The Picture of Dorian Gray altered the way Victorians understood the world they inhabited. It heralded the end of a repressive Victorianism, and after its publication, literature had—in the words of biographer Richard Ellmann—“a different look.” Yet the Dorian Gray that Victorians never knew was even more daring than the novel the British press condemned as “vulgar,” “unclean,” “poisonous,” “discreditable,” and “a sham.” Now, more than 120 years after Wilde handed it over to his publisher, J.B. Lippincott & Company, Wilde’s uncensored typescript is published for the first time, in an annotated, extensively illustrated edition.

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674057920

Editor Nicholas Frankel on The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored Edition

The Gothic, Romanticism’s gritty older sibling, has flourished in myriad permutations since the eighteenth century. In Gothicka, Victoria Nelson identifies the revolutionary turn it has taken in the twenty-first. Today’s Gothic has fashioned its monsters into heroes and its devils into angels. It is actively reviving supernaturalism in popular culture, not as an evil dimension divorced from ordinary human existence but as part of our daily lives. To explain this millennial shift away from the traditionally dark Protestant post-Enlightenment Gothic, Nelson considers the work of Dan Brown and Stephenie Meyer, graphic novelists Mike Mignola and Garth Ennis, Christian writer William P. Young (author of The Shack), filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, and twentieth-century Gothic masters H.P. Lovecraft, Anne Rice, and Stephen King, among others radically reviving and reinventing the transcendental worldview that informed the West’s premodern era. 

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674725928

Victoria Nelson discusses Gothicka: Vampire Heroes, Human Gods, and the New Supernatural

John and George Keats—Man of Genius and Man of Power, to use John’s words—embodied sibling forms of the phenomenon we call Romanticism. George’s 1818 move to the western frontier of the United States, an imaginative leap across four thousand miles onto the tabula rasa of the American dream, created in John an abysm of alienation and loneliness that would inspire the poet’s most plangent and sublime poetry. Denise Gigante’s account of this emigration places John’s life and work in a transatlantic context that has eluded his previous biographers, while revealing the emotional turmoil at the heart of some of the most lasting verse in English.

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674725959

Denise Gigante discusses The Keats Brothers: The Life of John and George

“Boys are emotionally illiterate and don’t want intimate friendships.” In this empirically grounded challenge to our stereotypes about boys and men, Niobe Way reveals the intense intimacy among teenage boys especially during early and middle adolescence. Boys not only share their deepest secrets and feelings with their closest male friends, they claim that without them they would go “wacko.” Yet as boys become men, they become distrustful, lose these friendships, and feel isolated and alone.

Drawing from hundreds of interviews conducted throughout adolescence with black, Latino, white, and Asian American boys, Deep Secrets reveals the ways in which we have been telling ourselves a false story about boys, friendships, and human nature.

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674072428

Niobe Way discusses Deep Secrets: Boys’ Friendships and the Crisis of Connection

This is the story of a city that shouldn’t exist. In the seventeenth century, what is now America’s most beguiling metropolis was nothing more than a swamp: prone to flooding, infested with snakes, battered by hurricanes. But through the intense imperial rivalries of Spain, France, and England, and the ambitious, entrepreneurial merchants and settlers from four continents who risked their lives to succeed in colonial America, this unpromising site became a crossroads for the whole Atlantic world.

Lawrence N. Powell, a decades-long resident and observer of New Orleans, gives us the full sweep of the city’s history from its founding through Louisiana statehood in 1812. We see the Crescent City evolve from a French village, to an African market town, to a Spanish fortress, and finally to an Anglo-American center of trade and commerce. We hear and feel the mix of peoples, religions, and languages from four continents that make the place electric—and always on the verge of unraveling. The Accidental City is the story of land-jobbing schemes, stock market crashes, and nonstop squabbles over status, power, and position, with enough rogues, smugglers, and self-fashioners to fill a picaresque novel.

Powell’s tale underscores the fluidity and contingency of the past, revealing a place where people made their own history. This is a city, and a history, marked by challenges and perpetual shifts in shape and direction, like the sinuous river on which it is perched.

Visit http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674725904 for more about the book. 

Lawrence Powell discusses The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans

In The Omnivorous Mind, a gustatory tour of human history, John S. Allen demonstrates that the everyday activity of eating offers deep insights into human beings’ biological and cultural heritage.

We humans eat a wide array of plants and animals, but unlike other omnivores we eat with our minds as much as our stomachs. This thoughtful relationship with food is part of what makes us a unique species, and makes culinary cultures diverse. Not even our closest primate relatives think about food in the way Homo sapiens does. We are superomnivores whose palates reflect the natural history of our species.

Drawing on the work of food historians and chefs, anthropologists and neuroscientists, Allen starts out with the diets of our earliest ancestors, explores cooking’s role in our evolving brain, and moves on to the preoccupations of contemporary foodies. The Omnivorous Mind delivers insights into food aversions and cravings, our compulsive need to label foods as good or bad, dietary deviation from “healthy” food pyramids, and cross-cultural attitudes toward eating (with the French, bien sûr, exemplifying the pursuit of gastronomic pleasure). When it comes to eating, Allen shows, there’s no one way to account for taste.

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674055728

John Allen explains The Omnivorous Mind: Our Evolving Relationship with Food

African American literature is over. With this provocative claim Kenneth Warren sets out to identify a distinctly African American literature—and to change the terms with which we discuss it.

Rather than contest other definitions, Warren makes a clear and compelling case for understanding African American literature as creative and critical work written by black Americans within and against the strictures of Jim Crow America. Within these parameters, his book outlines protocols of reading that best make sense of the literary works produced by African American writers and critics over the first two-thirds of the twentieth century.

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674066298

Kenneth Warren asks What Was African American Literature?

In 1913, Russian imperial marines stormed an Orthodox monastery at Mt. Athos, Greece, to haul off monks engaged in a dangerously heretical practice known as Name Worshipping. Exiled to remote Russian outposts, the monks and their mystical movement went underground. Ultimately, they came across Russian intellectuals who embraced Name Worshipping—and who would achieve one of the biggest mathematical breakthroughs of the twentieth century, going beyond recent French achievements.

Loren Graham and Jean-Michel Kantor take us on an exciting mathematical mystery tour as they unravel a bizarre tale of political struggles, psychological crises, sexual complexities, and ethical dilemmas. At the core of this book is the contest between French and Russian mathematicians who sought new answers to one of the oldest puzzles in math: the nature of infinity. The French school chased rationalist solutions. The Russian mathematicians, notably Dmitri Egorov and Nikolai Luzin—who founded the famous Moscow School of Mathematics—were inspired by mystical insights attained during Name Worshipping. Their religious practice appears to have opened to them visions into the infinite—and led to the founding of descriptive set theory.

The men and women of the leading French and Russian mathematical schools are central characters in this absorbing tale that could not be told until now. Naming Infinity is a poignant human interest story that raises provocative questions about science and religion, intuition and creativity.

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674032934

Loren Graham describes Naming Infinity

IBetween 1961 and 1967 the United States Air Force buried 1,000 Minuteman Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles in pastures across the Great Plains. The Missile Next Door tells the story of how rural Americans of all political stripes were drafted to fight the Cold War by living with nuclear missiles in their backyards—and what that story tells us about enduring political divides and the persistence of defense spending.

By scattering the missiles in out-of-the-way places, the Defense Department kept the chilling calculus of Cold War nuclear strategy out of view. This subterfuge was necessary, Gretchen Heefner argues, in order for Americans to accept a costly nuclear buildup and the resulting threat of Armageddon. As for the ranchers, farmers, and other civilians in the Plains states who were first seduced by the economics of war and then forced to live in the Soviet crosshairs, their sense of citizenship was forever changed. Some were stirred to dissent. Others consented but found their proud Plains individualism giving way to a growing dependence on the military-industrial complex. Even today, some communities express reluctance to let the Minutemen go, though the Air Force no longer wants them buried in the heartland.

Complicating a red state/blue state reading of American politics, Heefner’s account helps to explain the deep distrust of government found in many western regions, and also an addiction to defense spending which, for many local economies, seems inescapable.

Visit http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674059115 for more.

Gretchen Heefner explains The Missile Next Door: The Minuteman in the American Heartland

Brigham Young was a rough-hewn New York craftsman whose impoverished life was electrified by the Mormon faith. John G. Turner provides a fully realized portrait of this spiritual prophet, viewed by followers as a protector and by opponents as a heretic. His pioneering faith made a deep imprint on tens of thousands of lives in the American Mountain West.

For more about the book, visit http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674416857

John G. Turner discusses his biography of Brigham Young

Until the nineteenth century, "risk" was a specialized term: it was the commodity exchanged in a marine insurance contract. Jonathan Levy's Freaks of Fortune tells how the modern concept of risk emerged in the United States. Born on the high seas, risk migrated inland and became essential to the financial management of an inherently uncertain capitalist future.

For more on the book, visit http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674736351

Jonathan Levy explains the emerging world of capitalism and risk in America

Founded in 1913, Harvard University Press is the publisher of such classic works as John Rawls’s Theory of Justice, E.O. Wilson’s On Human Nature, and Helen Vendler’s Dickinson. The Press continues to be a leading publisher of convergent works in the sciences, humanities, and social sciences, while it’s taking bold steps in exciting new directions, from innovative partnerships, to a diverse translation program, to an expanded commitment to facilitating scholarly conversation around the globe. The Press is also embracing new digital products and platforms, driven by the belief that books from academic publishers—on paper or on screen, in your hand or in the cloud—are more essential than ever before for understanding critical issues facing the world today.

Harvard Press

Popular tracks