Bøker i The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics-serien

Mexican Ballads, Chicano Poems combines literary theory with the personal engagement of a prominent Chicano scholar. Recalling his experiences as a student in Texas, Jose Limon examines the politically motivated Chicano poetry of the 60s and 70s. He bases his analyses on Harold Bloom's theories of literary influence but takes Bloom into the socio-political realm. Limon shows how Chicano poetry is nourished by the oral tradition of the Mexican corrido, or master ballad, which was a vital part of artistic and political life along the Mexican-U.S. border from 1890 to 1930.Limon's use of Bloom, as well as of Marxist critics Raymond Williams and Fredric Jameson, brings Chicano literature into the arena of contemporary literary theory. By focusing on an important but little-studied poetic tradition, his book challenges our ideas of the American canon and extends the reach of Hispanists and folklorists as well.

The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism discusses ways of creating value in turn-of-the-century American capitalism. Focusing on such topics as the alienation of property, the invention of masochism, and the battle over free silver, it examines the participation of cultural forms in these phenomena. It imagines a literary history that must at the same time be social, economic, and legal; and it imagines a literature that, to be understood at all, must be understood both as a producer and a product of market capitalism.

In the period between 1200 and 1500 in western Europe, a number of religious women gained widespread veneration and even canonization as saints for their extraordinary devotion to the Christian eucharist, supernatural multiplications of food and drink, and miracles of bodily manipulation, including stigmata and inedia (living without eating). The occurrence of such phenomena sheds much light on the nature of medieval society and medieval religion. It also forms a chapter in the history of women. Previous scholars have occasionally noted the various phenomena in isolation from each other and have sometimes applied modern medical or psychological theories to them. Using materials based on saints' lives and the religious and mystical writings of medieval women and men, Caroline Walker Bynum uncovers the pattern lying behind these aspects of women's religiosity and behind the fascination men and women felt for such miracles and devotional practices. She argues that food lies at the heart of much of women's piety. Women renounced ordinary food through fasting in order to prepare for receiving extraordinary food in the eucharist. They also offered themselves as food in miracles of feeding and bodily manipulation. Providing both functionalist and phenomenological explanations, Bynum explores the ways in which food practices enabled women to exert control within the family and to define their religious vocations. She also describes what women meant by seeing their own bodies and God's body as food and what men meant when they too associated women with food and flesh. The author's interpretation of women's piety offers a new view of the nature of medieval asceticism and, drawing upon both anthropology and feminist theory, she illuminates the distinctive features of women's use of symbols. Rejecting presentist interpretations of women as exploited or masochistic, she shows the power and creativity of women's writing and women's lives.

Herodotus' great work is not only an account of the momentous historical conflict between the Greeks and the Persians but also the earliest sustained exploration in the West of the problem of cultural difference. This title asks fundamental questions about how Herodotus represented this difference.

This text argues against the application of priori schemes to Renaissance (and all) texts. It argues for the possibility and desirability of rigorously attentive but "pre-theoretical" reading, taking an approach that privileges particularity and respects "resistant structures" of texts.

This account of the "peasant revolt" of 1381 demonstrates that the rebellion was not an uncontrolled, inarticulate explosion of peasant resentment, but an informed and tactical claim to literacy and rule. It focuses on six brief texts by the rebels themselves.

Exploring the careers of five influential women writers of the Restoration and eighteenth century, this book reveals the connections between the increasing prestige of female authorship, the economy of credit and debt, and the rise of the novel.

The marriage of Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne, for their contemporaries a model of true love and married happiness, was also a scene of revulsion and combat. This book reveals the tragic conflicts beneath the Hawthorne's ideal of domestic fulfillment.

Bristol is the city that John Cabot sailed from and Thomas Chatterton dreamed, that Hugh Latimer preached to and Oliver Cromwell seized. This book looks at Bristol's connection with the rise of the Atlantic economy in the early modern period and the accompanying transformation of English economic ideas and practices.

This analysis of important early-modern texts also provides a critique of postmodern theories of ideology. The author aims to contribute both to the reader's understanding of the Enlightenment, and to contemporary debates concerning cultural studies and critical literary theory.

Explores the key relationship between domestic ideology and formulations of the self in 19th-century America. Arguing that domesticity not only presumes but institutes distinctions of gender, class and race, Brown reveals how these distinctions in turn inform identity.

In a post-structuralist study of 13th-century French historical texts, the author investigates the reasons for the rise of French vernacular prose historiography at this particular time.

Beginning with a startling endorsement of the patristic view of Judaism - that it was a 'carnal' religion, in contrast to the spiritual vision of the Church, the author argues that rabbinic Judaism was based on a set of assumptions about the human body that were profoundly different from those of Christianity.