Subjects of Affection offers an alternative to the modern model of human rights in an unexpected archive: the monarchist tragedies that shaped Louis XIV’s absolutist France. Pairing political theory with performance studies, Anna Rosensweig argues that the right of resistance, largely thought to have disappeared from French political thought in the aftermath of the religious wars of the sixteenth century, actually endured throughout the seventeenth century as a conceptual framework embedded and embodied in tragic drama. Contemporary scholars have critiqued the modern rights paradigm for its failure to acknowledge the ways in which individual rights depend upon state protection and national belonging. Through a reappraisal of early modern French tragedy, Rosensweig provides a corrective to accounts of human rights that begin with the French Revolution, exploring previously unrecognized models for collective action that had emerged during the religious wars. Subjects of Affection reveals how French tragedy sustained these models of collective action by binding together individuals and groups through affect. Rosensweig places sixteenth-century political treatises in dialogue with dramas by Robert Garnier, Jean Rotrou, Pierre Corneille, and Jean Racine that were performed and published between 1550 and 1700. In so doing, she demonstrates how these tragedies, through their poetics and performance potential, stage a subject of rights whose collective constitution differs from the individualism of our modern rights framework. Through fresh insights and incisive readings, Subjects of Affection explores a form of political subjectivity that locates political power in connection to others—from staged characters and choruses to unseen collectives.

Analyzes the feelings and problems involved in different types of human love, including familial affection, friendship, passion, and charity.

Literary Nonfiction. Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough arrived in the United States from Poland in 1984, bringing memories of life under a totalitarian regime, where the personal was always political. In essay after essay in OBJECTS OF AFFECTION, her remarkable debut, Hryniewicz-Yarbrough shows the immigrant's double perspective, exploring a "bi-polar" world of displacement and rootlessness, geography and memory, individual and family history, always with an acute awareness of losses and gains that accompany adaptation to a new language and culture and the creation of a new identity.

Cartoons provide a humorous view of love, courtship, marriage, infidelity, and friendship

"(Tuan) does a masterful job exploring the condescending human treatment of animals as 'playthings' that exist only for our entertainment. He charts the malevolent history of male domination over women and children and the sad chronicle of slaves, dwarfs and other 'freaks' treated as human appliances or toys. This provocative study of power in the world of pleasure, play and art is a tour de force." -Cultural Information Service "A brilliant book that will appeal to a wide audience. The volume provides excellent material for school and college seminar debates on humankind's place in nature and attitudes toward other living things. . . . (A) penetrating analysis. . . . Readable at all levels."-Choice