Modern Lusts

As a jazz musician, filmmaker, anthropologist, sexologist, and crime novelist, the boundlessly curious German autodidact Ernest Borneman exemplified the conflicting cultural and intellectual currents of the twentieth century. In this long-awaited English translation, acclaimed historian Detlef Siegfried chronicles Borneman’s journey from a young Jewish Communist in Nazi Berlin to his emergence as a celebrated (and reliably controversial) transatlantic polymath. Through an innovative structure organized around the human senses, this biography memorably portrays a figure whose far-flung obsessions comprised a microcosm of postwar intellectual life.

Focusing on cases of extramarital sex, Johanna Rickman investigates fornication, adultery and bastard bearing among the English nobility during the Elizabethan and early Stuart period. Since members of the nobility were not generally brought before the ecclesiastical courts, which had jurisdiction over other citizens' sexual offences, Rickman's sources include collections of family papers (primarily letters), state papers, and literary texts (prescriptive manuals, love sonnets, satirical verse, and prose romances), as well as legal documents. Rickman explores how attitudes towards illicit sex varied greatly throughout the period of study, roughly 1560 - 1630. Whole some viewed it as a minor infraction, others, directed by a religious moral code, viewed it as a serious sin. seeks to illuminate the place of noblewomenin early modern aristocratic culture, both as historical subjects (considering personal circumstances) and as a social group (considering social position and status).She argues that two different gender ideals were in operation simultaneously: one primarily religious ideal, which lauded female silence, obedience, and chastity, and another, more secular ideal, which required noblewomen to be beautiful, witty, brave, and receptive to the games of courtly love.

Get Your Geek On! Unless you're horndog Howard Wolowitz from The Big Bang Theory, the words "geek" and "lust" are seldom found in the same sentence. Until now, bub. Whether it's the most recent tweet from Felicia Day, the newest book from Terry Pratchett, or the latest anything from Joss Whedon, the world is a smoking hot, happening place for Geeks. Geek Lust, a humorous celebration of Geekdom's frenzied desires, heats it up like 1.21 Giga-Suns. It spotlights some of the awesomest real and fictional geeks in history, including Einstein, Madame Curie, Nerdist Chris Hardwick, and Steve Urkel (!); features classic science fiction and horror stories; the greatest experiences to have playing video games; gadgets gone wild; various top lists such as the hottest cryptids; and things from Star Wars that could be euphemisms for your genitals. If you yearn for time travel, robotics and cloning; if Kirk still captains your imagination; and if, when all is said and done, you still can't decide between Linda Carter's Wonder Woman or Lucy Lawless's Xena, Warrior Princess, welcome to Geek Lust. And by the way, is it hot in here or did the next-generation iPhone just drop?

Robert Irwin’s history of Orientalism leads from Ancient Greece to the present. He shows that, whether making philological comparisons between Arabic and Hebrew, cataloguing the coins of Fatimid Egypt or establishing the basic chronology of Harun al-Rashid’s military campaigns against Byzantium, scholars have been unified not by politics or ideology but by their shared obsession. For Lust of Knowing is an extraordinary, passionate book, both a sustained argument and a brilliant work of original scholarship.

The Tides of Lust is a powerful, erotic and violent encounter with the voices and experiences of characters who linger in a small American seaport. Here is an insatiable African-American ship's captain, a dangerously young slave mistress, an aimless drifter and a supreme artist of the perverse. Written by acclaimed and award-winning author Samuel R. Delany, The Tides of Lust, first published in 1973, is a wild ride along the oceans of unleashed sexuality at its most exuberant. A true modern classic.

Since its rediscovery in the early 20th century, through spectacular finds such as those by Sir Arthur Evans at Knossos, Minoan Crete has captured the imagination not only of archaeologists but also of a wider public. This is shown, among other things, by its appearance and uses in a variety of modern cultural practices: from the innovative dances of Sergei Diaghilev and Ted Shawn, to public and vernacular architecture, psychoanalysis, literature, sculpture, fashion designs, and even neo-pagan movements, to mention a few examples.Cretomania is the first volume entirely devoted to such modern responses to (and uses of) the Minoan past. Although not an exhaustive and systematic study of the reception of Minoan Crete, it offers a wide range of intriguing examples and represents an original contribution to a thus far underexplored aspect of Minoan studies: the remarkable effects of Minoan Crete beyond the narrow boundaries of recondite archaeological research.The volume is organised in three main sections: the first deals with the conscious, unconscious, and coincidental allusions to Minoan Crete in modern architecture, and also discusses archaeological reconstructions; the second presents examples from the visual and performing arts (as well as other cultural practices) illustrating how Minoan Crete has been enlisted to explore and challenge questions of Orientalism, religion, sexuality, and gender relations; the third focuses on literature, and shows how the distant Minoan past has been used to interrogate critically more recent Greek history.

Lists, one of the most archaic literary genres, stand behind many of our complex mental or rhetorical structures and they often influence the way we conceptualize the world (even if we are unaware of it). They seem plain but may conceal a complicated inner logic. They are agrammatical but may tell a story. Their basic features – selection, order, and layout – may be enough to give them enormous power: by including they exclude, by ordering they create a hierarchy, by taking on particular physical aspects they place themselves into a specific context. These and other issues are discussed in the present transdisciplinary volume collecting the best revised contributions to a workshop on lists held at the Center for Theoretical Study in Prague in November 2008. Each of the 13 articles by researchers from seven countries provides a case study on the subject of list. The fields covered include late antique, medieval and early modern history, philology, philosophy, cognitive and computer science. The contributors aim both at presenting particular cases – specific lists or list-types – and, at the same time, at addressing methodological issues: exploring the ways of researching lists in their particular disciplines, formulating relevant research themes and questions, contextualizing the subject. Since theoretical discourse on lists has not been established yet, this volume should be seen as a first step in the process, showing the variety of possible research directions on a transdisciplinary level, and raising interest in the topic, which, although it may seem a bit obscure at first, has indeed a lot to offer.