Product Description: In Loaded Words the inimitable literary and cultural critic Marjorie Garber invites readers to join her in a rigorous and exuberant exploration of language. What links the pieces included in this vibrant new collection is the author's contention that all words are inescapably loaded-that is, highly charged, explosive, substantial, intoxicating, fruitful, and overbrimming-and that such loading is what makes language matter...read more

The story of a recently discovered portrait of a young William Shakespeare traces its origins and history to discuss how it came into being, its possession by the same family for more than four hundred years, the painstaking forensic study that confirmed its age, and the plausibility of its authenticity. 20,000 first printing.

Product Description: The plays of Shakespeare are filled with ghosts – and ghost writing. Shakespeare's Ghost Writers is an examination of the authorship controversy surrounding Shakespeare: the claim made repeatedly that the plays were ghost written...read more

Product Description: From one of the world's premier Shakespeare scholars comes a magisterial new study whose premise is "that Shakespeare makes modern culture and that modern culture makes Shakespeare."        Shakespeare has determined many of the ideas that we think of as "naturally" true: ideas about human character, individuality and selfhood, government, leadership, love and jealousy, men and women, youth and age...read more

What is the role of the arts in American culture? Is art an essential element? If so, how should we support it? Today, as in the past, artists need the funding, approval, and friendship of patrons whether they are individuals, corporations, governments, or nonprofit foundations. But as Patronizing the Arts shows, these relationships can be problematic, leaving artists "patronized"--both supported with funds and personal interest, while being condescended to for vocations misperceived as play rather than serious work. In this provocative book, Marjorie Garber looks at the history of patronage, explains how patronage has elevated and damaged the arts in modern culture, and argues for the university as a serious patron of the arts. With clarity and wit, Garber supports rethinking prejudices that oppose art's role in higher education, rejects assumptions of inequality between the sciences and humanities, and points to similarities between the making of fine art and the making of good science. She examines issues of artistic and monetary value, and transactions between high and popular culture. She even asks how college sports could provide a new way of thinking about arts funding. Using vivid anecdotes and telling details, Garber calls passionately for an increased attention to the arts, not just through government and private support, but as a core aspect of higher education. Compulsively readable, Patronizing the Arts challenges all who value the survival of artistic creation both in the present and future.

Product Description: The title of this collection, Profiling Shakespeare, is meant strongly in its double sense. These essays show the outline of a Shakespeare rather different from the man sought by biographers from his time to our own. They also show the effects, the ephemera, the clues and cues, welcome and unwelcome, out of which Shakespeare's admirers and dedicated scholars have pieced together a vision of the playwright, whether as sage, psychologist, lover, theatrical entrepreneur, or moral authority...read more

Reflecting thirty years of scholarship, a comprehensive companion to the plays of Shakespeare presents the plays in chronological order, examining the playwright's stylistic and literary development and the recurring themes and motifs of the plays, accompanied by chapters on Shakespeare's world and stage, a critical biography, and a detailed index. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.

Product Description: "A Manifesto for Literary Studies", writes Marjorie Garber, "is an attempt to remind us of the specificity of what it means to ask literary questions, and the pleasure of thinking through and with literature. It is a manifesto in the sense that it invites strong declarations and big ideas, rather than impeccable small contributions to edifices long under construction"...read more

Product Description: When we speak of the English Renaissance, what is it that we are naming, what are we recognizing reborn? As the essays in this latest collection from the English Institute demonstrate, our basic notions of the period have themselves been reconceived...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Ranging from classical times to pop culture, this collection will appeal to art historians, feminists, classicists, cultural critics, and anyone interested in mythology. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Written with characteristic verve, Quotation Marks considers, among other subjects, how we depend upon the most quotable men and women in history, using great writers to bolster what we ourselves have to say. The entertaining turns and reversals of Marjorie Garber's arguments offer the rare pleasure of a true essayist...read more

A witty and insightful collection of cultural analyses explores the complex relationship that exists between ourselves and our homes, in essays that address such topics as 'The House as Mother,' 'The House as Body,' 'The Dream House,' and 'The Trophy House.' Reprint. 15,000 first printing. (view table of contents)

Product Description: In this lively and provocative book, cultural critic Marjorie Garber, who has written on topics as different as Shakespeare, dogs, cross-dressing, and real estate, explores the pleasures and pitfalls of the academic life. Academic Instincts discusses three of the perennial issues that have surfaced in recent debates about the humanities: the relation between "amateurs" and "professionals," the relation between one academic discipline and another, and the relation between "jargon" and "plain language...read more

Product Description: What kind of turn is the turn to ethics? A Right turn? A Left turn? A wrong turn? A U-turn? Ethics is back in literary studies, philosophy, and political theory. Where critiques of universal man and the autonomous human subject had, in recent years, produced a resistance to ethics in many fields of scholarship, today these critiques have generated a crossover among disciplines and led to theories and practices that see and do ethics otherwise...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: "Bisexuality is about three centuries overdue . . . nevertheless, here it is: a learned, witty study of how our curious culture has managed to get everything wrong about sex."-Gore Vidal

A Harvard professor combines pieces of literature, history, and social insights to explain humankind's personal relationships with, and attachments to their dogs, shedding light on the intricacies and simplicities of an ages-old companionship between two different species. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

Product Description: Beginning with the bold claim, "There can be no culture without the transvestite," Marjorie Garber explores the nature and significance of cross-dressing and of the West's recurring fascination with it. Rich in anecdote and insight, Vested Interests offers a provocative and entertaining view of our ongoing obsession with dressing up--and with the power of clothes...read more

Product Description: Marjorie Garber examines the rites of passage and maturation patterns--"coming of age"--in Shakespeare's plays. Citing examples from virtually the entire Shakespeare canon, she pays particular attention to the way his characters grow and change at points of personal crisis...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This volume of new work presents an account of current thinking on central issues within and beyond the humanities today. It brings together such leading figures as Sacvan Bercovitch and Helen Vendler, Anthony Appiah and Barbara Johnson, Seyla Benhabib and Norman Bryson, Martha Minow and Henry Louis Gates,Jr, Marjorie Garber and Susan Suleima...read more

Evidence drawn from art, literature, history, pop culture, science, and psychology informs a study of the nature and influence of bisexuality in western culture. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

Product Description: When the American Bar Association recreated the trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg on the fortieth anniversary of their execution, the jury acquitted the "mock Rosenbergs," finding that in today's courts they would not have been convicted of espionage...read more

Product Description: With close attention to the nuances of language, tone, metaphor and figure, "Media Spectacles" brings together critics from general fields to examine a series of remarkable news and media spectacles. Sixteen contributors explore the languages of word and image that produce current events as spectacle, reading the world in which we live through the lens of interpretation...read more

Product Description: Shakespeare's plays are full of ghosts and of ghost writing. Garber asks what lies behind claims that 'Shakespeare' did not write the plays; and argues that the plays themselves both thematize and theorize this controversy over authorship.