friends. Yet although their dialogue was instructive at times, and demonstrated the esteem in which Levinas held Buber, in particular, their relationship just as often exhibited a failure to communicate. This volume of essays is intended to resume the important dialogue between the two. Thriteen essays by a wide range of scholars do not attempt to assimilate the two philosopher's respective views to each other. Rather, these discussions provide an occasion to examine their genuine differences -- difference that both Levinas and Buber agreed were required for genuine dialogue to begin. { 325pp, 155x230mm, December 2004; HB, £35.50, 0820703494:9780820703497 / PB, £16.99, 0820703516:9780820703510 , Duquesne University Press } |
| LEVINAS BETWEEN ETHICS & POLITICS : For the Beauty that Adorns the Earth [Bettina Bergo] Now available in paperback, this volume traces the unfolding of Levinas's phenomenology into his hermenutics of subjectivity, focusing on two major works, Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence with a view toward sketching the destiny of a phenomenology of ethical intersubjectivity. This work provides both an insight into the evolution of Levinas's work and a clear, critical perspective on the shortcomings of the use of phenomenology in ethics. In addition, Bergo demonstrates the difficulties for postmodern thought found in the relationship between ethics and politics. { 309pp, 150x225mm, January 2002; PB, £16.99, 0820703346:9780820703343 , Duquesne University Press } |
| LITERATURE & SACRAMENT : The Sacred & the Secular in John Donne [Theresa DiPasquale] John Donne was deeply involved in the theological and ideological debates of his time. In this innovative study, Theresa DiPasquale explores the literary implications of that engagement. DiPasquale argues that Donne was greatly influenced by his response to the Reformation debate over the sacraments -- Baptism and the Eucharist -- in formulating his understanding of the written word as visible sign, of the poet as the quasi-divine maker of that sign, and of the reader and its receiver. Structured around close readings of Donne's poems, Literature and Sacrament considers poems, especially of a secular nature, that have not been previously viewed from this perspective. REVIEW: ".the author shows a critical respect for the language of poetry which is in itself a virtue of some rarity. Neil Rhodes, MLR. This is the first comprehensive and detailed study of Donne's sacramental theology and its implications in the broad range of his poetry, secular and sacred, and prose works, including the sermons, several so-called meditations, and other treatises..." -- Choice. { 338pp, 155x230mm, April 1999; HB, £38.99, 0820703095:9780820703091 , Duquesne University Press } |
| LEVINAS STUDIES, VOLUME 1 : An Annual Review [Jeffrey Bloechl & Jeffrey L Kosky (eds)] This book is dedicated to scholarly work on the innovations and implications of the thought of Emmanuel Levinas. One volume of original essays will appear each year, edited by series director Jeffrey Bloechl, aided by an international editorial board. The series invites papers contributing to the advancement of reflection on Levinas’s thinking, in its pertinence for fields including philosophy, psychology, religious studies, theology, and the study of literature. { 211pp, 155x230mm, April 2006; HB, £37.50, 0820703710:9780820703718 , Duquesne University Press } |
| LEVINAS STUDIES, VOLUME 2 : An Annual Review [Jeffrey Bloechl (ed)] This volume includes essays examining Levinas’s relation to the history of philosophy and his own philosophy of history, by established interpreters of Levinas and his interlocutors -- both well known (including Spinoza, Hegel and Heidegger) and less known (Kabbalah, Rousseau, Schelling). Contributors include: Jacques Taminiaux, Jean-Marc Narbonne, Jacob Meskin, Martin Kavka, Peter Atterton, Claire Katz, Michael Juffé, Joseph Lawrence, and Adriaan Peperzak. { 250pp, 155x230mm, May 2007; HB, £37.50, 0820703850:9780820703855 , Duquesne University Press } |
| LEVINAS STUDIES : Volume 3: An Annual Review [Jeffrey Bloechl (ed)] This volume contains essays probing Levinas's thought as it develops a theory of ethical politics capable of attending to themes such as community, statehood, peace, and violence, as well as others examining the relation of that theory to the work of contemporary political philosophers including Antonio Negri, Charles Taylor, and Simone Weil. The volume begins with an interview with Levinas hitherto published only in Dutch. { 240pp, 155x230mm, June 2008; HB, £37.50, 0820704067:9780820704067 , Duquesne University Press } |
| LITURGY OF THE NEIGHBOR : Emmanuel Levinas & the Religion of Responsibility [Jeffrey Bloechl] This study offers a comprehensive and critical analysis of Levinas's philosophy of religion, in dialogue with phenomenology and with attention to morality and theology. It is the first such book-length study of the topic in English. REVIEW: "There is much to applaud in this work, much that is novel. It is a book that will be treasured..." -- Robert Bernasconi, Moss Chair of Excellence in Philosophy, University of Memphis. "This book is the first precise and detailed analysis of Levinas's oeuvre, including its relations to Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre from the perspective of religion. It is an original and highly valuable contribution to the understanding of Levinas's philosophy..." -- Adriaan Peperzak, Schmitt Professor of Philosophy, Loyola University. { 354pp, 155x230mm, January 2000; HB, £36.99, 0820703117:9780820703114 , Duquesne University Press } |
| MELVILLE & MILTON : An Edition & Analysis of Melville's Annotations on Milton [Robin Grey (ed)] Nearly two decades ago, Herman Melville's marked and annotated copy of John Milton's poetry first came to light. This was the most substantial and tangible evidence of the deep connection between the two authors since Henry R Pommer's speculative study on Melville and Milton was published half a century ago. This is the only book-length work covering these two writers on the market. Featuring a forward by John Bryant, this study brings together both Melville and Milton scholars in the same text, and makes available the important artistic connections between the two great authors. For Milton scholars, this study shows Milton's very vital artistic and theological 'afterlife' in America. For Melville scholars, this book shows Melville in American culture and history, his influence on studies in textuality and performivity and in theology and literary genre. { 210pp, 155x230mm, July 2004; HB, £38.99, 0820703524:9780820703527 , Duquesne University Press } |
| MILTON & THE PREACHING ARTS [Jameela Lares] This groundbreaking study demonstrates the extent to which Milton's work reflects the dominant discursive mode of his age: preaching. It challenges the assumption that Milton the poet paid no attention to the ministerial training of his past. { 352pp, 155x230mm, January 2001; HB, £38.99, 0820703184:9780820703183 , Duquesne University Press } |
| MILTON & THE RHETORIC OF ZEAL [Thomas Kranidas] Milton's radically aggressive English prose emerged from a dynamic rhetorical milieu. A rhetoric of radical excess developed among the Puritan wing of English Protestantism throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, scriptural injunctions to will the sword of the spirit against the enemies of the Lord. The first part of Kranidas's study demonstrates the widespread acceptance of the attack on 'lukewarmness' and the celebration of a passionate and immoderate commitment to action against the Laudian campaign for 'Holy Decency', the reform of ritual and discipline generally in the Church of England. The book then turns to an analysis of Milton's antiprelatical tracts, with particular, but not exclusive, reference to the tradition of zeal. The book ends with a brief coda that argues the similarities of radical Puritan rhetoric and the rhetoric of the radical American movement of the 1960s and 1970s. { 255pp, 155x230mm, April 2005; HB, £38.99, 0820703613:9780820703619 , Duquesne University Press } |
| MILTON AMONG THE ROMANS : The Pedagogy & Influence of Milton's Latin Curriculum [Richard J DuRocher] In the 1640's, John Milton led a group of students through an extensive curriculum of ancient authors. In Milton Among the Romans, DuRocher provides the first scholarly study of Milton's Latin tutorial by tracing the reshaping of Roman ideas and expressions in Milton's poetry. Drawing upon previously unexamined evidence from Milton's classical curriculum, this book takes a new approach to Milton as a teacher, scholar and poet. It is necessary reading for Milton scholars and students of the classics. Milton Among the Romans is part of the Medieval and Renaissance Literary Studies series. { 210pp, 160x235mm, January 2002; HB, £38.99, 0820703281:9780820703282 , Duquesne University Press } |
| MILTON IN THE AGE OF FISH : Essays on Authorship, Text & Terrorism [Michael Lieb & Albert C Labriola (eds)] This multi-author collection by some of today’s most pre-eminent Miltonists highlights the paramount importance of Stanley Fish to Milton studies and, at the same time, provides major insights into the nature of Milton’s works. As a force to be reckoned with, Stanley Fish is among the most frequently cited commentators on Milton, testimony to his indelible imprint on the field. Of significance not only to Miltonists but also to critical and cultural theorists, this volume explains and exemplifies how many of the lines of inquiry that distinguish present-day scholarship were initiated by Stanley Fish. Fish validated the role of the reader as a major participant, if not a "character", in the works of Milton and struck a balance between historical study and explication of the text, thereby emphasising the interplay of the text and its context. His writings on Milton have also led to the ongoing controversy over Milton and terrorism and promoted intensive analysis of Milton's language and its connotative richness and tonal range. By fostering critical and cultural theories in the study of Milton’s works, Fish has heightened awareness of the aesthetics of literary achievement. { 320pp, 155x230mm, October 2006; HB, £39.99, 0820703842:9780820703848 , Duquesne University Press } |
| NATURE'S CRUEL STEPDAMES : Murderous Women in the Street Literature of Seventeenth Century England [Susan C Staub] A unique selection of seventeenth century pamphlets revealing the populars press' obsessive concern with female violence -- a violence that is almost always domestic -- is presented in this book, along with a discussion of the texts' historical and cultural contexts. Modernised and annotated, these pamphlets vividly illustrate the precarious and often contradictory legal position of the early modern English woman. Because the early modern woman was so thoroughly defined by her marital status (either married or to be married), the crimes chronicled in this study -- infanticide, child murder and husband murder -- focus almost exclusively on women's roles as wives and mothers. { 356pp, 155x230mm, March 2005; HB, £39.99, 0820703567:9780820703565 , Duquesne University Press } |
| NEAR BREATHING : A Memoir of a Difficult Birth [Kathryn Rhett] Near Breathing is the story of a difficult and transformative birth experience. Rather than the ‘perfect birth' the author can later imagine, she and her husband instead experience the near-death of their infant daughter. As the baby is attended by a bewildering team of specialists in the neonatal intensive care unit, attached to a respirator and other machines, Kathryn Rhett finds that she is forced to confront her own ideas about bravery and beauty, family and love. Beginning with labour and delivery, Rhett describes her experiences in clear-eyed detail. She finds that she herself is hardly breathing as she sits by her child's bed in ICU, attending to the strange duties of mothers in situation: making phone calls, reading medical articles, handling family visitors, and pumping breastmilk for a day when her baby might drink it. Life has constricted to a flourescent-lit room filled with monitors. Only later, when her daughter comes home, can she begin to articulate the significance of what has happened. Near Breathing is a love letter, from a mother to the daughter she nearly lost. { 215pp, 140x215mm, January 1998; PB, £11.50, 0820702781:9780820702780 , Duquesne University Press } |
| NEW TALMUDIC READINGS [Emmanuel Levinas; Translated by Richard A Cohen] This small but important volume contains three of Emmanuel Levinas's last major lectures on the Talmud, originally presented in 1974, 1988 and 1989. These three readings continue and augment much of Levinas's thought as presented in the earlier works: Nine Talmudic Readings In the Time of the Nations and Beyond Verse. Originally compiled and published in French in early 1996, New Talmudic Readings includes the lectures, The Will of Heaven and the Power of Men, Beyond the State in the State, and Who is Oneself? { 133pp, 155x230mm, January 1999; PB, £12.99, 0820704032:9780820704036 , Duquesne University Press } |
| ONTOLOGICAL STUDY OF DEATH : From Hegel to Heidegger [Sean Ireton] Examines conceptions of death as manifested in German literature and philosophy from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, expanding on thanatological theories that distinguish between a metaphysical and an ontological view of human finitude. Whereas metaphysics separates life from death and posits a transcendent reality beyond the physical world, the ontological perspective integrates death into the very core of being where it functions as a fundamental phenomenon of life. Though primarily focused on the Germanic tradition, Ireton’s study also addresses the modern French philosophical treatment of death by Blanchot, Kojève, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Foucault in the wake of their German predecessors. Ireton concludes by placing the dialectical and existential views discussed in his study within the context of modern thanatology, specifically demonstrating how themes of human finitude and freedom have a direct bearing on the current debate surrounding the dignity of death and the right to die. { 326pp, 155x230mm, May 2007; PB, £16.99, 0820703974:9780820703978 / HB, £46.99, 0820703966:9780820703961 , Duquesne University Press } |
| OTHERWISE THAN BEING, OR, BEYOND ESSENCE [Emmanuel Levinas] A sequel to Levinas's Totality and Infinity, this work is generally considered Levinas's most important contribution to the contemporary debate surrounding the closure of metaphysical discourse, much commented upon by Jacques Derrida. This work contains a fundamentally original theory of the ethical relationship and describes the face-to-face relationship, sensibility, responsibility and speech. Renowned Levinas scholar Richard A. Cohen has contributed a new foreword to this edition of Otherwise than Being, which is also the first time the work is available in an affordable paperback edition. This foreword, along with Alphonso Lingis's extensive introduction to the work, is a valuable tool for researchers and students of Levinas's philosophy. { 205pp, 155x230mm, January 1999; PB, £15.50, 0820702994:9780820702995 , Duquesne University Press } |
| PARADISE LOST -- A POEM WRITTEN IN TEN BOOKS : An Authoritative Text of the 1667 First Edition [John T Shawcross & Michael Lieb (eds)] This is the first such presentation of the first edition of this major epic of English literature. Shawcross and Lieb have sought to underscore the significance of the epic as Milton originally conceived it. Indeed, the 1667 edition is, in many respects, a unique document. Constructed as a 10-book version, the edition is a finished piece that is architecturally and numerically balanced, significantly differing from the now-standard 1674 version that appeared in 12 books. With scrupulous attention to detail, Shawcross and Lieb examine the numerous changes to Milton's epic in the course of its printing and address the way in which so-called facsimile editions are, in fact, faulty because they offer texts that were either silently altered or are, in effect, composites of various textual states. This edition of the 1667 text also provides the opportunity to view the second edition of 1674 from a fresh perspective. Order this volume separately or with its companion volume, "Paradise Lost: A Poem Written in Ten Books: Essays on the 1667 First Edition" (9780820703931). { 456pp, 180x260mm, November 2007; HB, £39.99, 0820703923:9780820703923 , Duquesne University Press } |
| PARADISE LOST -- A POEM WRITTEN IN TEN BOOKS : Essays on the 1667 First Edition [Michael Lieb & John T Shawcross (eds)] Appearing in tandem with the first publication of an authoritative text of the 1667 first edition of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, these insightful essays by ten Miltonists establish the significant differences in the text, context, and effect of the first edition of Paradise Lost from those of the now-standard second edition of 1674. This book represents the first and only collection of original essays on the subject of the 1667 edition of Milton’s major epic. The essays gathered here encompass a wide range of interest, extending from matters of text to matters of historical and literary context. These scholars also discuss the epic’s relationship to the literary and theological world it entered in 1667, which has been overlooked as readers have examined only the second edition. Order this volume separately or with its companion volume, "Paradise Lost: A Poem Written in Ten Books": An Authoritative Text of the 1667 First Edition. { 288pp, 180x260mm, November 2007; HB, £39.99, 0820703931:9780820703930 , Duquesne University Press } |
| PARADISE LOST -- A POEM WRITTEN IN TEN BOOKS: 2 VOLUME SET : Text & Essays [John T Shawcross & Michael Lieb (eds)] This two-volume set includes "Paradise Lost: A Poem Written in Ten Books: An Authoritative Text of the 1667 First Edition" and its companion volume, "Paradise Lost: A Poem Written in Ten Books: Essays on the 1667 First Edition" { 744pp, 180x260mm, September 2007; HB, £66.99, 0820704040:9780820704043 , Duquesne University Press } |
| PHENOMENOLOGY & PSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH [Amedeo Giorgi (ed)] { 216pp, 150x225mm, January 1985; PB, £15.50, 0820701742:9780820701745 , Duquesne University Press } |
| PHENOMENOLOGY & THE RETURN TO BEGINNINGS : Phenomenology & the Return to Beginnings [John Sallis] Originally published in 1973, this work continues to be a classic in the field of French phenomenology, focusing on tis most seminal represenataive, Maurice Merleau-Ponty. By tracing how Merleau-Ponty accounts for the beginning of philosophical thought in the dual sense of understanding its origin and showing how that origin permits philosophy (and all thought) to achieve truth, Sallis demonstrates that this process is never fully completed. With a signifigant revival of interest in French phenomenology in recent years, this paperback edition -- with a new preface by Sallis -- provides an enduring and important voice to the dialogue. { 120pp, 155x230mm, January 2003; PB, £12.99, 0820703389:9780820703381 , Duquesne University Press } |
| PHILOSOPHER'S GAZE : Modernity in the Shadows of Enlightenment [David M Levin] Reading texts by Descartes, Husserl, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Benjamin, Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, the author continues his questioning of the moral character and enlightenment-potential of our culturally dominant mode of perception, using vision and the philosophical discourse vision has generated as the site of thinking critically about the moral and political culture in which we are living. In a series of independent essays that focus on specific texts of each thinker, Levin examines their respective challenges to 'ocularcentrism'" and the political vision they imply. In Levin's view, all these philosophers attempted to understand, in one way or another, the distinctive pathologies of the modern age. But every one also attempted to envision -- if only through teh faintest of traces, traces of mutual recognition, traces of another way of looking and seeing -- the prospects for a radically different lifeworld. { 494pp, 155x230mm, November 2003; PB, £16.99, 0820703443:9780820703442 , Duquesne University Press } |
| PHILOSOPHY OF EDITH STEIN [Antonio Calcagno] Covers most of Edith Stein’s philosophical life, from her early work with Husserl to her later encounters with medieval Christian thought, as well as a critical and analytical reading of major Steinian texts. Stein was an original thinker who challenged not only the direction in which Husserlian phenomenology was progressing but also sought to bring to philosophical light the relevance of certain key questions, including the meaning of what it is to be human, the relevance of metaphysics to science, and fundamental questions about the nature of God. Working to correct the perception that Stein is either an 'unfaithful and distorting' phenomenologist or a pious Catholic mystic, Calcagno brings to light important work that has been neglected by both secular and religious scholars. The essays are not merely expository, but discuss the philosophical questions raised by Stein’s work from a contemporary perspective, using Stein’s original German texts. { 170pp, 155x230mm, May 2007; PB, £13.50, 0820703990:9780820703992 / HB, £31.99, 0820703982:9780820703985 , Duquesne University Press } |
| PRACTISING RENAISSANCE SCHOLARSHIP : Plays & Pageants, Patrons & Politics [David M Bergeron] In an era that has witnessed the apparent triumph of literary theory, this collection offers a compelling argument for the importance of scholarship in Renaissance studies by underscoring the necessity of considerate questioning of received information and perspective. David Bergeron, one of the most renowned specialists in the world on Renaissance English civic pageantry, masques, entertainments and drama, now gives us Practicing Renaissance Scholarship. This book is a collection of 11 essays that focus on the plight of the humanistic scholar at the beginning of the new century, arguing for an attitude of "interrogative metonymy" -- that is, a kind of collegiality among scholars with an insistent questioning of transmitted knowledge. From original archival research, to analyzing what centuries of thinkers have written, to exposing reductive ideology, the essays revolve around the twin poles of evidence and interpretation. { 221pp, 155x230mm, January 2000; HB, £38.99, 0820703133:9780820703138 , Duquesne University Press } |
| PREGNANCY PROJECT : Encounters with Reproductive Therapy [Karen Propp] In this beautifully written account that is both accessible and clinically accurate, Karen Propp relates her own experiences with infertility treatment. After speaking with women across the country about fertility problems, she was able to also weave other women's stories into her own. She describes a range of reproductive technology techniques, including artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization, and the use of donor eggs. REVIEW: "Propp convincingly conveys the dashed hopes, despair and pure physical pain she experienced.couples with fertility problems will take heart from the author's laborious success story..." -- Publishers Weekly. { 138pp, 140x215mm, January 1999; HB, £16.99, 0820703028:9780820703022 , Duquesne University Press } |
| PSYCHOTHERAPY AS A HUMAN SCIENCE [Daniel Burston & Roger A Frie] A masterful survey, 'Psychotherapy as a Human Science' provides a critical and historical introduction to the core themes and influential thinkers that helped to shape contemporary human science approaches to psychotherapy. { 326pp, 155x230mm, June 2006; PB, £19.99, 0820703788:9780820703787 , Duquesne University Press } |
| READING THE RENAISSANCE : Ideas & Idioms from Shakespeare to Milton [Marc Berley (ed)] Reading the Renaissance is a timely and compelling answer to a decades-long attack on literature by various schools of critical theory. A collection of new and provocative essays by prominent scholars, it speaks with learning, wit, and eloquence to the enduring value of Renaissance literature and literary study. These scholars focus on the various Renaissance authors they consider, not contemporary theories or schools that might seem to offer totalizing safety. They are committed to the thrill of reading the Renaissance not the power of rewriting it. This commitment, not coincidentally, leads them to authoritative new readings of major texts. { 278pp, 155x230mm, January 2002; HB, £39.99, 0820703362:9780820703367 , Duquesne University Press } |
| REFIGURING THE SACRED FEMININE : The Poems of John Donne, Aemilia Lanyer, & John Milton [Theresa MDiPasquale] Theresa DiPasquale’s study of John Donne, Aemilia Lanyer, and John Milton demonstrates how each of these seventeenth century English poets revised, reformed, and renewed the Judeo-Christian tradition of the sacred feminine. All three poets are deeply invested in the ancient, scripturally authorized belief that the relationship between God and humankind is gendered: God is father, bridegroom, king; the human soul and the Church as corporate entity are daughter, bride, and consort. All three poets, DiPasquale demonstrates, thus engage in literary projects that modify, expand upon, challenge, or rethink the natures of men and women, the duties and privileges of the female sex, and the essential role played by feminine powers and influences in healing the sin-forged rift between God and humanity. { 392pp, 180x260mm, May 2008; HB, £39.99, 0820704059:9780820704050 , Duquesne University Press } |
| RENAISSANCE ECOLOGY : Imagining Eden in Milton's England [Ken Hiltner (ed)] These essays consider how writers and artists such as John Milton imagined, by way of Eden, a future where human beings would live in greater peace with the natural world. This impressive collection, which includes contributions by such eminent scholars as Barbara Lewalski and Diane McColley, takes an exciting, new, 'green' approach to representations of Eden, while also considering the role of gender, politics, and poetics, discussing relevant issues of both literature and culture. { 356pp, 155x230mm, May 2008; HB, £41.50, 0820704024:9780820704029 , Duquesne University Press } |
| RENAISSANCE TROPOLOGIES [Jeanne Shami] { November 2008; HB, £39.99, 0820704091:9780820704098 , Duquesne University Press } |
| RENAISSANCE' TALK : Ordinary Language & the Mystique of Critical Problems [Stanley Stewart] This book exposes what sometimes passes for scholarly criticism and contains exemplary corrective explication of misinterested passages from the writings of major Renaissance authors { 306pp, 155x230mm, January 1998; PB, £14.50, 0820702749:9780820702742 / HB, £31.99, 0820702730:9780820702735 , Duquesne University Press } |
| SELF IN EARLY MODERN LITERATURE : For the Common Good [Terry G Sherwood] This study is a response to a continuing debate stimulated primarily by cultural materialist and new historicist claims that the early modern self was de-centred and fragmented by forces in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. The current study enters this debate by rejecting claims of such radical discontinuity characterising a "contingent" and "provisional" self incapable of unified subjectivity. The counter-argument in "The Self in Early Modern Literature" is that the intersection of Protestant vocation and Christian civic humanism, in support of the common good, was a stabilising factor in early modern construction of self that resisted historical and cultural dislocations. The theoretical issues at stake are examined in an introductory chapter, followed by chapters discussing central aspects of five major early modern writers whose works variously incorporate elements in Protestant vocation and Christian civic humanism. These five writers have been chosen both for their importance in the English literary canon and for their respective roles in early modern culture: "Spenser: Persons Serving Gloriana"; "Shakespeare’s Henriad: Calling the Heir Apparent"; "Ego Videbo: Donne and the Vocational Self"; "Jonson and the Truth of Envy"; "Milton: Self-Defense and the Drama of Blame". The study ends with a brief postscript on the Bacon family in whom the combined forces of Protestant vocation and Christian civic humanism were uniquely expressed. { 384pp, 155x230mm, May 2007; HB, £39.99, 0820703958:9780820703954 , Duquesne University Press } |
| SELF-CONSUMING ARTIFACTS : The Experience of Seventeenth Century Literature [Stanley E Fish] The foremost theoretical statement and practical criticism of seventeenth century texts from the standpoint of reader response. { 432pp, 135x205mm, January 1998; PB, £15.99, 0820702986:9780820702988 , Duquesne University Press } |
| SHANGHAI QUARTET : The Crossings of Four Women of China [Min-Zhan Lu] Steeped in the Chinese tradition of recording family tales and keeping the family register, Shanghai Quartet is a moving and powerful memoir describing the lives of four women of China -- the author, her grandmother, her nanny, and her mother. The complex emotional landscape of the book centres around Min-Zhan Lu -- the immigrant who has crossed over to America, and our narrator. In each of four sections, she tells us the intergenerational story of these women, each of whom crosses over time, history, custom and geography during her lifetime. The overall frame of the book is the author reciting the family stories to her daughter -- partly to heal the complex divisions between them, partly to understand her own past and how it has shaped her identity. But Shanghai Quartet is much more than just a vehicle for a mother-daughter dialogue. This book exposes a less-than-familiar picture of Chinese life in the last century. As we come to know Min-Zhan Lu's family, we find credible lives, not propaganda or stereotypes. The book is a first hand account of: a Chinese Catholic family in Shanghai; the events of the Cultural Revolution; the decision to come to America and be separated from family; and the next, postmodern generation of young Chinese abroad. Shanghai Quartet is part of the Emerging Writers in Creative Nonfiction series. { 292pp, 155x230mm, January 2001; HB, £16.99, 0820703222:9780820703220 , Duquesne University Press } |
| SINGLE IMPERFECTION : Milton, Marriage & Friendship [Thomas H Luxon] This book takes a fresh look at John Milton’s major poems -- Paradise Lost, Samson Agonistes and Paradise Regained -- and a few of the minor ones in light of a new analysis of Milton’s famous tracts on divorce. Luxon contends that Milton’s work is best under-stood as part of a major cultural project in which Milton assumed a leading role -- the redefinition of Protestant marriage as a heteroerotic version of classical friendship, originally a homoerotic cultural practice. Schooled in the humanist notion that man was created as a godlike being, Milton also believed that what marked man as different from God is loneliness. Milton’s reading of Genesis -- it is not good for man to be alone -- prescribes a wife as the remedy for this 'single imperfection', but Milton thought marriage had fallen to such a degraded state that it required a reformation. As a humanist, Milton looked to classical culture, especially to Plato, Aristotle and Cicero, for a more dignified model of human relations -- friendship. Milton reimagined marriage as a classical friendship, without explicitly conceptualising the issues of gender construction. Nor did he allow the chief tenet of classical friendship, equality, to claim a place in reformed marriage. The book traces the path of friendship theory through Milton’s epistolary friendship with Charles Diodati, his elegies, divorce pamphlets and major poems. The book will prompt even more reinterpretations of Milton’s poetry in an age that is anxiously redefining marriage once again. { 215pp, 155x230mm, November 2005; HB, £38.99, 0820703737:9780820703732 , Duquesne University Press } |
| SPEAKING GRIEF IN ENGLISH LITERARY CULTURE : Shakespeare to Milton [Margo Swiss & David A Kent (eds)] Grief is a universal emotion expressed in response to numerous forms of loss or bereavement. Expressing grief has been subject to varying degrees of religious and social constraint in different periods of history and in different cultures and traditions. This collection of 12 essays by both established and newer scholars explores the question of grief expression in a wide variety of writers and genres in the period from Shakespeare to Milton. Contributors examine lyric poems and plays as well as prose works such as sermons, diaries, and medical treatises to disclose the challenges faced by writers of both sexes in dealing with the trauma of loss. The roots of grief expression in personal experience or collective loss, or as described in scientific speculation or literary forms, demonstrate both the complexity and the centrality of this subject in the social and literary history of the period. Actors debate the topic of sorrow, poets wrestle with decorum and sincerity, women diarists confide their private feelings, clerics admonish the grieving with the consolations of faith, and writers discover the limitations of language and articulation in seeking to express sorrow. In the aftermath of deconstructive analyses of literature, there has been a discernible turn toward rediscovering the emotional textures of literature. The subject of grief is a good example of this trend, and this collection is one of the first efforts to address this theme in relation to a specific period of literary history. { 375pp, 150x230mm, January 2002; HB, £39.99, 0820703303:9780820703305 , Duquesne University Press } |
| SPIRITUAL ARCHITECTURE & PARADISE REGAINED : Milton's Literary Ecclesiology [Ken Simpson] Ken Simpson’s study, focusing on John Milton’s 'Paradise Regained', examines the literary ecclesiology of this most subtle and elusive of Milton’s works. As Simpson asserts, in Paradise Regained Milton not only continues his critique of the English Reformation by confronting the failures of the Restoration settlement, but he also continues to develop the consistent theology of the church that preoccupied him in his prose during the civil war and Interregnum. Simpson examines Milton’s view of the church as a textual community -- a group of participants in the church who are each guided by the Holy Spirit in their reading of the Word. Simpson’s provocative and unique examination of Milton and 'Paradise Regained' will become an indispensable study, offering new views of this somewhat neglected poem. { 256pp, 155x230mm, September 2007; HB, £38.99, 0820703915:9780820703916 , Duquesne University Press } |
| SPIRITUAL PATH : An Introduction to the Psychology of the Spiritual Traditions [Han F de Wit] This insightful work is both theoretical and practical. It focuses on themes important for those dealing with fundamental life questions in their own lives, or in their professions as spiritual caregivers, psychologists or psychotherapists. Using an interreligious approach, Han de Wit offers psychological insights from the world's spiritual traditions to show how spiritual practices serve to cultivate our fundamental humanity. REVIEW: "A fascinating, inventive contribution to spiritual psychology. Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence. Written by a leading European author, this book is a major contribution to the psychology of spirituality. It explores and reveals in a clear and comprehensive way, the psychological insights that can be discovered in the spiritual traditions and that aim at cultivating the essence of our humanness..." -- John Welwood, author of 'Love and Awakening'. { 312pp, 150x230mm, January 1999; PB, £14.99, 0820703087:9780820703084 / HB, £35.99, 0820703079:9780820703077 , Duquesne University Press } |
| STRUCTURE OF BEHAVIOR [Maurice Merleau-Ponty] { 256pp, 140x215mm, January 1984; PB, £14.99, 0820701637:9780820701639 , Duquesne University Press } |
| SUFFERING IN PARADISE : The Bubonic Plague in English Literature from More to Milton [Rebecca Totaro] In Suffering in Paradise, Totaro provides a unique and timely discussion of the bubonic plague as it shaped literature in England from 1500 through the first half of the eighteenth century. During this time, the bubonic plague crept not only into bodies, but also into church sermons, medical treatises, royal proclamations and literary lives and works. Within the experience and accounts of bubonic plague, men and women found their own understandings of the body, of the human relationship with nature, and of the degree to which they had faith in their nation and their God. { 242pp, 155x230mm, February 2005; HB, £38.99, 0820703621:9780820703626 , Duquesne University Press } |
| THEOLOGICAL MILTON : Deity, Discourse & Heresy in the Miltonic Canon [Michael Lieb] In lively, forceful, and at times witty language, Michael Lieb has written an illuminating study of the figure of God as a literary character in the writings of John Milton. Milton’s God has always been a provocative and controversial figure, and Lieb offers a fresh way to look at the relationship between the language of theology and the language of poetry in Milton’s works. He draws into the discussion previous authors on the subject -- Patrides, Hunter, Kelley, Empson, Danielson, Rumrich and others -- resulting in a dynamic debate about Milton’s multifarious God. By stressing God’s multivalent qualities, 'Theological Milton' offers an innovative perspective on the darker side of the divinity. Lieb allows us to see a Miltonic God of hate as well as a God of love, a God who is a creator as well as a destroyer. Lieb directly confronts the more troubling faces of God in a manner richly informed by Milton’s own theology. Against the theoretical framework for the idea of addressing God as a distinctly literary figure, Lieb presents Milton in the historical milieu prior to and contemporaneous with his works. More cogently than others, Lieb clarifies Milton’s theology of the godhead and the various heresies, such as Socinianism and Arianism, that informed the religious controversies of the seventeenth century. He does so in a manner that exemplifies how literature and theology are inextricably intertwined. { 348pp, 155x230mm, April 2006; HB, £38.99, 0820703745:9780820703749 , Duquesne University Press } |
| THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY : Milton's Reinvention of the Mythological Tradition [John Mulryan] In this wide-ranging and ambitious study, John Mulryan contributes significantly to our knowledge of the mythological under-pinnings of John Milton's works. Perhaps our most Christian poet, Milton chose to communicate his vision of reality in the language of ancient Greek and Roman mythology. As Mulryan points out, Milton -- as no other poet before him -- mastered the texts of classical mythology in their original languages and seldom wrote a line that did not betray their influence. Here, we are reintroduced to the Renaissance milieu that was not only intimately familiar to Milton but that helped to shape his thinking about fundamental matters that he addresses in his poetry. Mulryan's study first establishes the incredible richness of the mythological tradition that was available to Milton, and it includes quotations from many sources that have either been ignored or depreciated in current scholarship. Milton's own view of classical myth is then explored, and Mulryan discusses the problem of reconciling pagan learning and Christian thought. Finally, this study demonstrates how Milton drew upon and assimilated the mythological traditions in his poetry as a reflection of his era's receptiveness to such acts of ‘creative mythologizing'. { 345pp, 160x235mm, January 1996; HB, £31.99, 0820702676:9780820702674 , Duquesne University Press } |
| TIME & THE OTHER [Emmanuel Levinas] Emmanuel Levinas is a major voice in twentieth century European thought. Beginning his intellectual career in the 1920s, he has developed an original and comprehensive post rationalist ethics of social responsibility and obligation. The influence of his work has already been profound and far-reaching, readily acknowledged by such diverse and important figures as Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, and Enrique Dussel. Time and The Other was first presented as a series of lectures in 1946-47 at the College Philosophique and is probably the clearest statement of Levinas' thought. Along with Existence and Existents (1947), it represents the first formulation of Levinas' own philosophy, later more fully developed in Totality and Infinity (1961) and Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1974 { 149pp, 140x215mm, January 1987; PB, £13.50, 0820702331:9780820702339 , Duquesne University Press } |
| TOTALITY & INFINITY : An Essay on Exteriority [Emmanuel Levinas] First published in English by Duquesne in 1969, this has become one of the classics of modern philosophy. REVIEW: "It is not often that one finds a work that is both radically original and carefully thought through. This book is both. It is striking out along new lines to formulate a general position which is opposed to Husserl's transcendental idealism as well as Heidegger's hermeneutic philosophy of being. In this way it shows the inexhaustible richness of our lived experience and the fruitfulness of reflecting on its form and patterns. The work deserves to be widely read..." -- John Wild. { 314pp, 155x230mm, January 1999; PB, £15.99, 0820702455:9780820702452 , Duquesne University Press } |
| TOWARD THE OUTSIDE : Concepts & Themes in Emmanuel Levinas [Michael B Smith] In this accessible and carefully crafted work, Michael B. Smith provides readers a systematic exposition of the essential concepts and themes that circulate throughout the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, a major voice in twentieth century thought. Unlike many recent studies that have pur-ported to examine the scope of Levinas’s thinking, "Toward the Outside" is distinguished by its attention to texts from both of Levinas’s two main genres: the philosophical and the confessional. Organised in three parts, the first examines key pairs of concepts -- totality/infinity, same/other, saying/said, among others. In Part 2, Smith more explicitly identifies themes that are essential to our better understand-ing of Levinas -- Judaism and the Holocaust, temporality, Levinas’s treatments of Husserl and Heidegger, Derrida’s reading of Levinas, and others. Finally, in Part 3, his commentary, based on close readings of selected Levinas texts, meticulously follows and highlights the development of Levinas’s thought. { 272pp, 155x230mm, March 2005; PB, £17.99, 0820703699:9780820703695 / HB, £38.99, 0820703680:9780820703688 , Duquesne University Press } |
| TRADITION & SUBVERSION IN RENAISSANCE LITERATURE : Studies in Shakespeare, Jonson & Donne [Murray Roston] Deconstructionist critics have argued that literary works contain conflicting or contradictory meanings, thus creating an aporia, or impasse, that prevents readers from interpreting the work. Here, however, Murray Roston offers detailed and essentially new analyses of works by Shakespeare, Spenser, Jonson, and Donne, arguing that the seemingly contradictory presence of traditional and subversive elements in their major works actually creates the source of much of their literary achievement. Chapters explore The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, Faerie Queene, Volpone, and the Meditations of John Donne, highlighting the creative tension between centripetal and centrifugal factors (borrowing Bakhtin's terms). As Roston demonstrates, this tension exists in a variety of genres, including poetry, epic and drama, and even in religious prose -- which, he acknowledges, might be thought to be exempt from such inner conflict because of its doctrinal and theological focus. The tension between tradition and subversion, both linguistic and cultural, then, can be seen to produce not aporia in any negative sense, but a positive complexity of response from the audience, animating and profoundly enriching each work. In The Merchant of Venice, for example, Shakespeare merges the previously despised figure of the merchant with a Christ-like figure, brilliantly reasserting the Christian condemnation of profiteering while simultaneously advocating its seeming opposite, a validation of the burgeoning mercantile activity of the Renaissance. "Tradition and Subversion in Renaissance Literature" is a thoughtful study, rich in both historical scholarship and in its survey of modern criticism. Even those who are quite familiar with the texts discussed here will find Roston's focus on the tension between maintaining the expectations of the culture and pulling toward new ideas an illuminating way to freshly consider these literary works. { 258pp, 160x235mm, March 2007; HB, £39.99, 0820703907:9780820703909 , Duquesne University Press } |
| TRICKS OF TIME : Bergson, Merleau-Ponty & Ricoeur in Search of Time, Self & Meaning [Mark S Muldoon] If there is a topic that sends chills up the spine of serious philosophers, scientists and poets alike, it is the topic of time. Simone Weil once wrote that time is the most tragic subject human beings can think about. Time is tragic on two counts. First, philosophically, we are unable to conceive of time in its totality. Second, our need to understand time beyond a mere speculation of its nature is driven by the undeniable reality of our mortal lives. It is the bane of human existence to see our lives as finite when contrasted to the age of stars and cosmic realities. This contrast fuels much of our existential angst to question our nature, understand ourselves and search for meaning. 'Tricks of Time' invites readers into the labyrinthine discussions of time, self and meaning under the auspices of three thinkers: Henri Bergson, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Paul Ricoeur. Dubbed by Mark Muldoon 'the masters of disruption', the work of each philosopher is highlighted to show how each 'disrupts clock time', drawing out and reclaiming aspects of our humanity neglected in systems that treat time merely as chronology. Outside of Augustine perhaps, no other set of philosophers in any particular school or epoch has offered us such a diverse and unique series of attempts to respond to the question: What is time? While not working in tandem, or even necessarily following one another’s leads, but sharing the same French cultural and philosophical climate, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty and Ricoeur will aptly reveal how interrogating the present constantly intercepts any neat and efficient closure to defining the self and meaning. Following the lead of Ricoeur’s central thesis, that time only becomes human to the extent that it is articulated through a narrative mode, Muldoon identifies unquestionable hints of the link between time and narrative in both Bergson and Merleau-Ponty. While the struggle with language is evident in each of these thinkers, the importance they accord it is striking. Each of their contributions is novel and unique, leading us to take Ricoeur’s claim seriously -- namely, that time cannot, ultimately, be thought, it can only be lived and our lives recounted. { 299pp, 155x230mm, June 2006; PB, £16.99, 0820703818:9780820703817 / HB, £46.99, 0820703796:9780820703794 , Duquesne University Press } |
| TWO PRINCIPAL LAWS OF THERMODYNAMICS : A Cultural & Historical Exploration [J H van den Berg] This short work describes the historical and cultural context surrounding discovery of the first two laws of thermodynamics. As in previous works by van den Berg, this interesting look at cultural history and trends employs a metabletic approach -- that is, the study of changes in our human perception and conceptualisation at particular times in history. When a discovery is made in a particular period, then, it often occurs around the same time by different people working independently -- and such discoveries may be viewed in relation to the overall sociological, cultural and political climate at the same time. This metabletic approach, admittedly sometimes controversial, is discussed in the translators' introduction, which provides readers unfamiliar with such an approach an overview and places the present work in context. { 126pp, 155x230mm, June 2004; PB, £10.50, 0820703559:9780820703558 / HB, £19.99, 0820703540:9780820703541 , Duquesne University Press } |
| VIRGILIAN PASTORAL TRADITION : From the Renaissance to the Modern Era [Nancy Lindheim] This book contributes significantly to the ongoing dialogue about the scope and meaning of pastoral as a genre, as Nancy Lindheim argues for a more culturally and aesthetically complex awareness of what the term has meant in the course of Western literature. Rather than assuming that pastoral follows a course charted by previous commentators -- defined by themes of nature, love, innocence, escape, or endless happiness -- Lindheim instead revisits Virgil’s eclogues, the primary influence on the pastoral in subsequent literature. In doing so, Lindheim identifies seminal Virgilian themes not fully acknowledged by previous critics: human vulnerability, cosmic and political injustice, the impulse for compassion and sympathy, and the social implications of the poet’s imagination. By demonstrating Virgil’s eclogues as foundational, the study is able to chart how these themes inform later works, testifying to Virgil’s abiding influence. Intensive readings of various texts enable Lindheim to advance her revisionist view of pastoral practice. Several chapters concentrate on Spenser and Milton, including discussions of: The Shepheardes Calender; The Faerie Queene; Comus; and Lycidas. Pastoral romance as drama, as seen in Shakespeare’s 'As You Like It' and 'The Winter’s Tale', is explored in two chapters, and an appendix deals with 'King Lear' as pastoral tragedy. In the book’s concluding chapter, Lindheim argues for the presence of pastoral’s 'transmuted afterlife' in both Wordsworth and Samuel Beckett. As Lindheim emphasises, pastoral has long suffered from the condescension of those who judge it as too narrow, too didactic, or too immature a genre. The book strives to redress this persistent imbalance in critical judgement, to influence current critical discourse concerning pastoral, and to suggest how other modern and post-modern writers may be seen as heirs of the pastoral tradition as well. { 378pp, 155x230mm, June 2006; HB, £39.99, 0820703729:9780820703725 , Duquesne University Press } |
| VISITATION UNIMPLOR'D : Milton & the Authorship of De Doctrina Christiana [William B Hunter] This book challenges the traditional view of the authorsip of De Doctrina Christiana { 192pp, 155x235mm, January 1999; HB, £31.99, 0820702897:9780820702896 , Duquesne University Press } |
| WAYS OF POWER : Hermeneutics, Ethics & Social Criticism [Paul Fairfield] Advances a hermeneutical conception of ethics, one oriented particularly toward questions of power and the critique of power in the aftermath of foundationalism. Bringing into mutual interrogation such disparate traditions as hermeneutics, liberalism, critical theory and postmodernism, and such figures as Gadamer, Ricoeur, Habermas, Foucault, Nietzsche and Artistotle, Fairfield argues that the principal question of ethics is no longer how to ground practices and judgments on a secure epistemological foundation. Rather, what is of importance is how normative discourses rooted in tradition and invested with power may adopt a critical posture toward these same conditions without generating an impossible circularity. Fairfield asserts that the practice of social criticism is ultimately inseparable from that of hermeneutic interpretation; critique is a matter of perceiving and understanding contexts of moral action in light of principles. In taking this view, Fairfield defends hermeneutics -- in particular, Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics -- against the charge leveled at it by critical theorists -- in particular, Jürgen Habermas -- that hermeneutical philosophy's emphasis on historicity and finitude demonstrates an absence of critical perspective in reflecting upon tradition and the power operative within tradition. With this objection in mind, Fairfield embarks upon his project to formulate a hermeneutical ethics. Ethical criticism, he maintains, belongs to the universal practice that is the struggle for illumination and self-understanding, a practice ubiquitous in human existence and central to the task of fashioning a just order. THE WAYS OF POWER is unique in bringing together a myriad of philosophical voices and perspectives, not to continue a quest for moral certainty and objective grounds -- which is so often sought in contemporary society, but which Fairfield insists must be given up -- but to take seriously the need for rationality in moral and political discourse. { 208pp, 155x230mm, January 2005; PB, £16.99, 0820703605:9780820703602 / HB, £38.99, 0820703338:9780820703336 , Duquesne University Press } |
| WHAT IS THE WEST? [Philippe Nemo; Translated by Kenneth Casler; Foreword by Michael Novak] In this short, illuminating, and very readable work, Philippe Nemo argues that what we call 'the West' is one and only one cultural entity, to which both North America and Western Europe belong. In contemporary debates, then, Nemo asserts, it is simply incorrect to exaggerate the differences or gaps between countries that are indeed 'Western'. Brilliantly and succinctly surveying the last five or six millenia, Nemo pieces together the history of the West’s development. He weaves together political events, philosophical discoveries, religious movements, and scientific and technological innovations to demonstrate the factors that have influenced and shaped Western culture. Already translated from the original French into Portuguese, Italian, German and Greek, What is the West? has received considerable interest throughout Europe; earlier this year, in fact, it received the Italian 'Citte della Rose' prize for essays. Now available for the first time in English, this book will be essential reading for those interested in contemporary cultural debates on Western culture and nationhood, as well as American values; as well as those interested in world history and politics, philosophy and religion, and contemporary global politics. Not geared to specifically conservative or liberal viewpoints but to an accurate rendering of historical ideas and trends, Nemo’s book should do much to advance our understanding of each other in an increasingly global community. { 157pp, 155x230mm, December 2005; PB, £12.99, 0820703753:9780820703756 , Duquesne University Press } |
| WHAT THE RIVER MEANS [Elizabeth Hodges] Through memorable story essays, Elizabeth Hodges reveals the importance of place in who we become and the importance of naming one's world in order to live well in it. What the River Means is a compelling story about growing up, about accepting who we become and how we come to be that way, and about the common influences that shape our lives -- often in differing ways. What the River Means will be enjoyed by all of us who have a love of and interest in family, in relationships between the generations, and an appreciation of life on a river. This beautifully written work will appeal to anyone who enjoys autobiographical nonfiction, literary or creative nonfiction and nature writing. REVIEW: "These are the essays of a genuinely gifted writer with a finely tuned ability to make the textures and sounds and tastes of youth come wildly alive in the adult mind..." -- Diana Hume George, author of 'The Lonely Other: A Woman Watching America'. { 249pp, 155x230mm, January 1999; HB, £16.99, 0820702943:9780820702940 , Duquesne University Press } |
| WOMEN WRITING OF DIVINEST THINGS : Rhetoric & the Poetry of Pembroke, Wroth & Lanyer [Lyn Bennett] Rhetorically analysing their verse within a gender-inclusive context, Women Writing of Divinest Things broadens our understanding of Renaissance women's poetry in literary history. Focusing on the work of Mary Sidney Herbert, Lady Mary Wroth and Aemilia Lanyer, Lyn Bennett shows how rhetoric enabled these poets to articulate what the sixteenth century rhetorician Henry Peacham called 'divine and human things'. Bennett closely analyses the poets' writings to reveal dynamic rhetorical structures and effects at work in their verse, and provides a detailed account of early modern rhetorical theory and its role within women's education. Bennett also compares the poets' work with that of their contemporaries, especially Wyatt, Donne and Herbert, to demonstrate that women authors were sophisticated thinkers as rhetorically and poetically accomplished as their male counterparts. { 328pp, 155x230mm, October 2004; HB, £39.99, 0820703591:9780820703596 , Duquesne University Press } |
| WRITING THE FLESH : The Herbert Family Dialogue [Jeffrey Powers-Beck] What the Brontës were to the nineteenth century, the family of poet George Herbert was to the seventeenth century -- an extraordinary domestic group that made familial struggles into the subjects of their art. Derived from an exhaustive reading of Herbert family manuscripts, this study interprets a series of texts that have never been studied together before. A keen synthesis of social history and literary criticism, it presents both a historical examination of the structure of an early modern family and a new "domestic" understanding of George Herbert's poetry. { 279pp, 155x230mm, January 1998; HB, £36.50, 08207 |