Bold Ideas, Essential Reading since 1936.

Rutgers University Press is dedicated to the advancement and dissemination of knowledge for a wide range of readers. The Press reflects and extends the University’s core mission of research, instruction, and service. They enhance the work of their authors through exceptional publications that shape critical issues, spark debate, and enrich teaching. Core subjects include: film and media studies, sociology, anthropology, education, history, health, history of medicine, human rights, urban studies, criminal justice, Jewish studies, American studies, women's, gender, and sexuality studies, LGBTQ, Latino/a, Asian and African studies, as well as books about New York, New Jersey, and the region.

Rutgers also distributes books published by Bucknell University Press.

Showing 2,371-2,400 of 2,552 items.

On Fashion

Rutgers University Press

Until recently, fashion was considered the "F-word" in intellectual circles, dismissed as unworthy of serious attention. Yet no area of life, no individual moment, stands outside fashion's discourses. Intuitively, we all know that clothing is a language, incessantly communicating messages about its wearer. But who speaks this language, to whom is it addressed, what does it mean, and how are its meanings established and transformed? On Fashion explores the ways our material, political, psychological, sexual, even intellectual lives are woven into fashion's fabric.

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Birth of a Nation

D.W. Griffith, Director

Rutgers University Press

The Birth of a Nation (1915) remains the most controversial American film ever made, and its director, D. W. Griffith, one of the most extraordinary figures in film history. It was the first true feature film and did more than any other to launch Hollywood both as an industry and as an idea. The film consolidated a trend in cinematic technique and an approach to dramatic narrative that define American cinema to this day. As a great but ideologically troubled film that offers us a reflection of ourselves as Americans, The Birth of a Nation continues to intrigue, challenge, infuriate, and awe.

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Big Science

Rutgers University Press

When cartoonist Nick Downes looks to Big Science for explanations, anything can happen. This first collection of his zany view of life in the laboratory––and beyond––takes everything to an extreme, from technology ("Aerobics is down the hall. This is Robotics.") to the atmosphere (with "threatening clouds" that spell out "YOU'RE DOOMED").

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White By Definition

Social Classification in Creole Louisiana

Rutgers University Press

"A profound study of the nebulous Creoles. . . . Domínguez's use of original sources . . . is scholarship at its best. . . . Her study is fascinating, thought-provoking, controversial, and without a doubt, one of the most objective analyses of Creole Louisiana. Her emphasis on social stratification and her excellent integration of ethnic and racial classification of Creoles with legal and social dynamics and individual choice of ethnic identity elucidates strikingly the continuing controversy of who and what is a Louisiana Creole."--Journal of American Ethnic History

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Hard Bodies

Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era

Rutgers University Press

Hard Bodies is about Ronald Reagan, Robert Bly, "America," Rambo, Dirty Harry, national identity, and individual manhood. By linking blockbuster Hollywood films of the 1980s to Ronald Reagan and his image, Susan Jeffords explores the links between masculinity and U.S. identity and how their images changed during that decade. Her book powerfully defines a distinctly ideological period in the renegotiation of masculinity in the post-Vietnam era.

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Exploring the Little Rivers of New Jersey

Rutgers University Press

Featuring 166 photos, 22 maps, and these rivers: Batsto, Cedar Creek, Delaware and Raritan Canal, Great Egg Harbor River, Hackensack, Manasquan River and Inlet, Maurice, Millstone, Mullica, Musconetcong, Oswego River and Lake, Passaic, Paulins Kill, Pequest, Ramapo-Pompton, Rancocas, South and North Branches of the Raritan, Toms, Wading, Black-Lamington, Cohansey River, Raceway, and Sunset Lake, Crosswicks Creek, Metedeconk, and Stony Brook.

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Romantic Poetry

Recent Revisionary Criticism

Edited by Karl Kroeber
Rutgers University Press

This anthology fills the need for a comprehensive, up-to-date collection of the most important contemporary writings on the English romantic poets. It should replace the last anthology of essays on romantic poetry, which appeared almost twenty years ago when few women wrote about these poets, and gender studies of literature had barely begun.

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Venice West

The Beat Generation in Southern California

Rutgers University Press

In this fascinating book, John Arthur Maynard tells the story of the poets and promoters who invented the Beat Generation and who, in many cases, destroyed themselves in the process. In this look at the least remembered (but in its time, most publicized) beat enclave, Maynard focuses on two of Venice's most newsworthy residentsÐÐLawrence Lipton and Stuart Z. Perkoff. Lipton began as a writer of popular detective stories and screenplays, but was determined to be recognized as a poet and social critic. He eventually published The Holy Barbarians, which helped to create the enduring public image of the beatnik. Stuart Perkoff was a more gifted poet; with fascination and horror, we follow his failed attempts to support his family, his heroin addiction, his first wive's courage and mental fragility, his sexual entanglements, his imprisonment, and the development of his own writing. Other characters who move in and out of the story are Kenneth Rexroth, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg, as well as lesser-known poets, artists, hangers-on, and the many women who were rarely treated as full members of the community.

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My Daughter, the Teacher

Jewish Teachers in the New York City Schools

Rutgers University Press

My son, the doctor' and 'my daughter, the teacher' were among the most cherished phrases of Jewish immigrant parents," writes Ruth Markowitz in recounting this story of Jewish women who taught school in New York. Teaching was an attractive profession to the daughters of immigrants. It provided status, security, was compatible with marriage, and licenses did not require expensive training. In the interwar years, Jewish women in New York entered teaching in large and unprecedented numbers. In fact, by 1960 the majority of all New York teachers were Jewish women. By interviewing sixty-one retired teachers, Ruth Markowitz re-created their lives and the far-reaching influence they had on public education.These women faced many barriers--from lack of parental and financial support to discrimination--as they pursued their educations.

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M.I.A. or Mythmaking in America

How and why belief in live POWs has possessed a nation

Rutgers University Press

This paperback edition of M.I.A. or Mythmaking in America adds major new material about Ross Perot's role, the 1991-1992 Senate investigation, and illegal operations authorized by Ronald Reagan. 

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Good Days, Bad Days

The Self and Chronic Illness in Time

Rutgers University Press

Millions of American suffer chronic illness, but what is life really like when you are chronically ill? Drawing on skillfully conducted in-depth interviews, Kathy Charmaz takes a fresh look at the experiences of people with serious chronic illnesses such as cardiovascular disease, cancer, lupus, emphysema, multiple sclerosis, and arthritis.

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Toxic Circles

Environmental Hazards from the Workplace into the Community

Rutgers University Press

When men and women who work with toxic materials get sick, everyone needs to worry. The toxic circles of industrial hazards spread in successive waves outward: from the workplace to the home, to the neighborhood, and to the community at large. These compelling essays tell how the links between cancers and working with radium, waxes, and dyes were uncovered and how poisoning from lead, mercury, dioxin, and chromium in and around the factory was detected. They document how corporations, government agencies, courts, unions, physicians, workers, and citizens have tried to ignore, evade, and finally battle the terrible legacy of industrial disease. The book focuses on New Jersey, the heart of industrial America, where three centuries of experience with occupational and environmental disease offer hard-earned lessons to the rest of the country and the world.


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Daughters of Decadence

Women Writers of the Fin de Siecle

Rutgers University Press

At the turn of the century, short stories by -- and often about -- "New Women" flooded the pages English and American magazines such as the Atlantic Monthly, Harpers, and the Yellow Book. This daring new fiction, often innovative in form and courageous in its candid representations of female sexuality, marital discontent, and feminist protest, shocked Victorian critics, who denounced the authors as "literary degenerates" or "erotomaniacs."

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"Flowering Judas"

Katherine Anne Porter

Rutgers University Press

Katherine Anne Porter often spoke of her story "Flowering Judas" as the tale she liked best of all her stories because it came the nearest to what she meant it to be. It is the story of Laura, an idealistic woman, who travels to Mexico from Arizona at the age of twenty-two to assist the Obregón Revolution.

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'Yellow Woman'

Leslie Marmon Silko

Edited by Melody Graulich
Rutgers University Press

Ambiguous and unsettling, Silko's "Yellow Woman" explores one woman's desires and changes--her need to open herself to a richer sensuality.  Walking away from her everyday identity as daughter, wife and mother, she takes possession of transgressive feelings and desires by recognizing them in the stories she has heard, by blurring the boundaries between herself and the Yellow Woman of myth. 

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Brown River, White Ocean

An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Philippine Literature in English

Edited by Luis H. Francia
Rutgers University Press

English is often a primary literary language for Filipino writers--not only for those in the Philippines but for those resident in the United States; both groups are included in this anthology of 31 stories and 108 poems documenting a tradition that began at the turn-of-the-century. Manila-born poet and writer Francia, an editor at the Village Voice, gathers and validates creative work that has had limited distribution not only here but in Asia.

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"A Good Man is Hard to Find"

Flannery O'Connor

Edited by Frederick Asals
Rutgers University Press

Presents a chronology of the life of author Flannery O'Conner, comments and letters by the author about the story, and a series of ten critical essays by noted authors about her work

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Abbie Hoffman

American Rebel

Rutgers University Press

In this sympathetic history of a maligned decade, Marty Jezer, a fellow antiwar activist, details Abbie Hoffman's humor, manic energy, depressive spells, political skills, & above all, his incurable & still contagious optimism. He presents a thoughtful, solidly researched biography of the wildly creative & iconoclastic Yippie, portraying Hoffman as a fresh force in American political culture. Jezer surveys in detail the politics, philosophies, & struggles of the antiwar movement.

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Shoot the Piano Player

Francois Truffaut, Director

Edited by Peter Brunette
Rutgers University Press

When it appeared in 1960, the inspired fun of François Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player shocked and delighted critics and audiences around the world. Its sudden shifts of tone and mood, its willful play with genre stereotypes, and its hilarious in-jokes clearly signaled that Jean-Luc Godard's equally innovative Breathless was not a fluke. The two films heralded the arrival of the so-called New Wave, sharing with other New Wave films an insistence on low-budget, location shooting and, above all, on cinema as the personal statement of an author. These films had a tremendous impact on all filmmaking. 

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My Night At Maud's

Eric Rohmer, Director

Rutgers University Press

Showalter discusses the film in the context of Rohmer's conservative film theory and explains its relationship to the other films in the director's series of Six Moral Tales. He shows how Rohmer's sense of place and his techniques of film narration develop the theme of moral choice in a story about love and chance encounters with a delightfully ironic conclusion.

The volume also contains a selection of background and critical materials, including interviews with Rohmer and pertinent statements by him, reviews of the film from several countries, and important criticism of the film from the past twenty years. A brief biography, filmography, and selected bibliography are also included. This volume will be indispensable for anyone studying this important film, and will delight those who just want to enjoy it.

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Animating Culture

Hollywood Cartoons from the Sound Era

Rutgers University Press

Long considered "children's entertainment" by audiences and popular media, Hollywood animation has received little serious attention. Eric Smoodin's Animating Culture is the first and only book to thoroughly analyze the animated short film. 

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The Sleeper Wakes

Harlem Renaissance Stories by Women

Rutgers University Press

Twenty-eight stories with themes of black and white racial tension and misunderstanding, economic deprivation, passing, love across and within racial lines, and the attempt to maintain community and uplift the race.

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The Retreat from Race

Asian-American Admissions and Racial Politics

Rutgers University Press

Moving beyond the university setting, Takagi explores the political significance of the retreat from race by linking Asian-American admissions to other controversies in higher education and in American politics, including the debates over political correctness and multiculturalism. In her assessment, the retreat from race is likely to fail at its promise of easing racial tension and promoting racial equality.

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Mothers On The Job

Maternity Policy in the U.S. Workplace

Rutgers University Press

Women's increasing demands for protection and benefits in the workplace, especially with regard to maternity leave, have sparked more than a century of controversy among feminists on how best to serve the needs of working women. This debate continues to divide the feminist community. One side believes women are better served by emphasizing equality with men--pregnancy should be treated like any other "disability." The other side wants to recognize difference--special provisions should apply only to pregnant women. Lise Vogel examines the evolution of this debate on pregnant women in the workplace, looking at theoretical as well as practical implications.

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Gender Play

Girls and Boys in School

Rutgers University Press

You see it in every schoolyard: the girls play only with the girls, the boys play only with the boys. Why? And what do the kids think about this? Breaking with familiar conventions for thinking about children and gender, Gender Play develops fresh insights into the everyday social worlds of kids in elementary schools in the United States. Barrie Thorne draws on her daily observations in the classroom and on the playground to show how children construct and experience gender in school. With rich detail,she looks at the "play of gender" in the organization of groups of kids and activities - activities such as "chase-and-kiss," "cooties," "goin' with" and teasing.

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A Convergence of Lives

Sofia Kovalevskaia - Scientist, Writer, Revolutionary

Rutgers University Press

To inaugurate a new series, Lives of Women in Science, Rutgers University Press is reissuing this much-acclaimed biography of Sofia Kovalevskaia, the renowned nineteenth-century mathematician, writer, and revolutionary.

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The (Other) American Traditions

Nineteenth-Century Women Writers

Edited by Joyce W. Warren
Rutgers University Press

The American literary canon has been the subject of debate and change for at least a decade.  As women writers and writers of color are being rediscovered and acclaimed, the question of whether they are worthy of inclusion remains open. The (Other) American Traditions brings together for the first time in one place, essays on individual writers and traditions that begin to ask the harder questions. How do we talk about these writers once we get beyond the historical issues?  How is their work related to their male counterparts? How is it similar: how is it different? Are differences related to gender or race or class? How has the selection of books in the literary canon (Melville, Hawthorne, Emerson, and James) led to a definition of the American tradition that was calculated to exclude women? Do we need a new critical vocabulary to discuss these works? Should we stop talking about a tradition and begin to talk about many traditions? How did black American women writers develop strategies for speaking out when they were doubly in jeopardy of being ignored as blacks and as women? The volume offers irrefutable proof that the writers, the critics who work on their texts, all these questions, and the expansion of the canon matter very much indeed.

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Sex Exposed

Sexuality and the Pornography Debate

Rutgers University Press

Over the past twenty years debates about pornography have raged within feminism and beyond. Throughout the 1970s feminists increasingly addressed the problem of men's sexual violence against women, and many women reduced the politics of men's power to questions about sexuality. By the 1980s these questions had become more and more focused on the issue of pornography--now a metaphor for the menace of male power. Collapsing feminist politics into sexuality and sexuality into pornography has not only caused some of the deepest splits between feminists, but made it harder to think clearly about either sexuality or pornography--indeed, about feminist politics more generally.

This provocative collection, by well-known feminists, surveys these arguments, and in particular asks why recent feminist debates about sexuality keep reducing to questions of pornography.

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Lucy Stone

Speaking Out for Equality

Rutgers University Press

No study of women's history in the United States is complete without an account of Lucy Stone's role in the nineteenth-century drive for legal and political rights for women.This first fully documented biography of Stone describes her rapid rise to fame and power and her later attempt at an equitable mariage. Lucy Stone was a Massachusetts newspaper editor, abolitionist, and charismatic orator for the women's rights movement in the last half of the nineteenth century. She was deeply involved in almost every reform issue of her time. Charles Sumner, Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Julia Ward Howe, Horace Greeley, and Louisa May Alcott counted themselves among her friends. Through her public speaking and her newspaper, the Woman's Journal, Stone became the most widely admired woman's rights spokeswoman of her era. In the nineteenth century, Lucy Stone was a household name.

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Looking for America on the New Jersey Turnpike

Rutgers University Press

Two American Studies professors from Rutgers University here show how the New Jersey Turnpike--that "ugly icon,'' America's "widest and most traveled'' road--has found its way into the minds, if not the hearts, of artists and drivers alike. In poet Allen Ginsberg, singer Bruce Springsteen, commuters and roadside home owners lulled to sleep by its drone of traffic, this 12-lane asphalt monster has inspired powerful reactions, from admiration to anger.

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