Performative Polemic is the first literary historical study to analyze the “war of words” unleashed in the pamphlets denouncing Louis XIV’s absolute monarchy between 1667 and 1715. As conflict erupted between the French ruler and his political enemies, pamphlet writers across Europe penned scathing assaults on the Sun King’s bellicose impulses and expansionist policies. This book investigates how pamphlet writers challenged the monarchy’s monopoly over the performance of sovereignty by contesting the very mechanisms through which the crown legitimized its authority at home and abroad. Author Kathrina LaPorta offers a new conceptual framework for reading pamphlets as political interventions, asserting that an analysis of the pamphlet’s form is crucial to understanding how pamphleteers seduced readers by capitalizing on existing markets in literature, legal writing, and journalism. Pamphlet writers appeal to the theater-going public that would have been attending plays by Molière and Racine, as well as to readers of historical novels and periodicals. Pamphleteers entertained readers as they attacked the performative circuitry behind the curtain of monarchy.

Performative Polemic offers a literary history of the French-language pamphlets that denounced absolutism during Louis XIV's personal reign (1661-1715). The book employs performativity as a conceptual framework to trace the evolution of anti-absolutist pamphlets from legalistic texts indicting the French crown to satirical narratives that transformed the Sun King into a laughable object of derision.

If terms are associated with particular historical periods, then ’polemic’ is firmly rooted within early modern print culture, the apparently inevitable result of religious controversy and the rise of print media. Taking a broad European approach, this collection brings together specialists on medieval as well as early modern culture in order to challenge stubborn assumptions that medieval culture was homogenous and characterized by consensus; and that literary discourse is by nature ’eirenic’. Instead, the volume shows more clearly the continuities and discontinuities, especially how medieval discourse on the sins of the tongue continued into early modern discussion; how popular and influential medieval genres such as sermons and hagiography dealt with potentially heterodox positions; and the role of literary, especially fictional, debate in developing modes of articulating discord, as well as demonstrating polemic in action in political and ecclesiastical debate. Within this historical context, the position of early modern debates as part of a more general culture of articulating discord becomes more clearly visible. The structure of the volume moves from an internal textual focus, where the nature of polemic can be debated, through a middle section where these concerns are also played out in social practice, to a more historical group investigating applied polemic. In this way a more nuanced view is provided of the meaning, role, and effect of ’polemic’ both broadly across time and space, and more narrowly within specific circumstances.

These new essays by leading scholars examine some famous and less well-known instances of polemical encounters. The essays are enhanced by an interview with Gayatri Spivak, specially conducted by Jane Gallop for this volume Historically rigorous, theoretically astute, and sometimes wickedly funny, Polemic makes criticism a critical issue.

Higher education and research are now at the centre of economic and social policy in advanced information societies. Global networks of researchers, finance, students and policymakers invoke collaborative sociological perspectives. What it means to be an academic and to work in a technologically advanced knowledge industry has undergone transformations that cross national borders. The future of knowledge production, social development, prosperity and the freedom of ideas are caught in the swelling of global tides. The Social Structures of Global Academia exposes readers to a variety of issues that are impacting academics across the globe. The volume includes contributions by leading social scientists and innovative research from emerging scholars. Its anchoring themes include academic ethics, the affective cultures of scholarship, changing funding structures and social control of the currents of scholarly life. Giving readers an overview of the growing field of critical studies of academia, The Social Structures of Global Academia will appeal to students and scholars seeking to understand more of the burgeoning field of critical sociologies of higher education, and general readers interested in contemporary knowledge about universities, science and the people who make it their passion. It will also appeal to policymakers who are invested in trying to make universities more viable places to work.

2021 Outstanding Academic Title, Choice Magazine Turns to the written record to re-examine the building blocks of a nation Picking up where most historians conclude, Chelsea Stieber explores the critical internal challenge to Haiti’s post-independence sovereignty: a civil war between monarchy and republic. What transpired was a war of swords and of pens, waged in newspapers and periodicals, in literature, broadsheets, and fliers. In her analysis of Haitian writing that followed independence, Stieber composes a new literary history of Haiti, that challenges our interpretations of both freedom struggles and the postcolonial. By examining internal dissent during the revolution, Stieber reveals that the very concept of freedom was itself hotly contested in the public sphere, and it was this inherent tension that became the central battleground for the guerre de plume—the paper war—that vied to shape public sentiment and the very idea of Haiti. Stieber’s reading of post-independence Haitian writing reveals key insights into the nature of literature, its relation to freedom and politics, and how fraught and politically loaded the concepts of “literature” and “civilization” really are. The competing ideas of liberté, writing, and civilization at work within postcolonial Haiti have consequences for the way we think about Haiti’s role—as an idea and a discursive interlocutor—in the elaboration of black radicalism and black Atlantic, anticolonial, and decolonial thought. In so doing, Stieber reorders our previously homogeneous view of Haiti, teasing out warring conceptions of the new nation that continued to play out deep into the twentieth century.

Against and Beyond: Subversion and Transgression in Mass Media, Popular Culture and Performance is a collection of fourteen essays by scholars representing a number of disciplines discussing transgression and subversion in film, television, music, theatre and digital media. Moving across major political and cultural movements of the 20th century, the book addresses a global need for transgression and subversion in our times. Applying theories of Freud, Lacan, Kristeva, Foucault, Adorno and Horkheimer, Deleuze and Guattari, and Butler, the volume is an important contribution to understanding the mechanisms and functions of subversion and transgression in contemporary media and popular culture and provides essential reading for all those seeking to go against and beyond.

Through hundreds of published and unpublished sources, Alex J. Novikoff traces the evolution of disputation from its ancient origins to its broader influence in the scholastic culture and public sphere of the High Middle Ages.

This book's primary task is to test the contemporary value of performance and performativity. Performative Identities in Culture: From Literature to Social Media undertakes this task via a host of chapters on a vast spectrum of performativity-related topics such as: literature (British, American, Welsh), film, art, social media, and sports. Within these contexts, the book raises a number of questions relevant today. How is minority culture constructed and performed in literature? How can one manifest identity in multicultural contexts? How has performativity been transformed in audiovisual media, like film, video games and social media? And, can the digital itself be performative?

This book explores responses to The Merchant of Venice by Jewish writers, critics, theater artists, thinkers, religious leaders and institutions.