University of Pittsburgh Press
The University of Pittsburgh Press is a publisher with distinguished lists in a wide range of scholarly and cultural fields. They publish books for general readers, scholars, and students. The Press focuses on selected academic areas: Latin American studies, Russian and East European studies, Central Asian studies, composition and literacy studies, environmental studies, urban studies, the history of architecture and the built environment, and the history and philosophy of science, technology, and medicine. Their books about Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania include history, art, architecture, photography, biography, fiction, and guidebooks.
Their renowned Pitt Poetry Series represents many of the finest poets active today, as reflected in the many prestigious awards their work has garnered over the past four decades. In addition, the Press is home to the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, and, in rotation with other university presses, the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. They sponsor the prestigious Drue Heinz Literature Prize, which recognises the finest collective works of short fiction available in an international competition.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 328
ISBN: 9780822956099
Pub Date: 17 Apr 1997
Description:
In the early nineteenth century, Vuk Karadzic, a Serb scholar and linguist, collected and eventually published transcriptions of the traditional oral poetry of the South Slavs. It was a monumental and unprecedented undertaking. Karadzic gathered and heard performances of the rich songs of Balkan peasants, outlaws, and professional singers and their rebel heroes.
His four volumes constitute the classic anthology of Balkan oral poetry, treasured for nearly two centuries by readers of all literatures, and influential to such literary giants as Goethe, Merimee, Pushkin, Mickiewicz, and Sir Walter Scott.This edition of the songs offers the most complete and authoritative translations ever assembled in English. Holton and Mihailovich, leading scholars of Slavic literature, have preserved here the unique meter and rhythm at the heart of Serbian oral poetry, as well as the idiom of the original singers. Extensive notes and comments aid the reader in understanding the poems, the history they record and the oral tradition that lies beneath them, the singers and their audience.The songs contain seven cycles, identified here in sections titled: Songs Before History, Before Kosovo, the Battle of Kosovo, Marko Karadzic, Under the Turks, Songs of the Outlaws, and Songs of the Serbian Insurrection. The editors have selected the best known and most representative songs from each of the cycles. A complete biography is also provided.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 120
ISBN: 9780822956365
Pub Date: 06 Mar 1997
Description:
Jim Daniels’ Blessing the House visits the sites of domestic faith - Catholic schools, sex and marriage, childbirth - in an attempt to witness a world worth believing in. In their search for hope, grace, and decency in the small dramas of an individual life, these poems become larger, more overtly political and express a genuine interest in human emotion.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 272
ISBN: 9780822956228
Pub Date: 06 Mar 1997
Description:
Nations use product standards, and manipulate them, for reasons othen than practical use or safety. The Soviets once cultivated standards to isolate themselves. In the United States, codes and standards are often used to favor home industries over external competition, and to favor some producers over others.
Krislov compares and contrasts the United States, the EC, the forner Eastern bloc, and Japan, to link standard choice with political styles and to trace growing internationalization based on product efficiency criteria.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 360
ISBN: 9780822956235
Pub Date: 27 Feb 1997
Description:
In the middle of the eighteenth century, English literature, composition, and rhetoric were introduced almost simultaneously into colleges throughout the British cultural provinces. Professorships of rhetoric and belles lettres were established just as print was reaching a growing reading public and efforts were being made to standardize educated taste and usage. The provinces saw English studies as a means to upward social mobility through cultural assimilation.
In the educational centers of England, however, the introduction of English represented a literacy crisis brought on by provincial institutions that had failed to maintain classical texts and learned languages.Today, as rhetoric and composition have become reestablished in the humanities in American colleges, English studies are being broadly transformed by cultural studies, community literacies, and political controversies. Once again, English departments that are primarily departments of literature see these basic writing courses as a sign of a literacy crisis that is undermining the classics of literature. The Formation of College English reexamines the civic concerns of rhetoric and the politics that have shaped and continue to shape college English.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 336
ISBN: 9780822956204
Pub Date: 27 Feb 1997
Description:
Focusing on expressions of popular culture among blacks in Africa, the United States, and the Carribean this collection of multidisciplinary essays takes on subjects long overdue for study. Fifteen essays cover a world of topics, from American girls\u2019 Double Dutch games to protest discourse in Ghana; from Terry McMillan\u2019s Waiting to Exhale to the work of Zora Neale Hurston; from South African workers to Just Another Girl on the IRT; from the history of Rasta to the evolving significance of kente clothl from rap video music to hip-hop to zouk.The contributors work through the prisms of many disciplines, including anthropology, communications, English, ethnomusicology, history, linguistics, literature, philosophy, political economy, psychology, and social work.
Their interpretive approaches place the many voices of popular black cultures into a global context. It affirms that black culture everywhere functions to give meaning to people\u2019s lives by constructing identities that resist cultural, capitolist, colonial, and postcolonial domination.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 256
ISBN: 9780822955948
Pub Date: 15 Dec 1996
Description:
Levin-Waldman argues that if American public policy were to be evaluated against a different set of principles—ones more closely aligned with core liberal values, especially the common good—liberalism would be in greater harmony with contemporary public opinion and thought. Liberalism rests on a moral vision of what constitutes the good life and a set of principles that can measure whether public policy accords with society's underlying philosophical principles. Levin-Waldman faults modern liberalism for obscuring these principles through a misplaced reliance on neutrality.
Liberalism, he contends, appears to have diverged from mainstream perceptions of traditional American values because policy is debated and formulated within the confines of this neutrality standard.Levin-Waldman develops a new methodology intended to take us away from the usual cost-benefit analysis and move us closer to assessing public policies in terms of what best serves the common good.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 320
ISBN: 9780822955580
Pub Date: 26 Nov 1996
Description:
Voces Femeninas de Hispanoamerica presents in one volume a selection of the most representative and outstanding writing by Latin American women writers from the seventeenth century to the present. Designed as a text for third and fourth-year students, the selections, writers\u2019 biographies, historical introduction, and appendixes are entirely in Spanish, with notes to help students with difficult words or passages.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 96
ISBN: 9780822956143
Pub Date: 17 Oct 1996
Description:
Angel, Interupted is Reginald Shepherd’s second poetry collection. The poems are lyrical, streetwise and contemporary, yet timeless, classically referential, and introspective.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 368
ISBN: 9780822956105
Pub Date: 10 Oct 1996
Description:
From 1909-1914 the Pittsburgh Survey brought together statisticans, social workers, engineers, lawyers, physicians, economists, and city planners to study the effects of industrialization on the city of Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh Surveyed examines the accuracy and the impact of the influential Pittsburgh Survey, emphasizing its role in the social reform movement of the early twentieth century.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 352
ISBN: 9780822956129
Pub Date: 15 Sep 1996
Description:
The end of communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the USSR produced strikingly little enthusiasm in the United States. The political energy absorbed for forty years by American-Soviet relations left America no triumphant, but reflective, turning inward with a general sense of national decline. American politics and policy have met the rapid changes in the new global order with alarming slowness and inflexibility.
In this book, fourteen leading political scientists ask two basic questions. What effect did the cold war have on American institutions and politics? And how will American politics evolve now? The first section of the volume focuses on institutions-the presidency, Congress, federalism. The second explores politics-ideologies, public opinion, and the American party system. The third section tackles important policy areas: the budget, social issues, education, foreign policy, trade, and immigration. Contributors: Joel D. Aberbach; Tobias D\u00fcrr; Andreas Falke; Adrienne H\u00e9ritier; Peter L\u00f6sche; Theodore J. Lowi; Heinz-Dieter Meyer; Demetrios G. Papademetriou; Paul E. Peterson; Bert A. Rockman; James Thurber; David B. Walker; and the editors.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 288
ISBN: 9780822955887
Pub Date: 15 Jun 1996
Description:
This book explains why some countries succeed in installing democracy after authoritarian rule, and why some of these new democracies make progress toward consolidation. Casper and Taylor show that a democratic government can be installed when elite bargaining during the transition process is relatively smooth. They view elite bargaining in twenty-four transitions cases, some where continued authoritarianism was the result, others where a democratic government was the result, and a third outcome where progress towards consolidation was the end product.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 328
ISBN: 9780822955795
Pub Date: 13 Jun 1996
Description:
In her remarkable book, Sondra Horton Fraleigh examines and describes dance through her consciousness of dance as an art, through the experience of dancing, and through the existential and phenomenological literature on the lived body. She describes, with performance photographs, specific imagery in dance masterworks by Doris Humphrey, Anna Sokolow, Viola Farber, Nina Weiner, and Garth Fagan.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 326
ISBN: 9780822956006
Pub Date: 15 May 1996
Description:
Winner of the Harold Lasswell Award of the American Political Science AssociationThe FSFIC failed spectacularly during the 1980s, costing taxpayers an estimated $200 billion. In this award-winning analysis, Rom examines the political causes of this \u201cthrift tragedy.\u201d He directly confronts-and rejects-the dominant scholarly \u201cpublic choice\u201d view that public officials were motivated mainly be self-interest.
Instead, Rom argues that politicians and bureaucrats generally acted in the \u201cpublic spirit\u201d by attempting to obtain the common interest as they saw it. Using new evidence and innovative methods, Rom demonstrates that FSLIC's failure unfolded because of commitments that officials had made in the past and their uncertainties about how to fulfill these obligations in the future.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 288
ISBN: 9780822955849
Pub Date: 15 May 1996
Description:
Andrew Carnegie, industrialist and a major American philanthropist, sought to bring world-class art and culture to Pittsburgh. This book looks at how the Carnegie International exhibit came into being in 1895, the early exhibitions, the art, artists, and the public reception to it.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 312
ISBN: 9780822955993
Pub Date: 25 Apr 1996
Description:
Albert Sbragia considers American urban government as an investor whether for building infrastructure or supporting economic development. Over time, such investment has become disconnected from the normal political and administrative processes of local policymaking through the use of special public spending authorities like water and sewer commissions and port, turnpike, and public power authorities.Sbragia explores how this entrepreneurial activity developed and how federal and state policies facilitated or limited it.
She also analyzes the implications of cities creating innovative, special-purpose quasi-governments to circumvent and dilute state control over city finances, diluting their own authority in the process.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 80
ISBN: 9780822955917
Pub Date: 25 Apr 1996
Description:
The locales of these poems range from the mountains of western Pennsylvania to the Andes, the subjects from memories of Kilwein Guevara’s native Colombia to a New York street scene. What characterizes all of them is precise and surprising language, a brilliance of effect, that establishes him as one of the most original young American poets.
