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.

Objects of affection recovers the emotional attraction of the medieval book through an engagement with a fifteenth-century literary collection known as Oxford, Bodleian Library Manuscript Ashmole 61. Exploring how the inhabitants of the book’s pages – human and nonhuman, tangible and intangible – collaborate with its readers then and now, this book addresses the manuscript’s material appeal in the ways it binds itself to different cultural, historical and material environments. In doing so it traces the affective literacy training that the manuscript provided its late-medieval English household, whose diverse inhabitants are incorporated into the ecology of the book itself as it fashions spiritually generous and socially mindful household members.

This interdisciplinary study argues that the intersection of pedagogical and affective language in Renaissance literature shows that emotion was conceived as a conventional practice.

The powerful, dramatic story of how a successful Hollywood set designer whose identity was deeply rooted in his homosexuality came to be suddenly and utterly transformed by the power of the gospel. When Becket Cook moved from Dallas to Los Angeles after college, he discovered a socially progressive, liberal town that embraced not only his creative side but also his homosexuality. He devoted his time to growing his career as a successful set designer and to finding "the one" man who would fill his heart. As a gay man in the entertainment industry, Cook centered his life around celebrity-filled Hollywood parties and traveled to society hot-spots around the world--until a chance encounter with a pastor at an LA coffee shop one morning changed everything. In A Change of Affection, Becket Cook shares his testimony as someone who was transformed by the power of the gospel. Cook's dramatic conversion to Christianity and subsequent seminary training inform his views on homosexuality--personally, biblically, theologically, and culturally--and in his new book he educates Christians on how to better understand this complex and controversial issue while revealing how to lovingly engage with those who disagree. A Change of Affection is a timely and indispensable resource for anyone who desires to understand more fully one of the most common and difficult stumbling blocks to faithfully following Christ today.

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

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.

A refined and remarkably well-educated woman, Maria Bryan began corresponding with her sister when she was sixteen years old. As Carol Bleser points out in her introduction, Bryan travels, reads the popular books of the day, entertains visitors, and makes social calls. At the same time, however, notes Bleser, Bryan's letters belie popular notions about the privileged lives of "typical" planters' daughters in the antebellum South, for she also works at housekeeping, tends the sick at home and in the neighborhood, makes clothes for the family's slaves, and tutors younger siblings.