Böcker utgivna av Harvard University Press

Meanings of Antiquity is the first dedicated study of how the oldest Japanese myths, recorded in the eighth-century texts Kojiki and Nihon shoki, changed in meaning and significance between 800 and 1800 CE. Matthieu Felt identifies the geographical, cosmological, epistemological, and semiotic changes that led to new adaptations of Japanese myths.

In Strange Tales from Edo, William Fleming paints a sweeping picture of Japan's engagement with Chinese fiction in the early modern period, including large-scale analyses of the record of the circulation of Chinese texts in Japan. He also traces the hidden history of Pu Songling's Liaozhai zhiyi (Strange Tales from Liaozhai Studio) in Japan.

Ariel Fox's The Cornucopian Stage examines a body of influential yet understudied early modern Chinese plays by a circle of Suzhou playwrights. These plays about long-distance traders and small-time peddlers, impossible bargains and broken contracts, place commercial forms not only at center stage but at the center of a new world coming into being.

Leon Battista Alberti was among the most famous figures of the Italian Renaissance. Biographical and Autobiographical Writings includes On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Literature, The Life of St. Potitus, My Dog, My Life, and The Fly. It presents the first collected English translations of these works and an authoritative Latin text.

Renowned philosopher of science David Z Albert offers an innovative approach to understanding the fundamental physical underpinnings of quantum mechanics. Albert shows how we can discern all the baffling features of quantum theory in a simple picture of the pushings and pullings of concrete and high-dimensional, fundamental physical "stuff."

Written in about 1340 by the Benedictine preacher Pierre Bersuire, The Moralized Ovid was a highly influential interpretation of Ovid's Metamorphoses in the High Middle Ages. It contains descriptions of the gods, followed by allegorical interpretations of major myths. This edition presents a new English translation and an authoritative Latin text.

Political theorist Jeremy Waldron makes a bracing case against identifying rule of law with predictability. Seeing the rule of law as just one value to which democracies aspire, he embraces thoughtfulness rather than rote rule-following, flexibility even at the cost of vagueness, and emphasizing procedure and argument over predictable outcomes.

David Kennedy and Martti Koskenniemi, two leading critics of law's role in global life, join together to explore the origins and destiny of efforts to build law into the fabric of global life. Erudite, open-minded, and at times personal, Of Law and the World is a poignant conversation about humanity's struggle to live together.

Nazmul Sultan explores Indian contributions to democratic theory, as anticolonial thinkers developed principles of peoplehood and self-rule. Indians contested British claims that the "backwardness" of the Indian people offered a democratic justification for imperial domination.

Moses Chao argues that activity in the peripheral nervous system predicts the onset of neurological and psychiatric conditions such as Parkinson¿s disease, autism, and dementia. Responsible for regulating a range of involuntary bodily processes and for detecting smells, sounds, and touch, the peripheral system may also be a key to better health.

Established to calm intracolonial tensions, the Mason-Dixon Line first marked a region of breakneck development and Native American resistance, then the boundary between pro- and antislavery regimes. Edward Gray¿s is the first comprehensive history of the line and its dynamic role in the US from the colonial period to the Civil War¿and beyond.

Marcy Norton tells a new history of the European colonization of the Americas, one that places wildlife and livestock at the center of the story. She reveals that it was, above all, the encounters between European and Native American beliefs about animal life that transformed societies on both sides of the Atlantic.

The sense of reading as an intimate act of self-discovery-and of communion between authors and book lovers-has a long history. Lina Bolzoni returns to Petrarch, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Montaigne, and Tasso, exploring how Renaissance humanists began to represent reading as a private encounter and a dialogue across barriers of time and space.

Drawing on a range of hard evidence, Neil Van Leeuwen shows that the psychological mechanisms underlying religious belief are the same as those enabling imaginative play. He argues that we should therefore understand religious belief as a form of make-believe that people use to define their group identity and express the values sacred to them.

John D. Garrigus provides a profound historical corrective, showing that enslaved Blacks in Saint-Domingue were hardly complacent before the Haitian Revolution. While scholars have looked beyond the island's shores for the forces that inspired rebellion, Garrigus documents African resistance and political organizing decades before the 1791 revolt.

Today John Hancock is known for his signature, but during the revolutionary era, he was famed for his pragmatic statesmanship. Brooke Barbier explores Hancock¿s position as a revolutionary who nonetheless understood the value of compromise. By shunning political extremes, Hancock became hugely influential in the infant United States.

The Op-Ed Novel follows a clutch of globally renowned Spanish novelists who swept into the political sphere via the pages of El Pais. Their literary sensibility transformed opinion journalism, and their weekly columns changed their novels, which became venues for speculative historical claims, partisan political projects, and intellectual argument.

Nostalgia, supposedly, is the sphere of the sentimentalist. But also, and most definitely, it is a force in the creation of the present and future and thus worth careful thought. Yesterday argues that nostalgiäs critics defend an idea of progress as naïve as the longing they denounce, while conflating nostalgia itself with historical whitewashing.