Revolutionary and writer: how do they fit together in one person’s work? Using literary texts from French, German, Russian and American pro-revolutionary writers, Sheila Delany examines the synergy of politics and rhetoric, art and social commitment. The writers she considers gave voice to the hopes of their time. Some led the events in person as well as through their writing; others worked to build a movement. Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, Mao, Sylvain Maréchal, Boris Lavrenov, Bertolt Brecht and others are here: consummate rhetoricians all, not necessarily on the same page politically but for the revolutions of their day.

British Women Writers and the French Revolution provides an overview of a wide range of British women's writings on the French Revolution, from writers sympathetic to the Revolution like Mary Robinson, Helen Maria Williams, and Charlotte Smith, to anti-revolutionary writers like Hannah More and Jane West. Based on new research in French and British archives and libraries, the book uncovers little-known writings by British women, and argues that these writers developed a distinct antinationalism, in some cases even a feminist cosmopolitanism, in their responses to the European revolutionary crisis.

Women Write Back explores the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century women's responses to texts written by well-known Enlightment figures. Hilger investigates the authorial strategies employed by Karoline von Günderrode, Ellis Cornelia Knight, Julie de Krüdener, and Helen Maria Williams, whose works engage Voltaire's Mahomet, Johnson's Rasselas, Goethe's Werther, and Rousseau's Julie. The analysis of these women's texts sheds light on the literary culture of a period that deemed itself not only enlightened but also egalitarian.

In recent years, formalist and deconstructive approaches to literary studies have been under attack, charged by critics with isolating texts as distinctive aesthetic or linguistic objects, separate from their social and historical contexts. Historicist and cultural approaches have often responded by simply reversing the picture, reducing texts to no more than superstructural effects of historical or ideological forces. In Writing Revolution, Peter J. Bellis explores the ways in which literature can engage with—rather than escape from or obscure—social and political issues. Bellis argues that a number of nineteenth-century American writers, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, saw their texts as spaces where alternative social and cultural possibilities could be suggested and explored. All writing in the same historical moment, Bellis's subjects were responding to the same cluster of issues: the need to redefine American identity after the Revolution, the problem of race slavery, and the growing industrialization of American society. Hawthorne, Bellis contends, sees the romance as "neutral territory" where the Imaginary and the Actual—the aesthetic and the historical—can interpenetrate and address crucial issues of class, race, and technological modernity. Whitman conceives of Leaves of Grass as a transformative democratic space where all forms of meditation, both political and literary, are swept away. Thoreau oscillates between these two approaches. Walden, like the romance, aims to fashion a mediating space between nature and society. His abolitionist essays, however, shift sharply away from both linguistic representation and the political, toward an apocalyptic cleansing violence. In addition to covering selected works by Hawthorne, Whitman, and Thoreau, Bellis also examines powerful works of social and political critique by Louisa May Alcott and Margaret Fuller. With its suggestions for new ways of reading antebellum American writing, Writing Revolution breaks through the thickets of contemporary literary discourse and will spark debate in the literary community.

In the aftermath of the May Fourth movement, a growing expectation of revolution raised important intellectual issues about the position of the individual within a society in turmoil and the shifting boundaries of political and sexual identities. The theme of "revolution plus love," a literary response to the widespread insurrections and upheaval, was first popularized in the late 1920s. In her examination of this popular but understudied literary formula, Liu Jianmei argues that revolution and love are culturally variable entities, their interplay a complex and constantly changing literary practice that is socially and historically determined. Liu looks at the formulary writing of "revolution plus love" from the 1930s to the 1970s as a case study of literary politics. Favored by leftist writers during the early period of revolutionary literature, it continued to influence mainstream Chinese literature up to the 1970s. By drawing a historical picture of the articulation and rearticulation of this theme, Liu shows how changes in revolutionary discourse force unpredictable representations of gender rules and power relations, and how women's bodies reveal the complex interactions between political representation and gender roles. Revolution Plus Love is a nuanced and carefully considered work on gender and modernity in China, unmatched in its broad use of literary resources. It will be of considerable interest to scholars and students of modern Chinese literature, women’s studies, cultural studies, and comparative literature.

Now known to the Chinese as the "ten years of chaos," the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) brought death to thousands and persecution to millions. Xing Lu identifies the rhetorical features and explores the persuasive effects of political language and symbolic practices during the period. She examines how leaders of the Communist Party enacted a rhetoric in political contexts to legitimize power and violence and to dehumanize a group of people identified as class enemies.

Thomas Gustafson examines how and why Americans renewed and developed the tradition of writing connecting political disorders and the corruption of language between the ages of the Revolutionary and the Civil Wars.

This extensive collection of English-language essays examines the many strategies of resistance to male domination that women in France from the 16th through the 18th centuries utilized in their lives and their writings.

In many ways the French Revolution--a series of revolutions, in fact, whose end has arguably not yet arrived--is modernity in action. Beginning in reform, it blossomed into wholesale attempts to remake society, uprooting the clergy and aristocracy, valorizing mass movements, and setting secular ideologies, including nationalism, in motion. Unusually manifold and complicated, the revolution affords many teaching opportunities and challenges. This volume helps instructors seeking to connect developments today--terrorism, propaganda, extremism--with the events that began in 1789, contextualizing for students a world that seems always unmoored and in crisis. The volume supports the teaching of the revolution's ongoing project across geographic areas (from Haiti, Latin America, and New Orleans to Spain, Germany, and Greece), governing ideologies (human rights, secularism, liberty), and literatures (from well-known to newly rediscovered texts). Interdisciplinary, intercultural, and insurgent, the volume has an energy that reflects its subject.

The English Revolution was a revolution in reading, with over 22,000 pamphlets exploding from the presses between 1640 and 1661. What this phenomenon meant to the political life of the nation is the subject of Sharon Achinsteins book. Considering a wide range of writers, from John Milton, Thomas Hobbes, John Lilburne, John Cleveland, and William Prynne to a host of anonymous scribblers of every political stripe, Achinstein shows how the unprecedented outpouring of opinion in mid-seventeenth-century England created a new class of activist readers and thus helped to bring about a revolution in the form and content of political debate. By giving particular attention to Miltons participation in this burst of publishing, she challenges critics to look at his literary practices as constitutive of the political culture of his age. Traditional accounts of the rise of the political subject have emphasized high political theory. Achinstein seeks instead to picture the political subject from the perspective of the street, where the noisy, scrappy, and always entertaining output of pamphleteers may have had a greater impact on political practice than any work of political theory. As she underscores the rhetorical, literary, and even utopian dimension of these writers efforts to politicize their readers, Achinstein offers us evidence of the kind of ideological conflict that historians of the period often overlook. A portrait of early modern propaganda, her work recreates the awakening of politicians to the use of the press to influence public opinion. Originally published in 1994. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.