Not Even Past highlights references to nineteenth-century U.S. slavery and anti-Black racism in literary and photographic projects begun during the late 1920s and early 1930s, including novels by William Faulkner and Nella Larsen, and portraits by Carl Van Vechten. These texts share a representational crisis, in which distinctions between present, quotidian racism and a massive, fully racialized historical trauma disappear. All identify persistent historical traumatization with intense subjective states (including madness, religious ecstasy, narcissism, and fetishistic enjoyment), and each ...
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Rape and Representation explores how cultural forms construct and reenforce social attitudes and behaviors that perpetuate sexual violence. The essays proceed from the observation that literature not only reflects but also contributes to what a society believes about itself.

Fourteen essays by authors in the fields of En...
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A collection of stories and novels from fin-de-si cle France that celebrate decline, decay, and deviance.

In France at the end of the nineteenth century, progress and material prosperity coincided with widespread alarm about disease and decay. The obsessions of our own culture as the twentieth century came to a close resonate strikingly with those of the last fin-de-si cle: crime, pollution, sexually transmitted diseases, gender confusion, moral depravity, alcoholism, and tobacco and drug use were topics of popular discussion then as now.

The Decadent Reader is a c...
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Although literary theories describe a world of strategies--textual, discursive, interpretive, and political--what is missing is the strategist. Poststructuralists try to explain agency as the effect of large-scale systems or formations; as a result, intuitions about individual action and responsibility are expressed in terms of impersonal strategies. Mette Hjort's book responds to this situation by proposing an alternative account of strategic action, one that brings the strategist back into the picture.

Hjort analyzes influential statements made by Derrida, Foucault, and others to sh...
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A generous and remarkable young prince, together with his loyal and brave servant, find more adventure than they bargained for in The Suicide Club, Robert Louis Stevenson's engrossing trilogy of short stories about a bizarre club for people with a strong desire to end their lives.
In these interrelated tales, Prince Florizel of Bohemia and his aide, Colonel Geraldine, travel incognito through some of the most dangerous haunts of 19th-century London. "The Story of the Young Man with the Cream Tarts" introduces Florizel to the formidable Suicide Club, an organization for people who ...
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