"Cultural Studies" has emerged in British and American higher education as a movement that challenges the traditional humanities and social science disciplines. Influenced by the New Left, feminism, and poststructualist literary theory, cultural studies seeks to analyze everday life and the social construction of "subjectivities." Crusoe's Footprints encompasses the movement of many colleges and universities in the 1960s towards such interdisciplinary and "radical" programs as American Studies, Women's Studies, and Afro-American Studies. Brantlinger also examines the role of feminist criticism which has been particularly crucial in both Britain and the U.S.

The discovery in Robinson Crusoe of the footprint of a fellow human on an abandoned island is a haunting and iconic moment in world literature. In the hands of Patrick Chamoiseau, one of the most innovative and lauded authors in the French language, this moment of shattered solitude becomes an occasion for Crusoe to reconsider his origins, existence, and humanity and for one of our most acclaimed novelists to craft a powerful meditation on race and history. Chamoiseau’s novel contrasts two intertwining narratives—the log entries of a slave ship’s captain and the story of a castaway who awakens on a beach and must rebuild his entire world alone. Chamoiseau creates a new perspective on the Crusoe myth, not only injecting the slave trade and Creole history into this previously ahistorical tale but conceiving an intensely original, freeform prose influenced by Creole cadence. This powerful work by a literary master is available in English for the first time in this eloquent and vivid translation.

Through an examination of carbon footprint metaphors, this books demonstrates the ways in which climate change and other ecological issues are culturally and materially constituted through metaphor. The carbon footprint metaphor has achieved a ubiquitous presence in Anglo-North American public contexts since the turn of the millennium, yet this metaphor remains under-examined as a crucial mediator of political responses to the urgent crisis of climate change. Existing books and articles on the carbon footprint typically treat this metaphor as a quantifying metric, with little attention to the shifting mediations and practices of the carbon footprint as a metaphor. This gap echoes a wider gap in understanding metaphors as key figures in mediating more-than-human relations at a time when such relations profoundly matter. As a timely intervention, this book addresses this gap by using insights from environmental humanities and political ecology to discuss carbon footprint metaphors in popular and public texts. This book will be of great interest to researchers and students of environmental humanities, political ecology, environmental communication, and metaphor studies.

In Defoe's Footprints, essays by prominent scholars of eighteenth-century literature salute Maximillian E. Novak's influence upon the study of Daniel Defoe. Best known today as the author of Robinson Crusoe, Defoe was a prolific writer in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries who wrote novels, essays, pamphlets, and poems. Widely extending Novak's perspectives, this volume explores Defoe's place in the English novel and in literary developments of mimesis, realism, and popular mythology. The contributors locate Defoe in new ways within the complex symbolism and discourse of a turbulent world of burgeoning capitalism, Protestantism, imperialism, and economic speculation. With attention to Defoe's neglected writings as well as to his important works, this volume uncovers his distance from and influence on modern literature, paying tribute to Maximillian E. Novak by presenting new ideas about, and new readings of, Daniel Defoe.

Students want to know: What does one do with critique? Fortunately, some of the most provocative self-critical intellectuals, from the postwar period to the postmodern present, have wrestled with this. Joel Pfister, in Critique for What?, criss-crosses the Atlantic to take stock of exciting British and US cultural studies, American studies, and Left studies that challenge the academic critique-for-critique's-sake and career's-sake business and ask: Critique for what and for whom? Historicizing for what and for whom? Politicizing for what and for whom? America for what and for whom? Here New Left revisionary socialists, members of the "unpartied Left," cultural studies theorists, American studies scholars, radical historians, progressive literary critics, and early proponents of transnational analysis interact in what amounts to a lively book-length strategy seminar. British political intellectuals, including Raymond Williams, E. P. Thompson, Stuart Hall, and Raphael Samuel, and Americans, including F. O. Matthiessen, Robert Lynd, C. Wright Mills, and Richard Ohmann, reconsider the critical project as social transformation studies, activism studies, organizing studies. Eager to prevent cultural studies from becoming cynicism studies, Critique for What? thinks creatively about the possibilities of using as well as developing critique in our new millennium.

A systematic presentation of activity theory, its application to interaction design, and an argument for the development of activity theory as a basis for understanding how people interact with technology. Activity theory holds that the human mind is the product of our interaction with people and artifacts in the context of everyday activity. Acting with Technology makes the case for activity theory as a basis for understanding our relationship with technology. Victor Kaptelinin and Bonnie Nardi describe activity theory's principles, history, relationship to other theoretical approaches, and application to the analysis and design of technologies. The book provides the first systematic entry-level introduction to the major principles of activity theory. It describes the accumulating body of work in interaction design informed by activity theory, drawing on work from an international community of scholars and designers. Kaptelinin and Nardi examine the notion of the object of activity, describe its use in an empirical study, and discuss key debates in the development of activity theory. Finally, they outline current and future issues in activity theory, providing a comparative analysis of the theory and its leading theoretical competitors within interaction design: distributed cognition, actor-network theory, and phenomenologically inspired approaches.