Domesticity gets a bad rap. We associate it with stasis, bourgeois accumulation, banality, and conservative family values. Yet in Extreme Domesticity, Susan Fraiman reminds us that keeping house is just as likely to involve dislocation, economic insecurity, creative improvisation, and queered notions of family. Her book links terms often seen as antithetical: domestic knowledge coinciding with female masculinity, feminism, and divorce; domestic routines elaborated in the context of Victorian poverty, twentieth-century immigration, and new millennial homelessness. Far from being exclusively middle-class, domestic concerns are shown to be all the more urgent and ongoing when shelter is precarious. Fraiman's reformulation frees domesticity from associations with conformity and sentimentality. Ranging across periods and genres, and diversifying the archive of domestic depictions, Fraiman's readings include novels by Elizabeth Gaskell, Sandra Cisneros, Jamaica Kincaid, Leslie Feinberg, and Lois-Ann Yamanaka; Edith Wharton's classic decorating guide; popular women's magazines; and ethnographic studies of homeless subcultures. Recognizing the labor and know-how needed to produce the space we call "home," Extreme Domesticity vindicates domestic practices and appreciates their centrality to everyday life. At the same time, it remains well aware of domesticity's dark side. Neither a romance of artisanal housewifery nor an apology for conservative notions of home, Extreme Domesticity stresses the heterogeneity of households and probes the multiplicity of domestic meanings.

What does it mean to be French? What constitutes Frenchness ? Is it birth, language, attachment to republicanism, adherence to cultural norms? In contemporary France, these questions resonate in light of the large number of non-French and non-European immigrants, many from former French colonies, who have made France home in recent decades. Historically, French identity has long been understood as the product of a centralized state and culture emanating from Paris that was itself central to European history and civilization. Likewise, French identity in terms of class, gender, nationality, and religion mainly has been explained as a strong, indivisible core, against which marginal actors have been defined. This collection of essays offers examples drawn from an imperial history of France that show the power of the periphery to shape diverse and dynamic modern French identities at its center. Each essay explains French identity as a fluid process rather than a category into which French citizens (and immigrants) are expected to fit. In using a core/periphery framework to explore identity creation, Views from the Margins breaks new ground in bringing together diverse historical topics from politics, religion, regionalism, consumerism, nationalism, and gendered aspects of civic and legal engagement.

You’ve Got Mail meets The Proposal—this romance is one for the books. Savannah Cade’s dreams are coming true. The Claire Donovan, editor-in-chief of the most successful romance publishing company in the country, has requested to see the manuscript Savannah’s been secretly writing. The only problem: she’s an editor for a different company, and their philosophy is only highbrow works are worth printing and romance should be reserved for the lowest level of Dante’s inferno. But when Savannah drops her manuscript during a staff meeting and nearly exposes herself to the whole company—including William Pennington, the new boss and son of the romance-despising CEO herself—she has no choice but to hide the manuscript in a hidden room. When she returns, she’s dismayed to discover that someone has not only been in her hidden nook but has written notes in the margins—quite critical ones. But when Claire’s own reaction turns out to be nearly identical to the scribbled remarks, and worse, Claire announces that Savannah has six weeks to resubmit before she retires, Savannah finds herself forced to seek the help of the shadowy editor after all. As their notes back and forth start to fill up the pages, however, Savannah finds him not just becoming pivotal to her work but her life. There’s no doubt about it: she’s falling for her mystery editor. If she only knew who he was. “Meet Me in the Margins is a delightfully charming jewel of a book that fans of romantic comedy won’t be able to put down!” — Kristy Woodson Harvey, New York Times bestselling author of Under the Southern Sky

David Shoemaker develops a novel pluralistic theory of responsibility, motivated by our ambivalence to cases of marginal agency--such as those caused by clinical depression or autism, for instance. He identifies three distinct types of responsibility, each with its own set of required capacities: attributability, answerability, and accountability.

Examines commentary written in the margins of the text to show how the pages of the first printed books became the arena for struggled among authors, readers, and cultural authorities. Focuses on four controversies: the printed English Bible, two rivals for court favor, Martin Marprelate's theological pamphlets, and the glossed works of Ben Jonson. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

In Marx at the Margins, Kevin Anderson uncovers a variety of extensive but neglected texts by Marx that cast what we thought we knew about his work in a startlingly different light. Analyzing a variety of Marx’s writings, including journalistic work written for the New York Tribune, Anderson presents us with a Marx quite at odds with conventional interpretations. Rather than providing us with an account of Marx as an exclusively class-based thinker, Anderson here offers a portrait of Marx for the twenty-first century: a global theorist whose social critique was sensitive to the varieties of human social and historical development, including not just class, but nationalism, race, and ethnicity, as well. Through highly informed readings of work ranging from Marx’s unpublished 1879–82 notebooks to his passionate writings about the antislavery cause in the United States, this volume delivers a groundbreaking and canon-changing vision of Karl Marx that is sure to provoke lively debate in Marxist scholarship and beyond. For this expanded edition, Anderson has written a new preface that discusses the additional 1879–82 notebook material, as well as the influence of the Russian-American philosopher Raya Dunayevskaya on his thinking.

Maria Sibylla Merian, a German painter and naturalist, produced an innovative work on tropical insects based on lore she gathered from the Carib, Arawak, and African women of Suriname.