During its seven-year run, Buffy the Vampire Slayer attracted a wide range of viewers and almost unprecedented academic interest. Sex and the Slayer explores one of the most talked-about topics in relation to this pioneering TV series-gender. As fantasy, Buffy potentially opens up a space for alternative representations of gender. But how alternative can popular television be? Taking a feminist cultural studies approach, Jowett explores the ways in which the series represents femininity, masculinity, and gendered relations, including sexuality and sexual orientation. Written for undergraduates, Sex and the Slayer provides an introduction to the most important theoretical and historical underpinnings of contemporary gender criticism as it examines a range of thought-provoking issues: role reversal, the tension between feminism and femininity, the "crisis" of masculinity, gender hybridity, the appeal of bad girls, romance, and changing family structures. Through this introductory analysis, Jowett shows that Buffy presents a contradictory mixture of "subversive" and "conservative" images of gender roles and as such is a key example of the complexity of gender representation in contemporary television.

Hailed as one of France's most influential living poets, Michel Deguy has remained largely inaccessible to English-language readers. Recumbents is the first English translation of the most critically-acclaimed volume of this poet's work. The word recumbents refers to funereal sculptures (gisants), reclining lovers, and the literal imprint of those and other figures on the page. The collection includes a poem for the dead, "Procession," written by Deguy in the wake of his father's suicide, and poems dedicated to all phases of Eros. These are interwoven with passages on rhetoric or what Deguy calls poetic reason. This bilingual edition also includes a meditation on Deguy's work by deconstructionism's foundational thinker, Jacques Derrida.

Irene, a rebellious product of an American 1950s upbringing, has fled from a repressive and sexist society into a life of apparent equality and adventure as part of the elite Trans-Temporal Authority's cadre of travelers. Under the tutelage of Ernst, a friend/lover and teacher/father, Irene has achieved status and dignity. Irene and Ernst are assigned to a Muslim world where they meet Zubedeyeh, a young girl whose creativity is being transformed into madness by the male chauvinistic society in which she lives. Vowing to rescue her, Irene unleashes a destructive cycle of violence. Originally published in 1978, The Two of Them is a powerful portrait of a future sexist society. This modern classic conveys its politics with rigor and complexity, in a story filled with suspense and unforgettable characters.

A multi-dimensional explosion hurls the starship's few passengers across the galaxies and onto an uncharted barren tundra. With no technical skills and scant supplies, the survivors face a bleak end in an alien world. One brave woman holds the daring answer, but it is the most desperate one possible. Elegant and electric, We Who Are About To... brings us face to face with our basic assumptions about our will to live. While most of the stranded tourists decide to defy the odds and insist on colonizing the planet and creating life, the narrator decides to practice the art of dying. When she is threatened with compulsory reproduction, she defends herself with lethal force. Originally published in 1977, this is one of the most subtle, complex, and exciting science fiction novels ever written about the attempt to survive a hostile alien environment. It is characteristic of Russ's genius that such a readable novel is also one of her most intellectually intricate.

From "The Next Generation" and "The X-Files" to "Farscape" and "Enterprise," science fiction television shows have millions of devoted fans. American Science Fiction TV is the first full-length study of this popular genre. Writing with the clarity of a scholar and the enthusiasm of a fan, Jan Johnson-Smith shows how science fiction television has displaced the Western in the American cultural imagination. As advances in special effects have made science fiction television technically feasible on a more lavish scale than ever before, visual style has become as important as narrative—sometimes even more important—in expressing the meaning of the genre. The main part of the book uses case studies of several key science fiction series, including "Space: Above and Beyond," "StarGate SG-1," and "Babylon 5," to exemplify particular narrative patterns and visual styles. The case studies explore themes such as politics, ideology, race and ethnicity, gender difference, militarism, and the use of science fiction narratives as allegories of present-day social and political concerns. American Science Fiction TV opens an important new area of genre studies and will be of interest to scholars and fans alike.

Lynn Garafola has written some of the most influential historical studies and criticism in the field of dance. Legacies of Twentieth-Century Dance is a selection of her essays and reviews that together document the extraordinary transformation of dance, especially ballet, since the early 20th century. Part I, "The Ballet Russes and Beyond," explores the relatively uncharted landscape of French ballet and European art dance in the early 1900s. Part II, "Reconfiguring the Sexes," focuses on women, such as choreographer Bronislava Nijinkska and dancer Ida Rubinstein, as well as phenomena that invite a feminist interpretation, such as the feminization of 19th-century ballet and the invisibility of women choreographers in ballet. Part III, "Dance in New York," examines the period when New York became not only the U.S. dance capital but also, by the 1960s, the dance capital of the world. Finally, Part IV, "Staging the Past," deals with issues of memory, reconstruction, and historical neglect. The book includes a generous selection of photographs.

Heather McHugh's new book, Eyeshot, is a brooding, visionary work that takes aim at the big questions-those of love and death. The poems suggest that such immensities balance on the smallest details, and that a range of human blindness is inescapable. The power of this new work comes from its delicate yet tenacious fidelity to the ever-unfolding senses of sense. The poems invite the reader to follow careening words and insights through passages both playful and profound. Her "Fido, Jolted by Jove" reveals the tension endemic to both language and living: "the world itself is worried." Yet the same poem remarks the high price of any reductive fix: "a brain this insecure may need another bolt be driven in it." This movement between anxiety and the human compulsion for order informs Eyeshot's darkly comic, 20/20 acuity.

Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and Chandralekha are major choreographers of the 20th century whose work will leave the dance field with a legacy as important and strong as that of Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey. Zollar is Artistic Director of the world-renowned company, The Urban Bush Women (based in New York City), and Chandralekha is an Indian choreographer (based in Madras) who has performed internationally and is known for her radical mixing of postmodern and traditional dance forms. In this nuanced and in-depth study, dance scholar Ananya Chatterjea shows how each of these choreographers has positioned herself through performance in terms of gender, race, and nationality. Reading each dancer's major works in order to assess their unique contributions to the development of global culture, Butting Out does important theoretical work to identify common threads in the history of cultural production and the aesthetic philosophies of the artists. Chatterjea draws on theory from an array of complementary fields, including women's studies, African-American studies, and postcolonial studies. The book is beautifully enhanced by 42 black and white photographs.

Wired for Sound is the first anthology to address the role of sound engineering technologies in the shaping of contemporary global music. Wired sound is at the basis of digital audio editing, multi-track recording, and other studio practices that have powerfully impacted the world's music. Distinctions between musicians and engineers increasingly blur, making it possible for people around the globe to imagine new sounds and construct new musical aesthetics. This collection of 11 essays employs primarily ethnographical, but also historical and psychological, approaches to examine a range of new, technology-intensive musics and musical practices such as: fusions of Indian film-song rhythms, heavy metal, and gamelan in Jakarta; urban Nepali pop which juxtaposes heavy metal, Tibetan Buddhist ritual chant, rap, and Himalayan folksongs; collaborations between Australian aboriginals and sound engineers; the production of "heaviness" in heavy metal music; and the production of the "Austin sound." This anthology is must reading for anyone interested in the global character of contemporary music technology.CONTRIBUTORS: Harris M. Berger, Beverley Diamond, Cornelia Fales, Ingemar Grandin, Louise Meintjes, Frederick J. Moehn, Karl Neunfeldt, Timothy D. Taylor, Jeremy Wallach.

Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand is a science fiction masterpiece, an essay on the inexplicability of sexual attractiveness, and an examination of interstellar politics among far-flung worlds. First published in 1984, the novel's central issues-technology, globalization, gender, sexuality, and multiculturalism-have only become more pressing with the passage of time.The novel's topic is information itself: What are the repercussions, once it has been made public, that two individuals have been found to be each other's perfect erotic object out to "point nine-nine-nine and several nines percent more"? What will it do to the individuals involved, to the city they inhabit, to their geosector, to their entire world society, especially when one is an illiterate worker, the sole survivor of a world destroyed by "cultural fugue," and the other is-you!

The bizarre idea that the earth's interior is hollow and, perhaps, even populated has been put to effective literary use by writers ranging from Edgar Allen Poe and Jules Verne to Rudy Rucker and Edgar Rice Burroughs. This notion had respectability as a scientific hypothesis until the early 1800s, and the theory that the earth "is hollow and inhabitable within" continues to find believers as an alternative description of the earth to this day. The hollow earth is one of the most important settings in the literature of the imagination that fed into early science fiction. Subterranean Worlds presents a fascinating look at the theme of the hollow earth and its history, as well as the geological theories which produced many of these stories. It excerpts key passages from the major subterranean world fictions, some translated into English for the first time. With helpful introductions to each selection and a comprehensive bibliography, this book is the definitive treatment of this entertaining topic.

Composer John Luther Adams makes his home in the boreal forest near Fairbanks, Alaska, where he has created a unique musical world grounded in the elemental landscapes and indigenous cultures of the North. Winter Music, a collection of Adams's essays, journal entries, and other writings is poetic and inspirational and delves into the environmental and cultural awareness that creates his reflective, almost spiritual, approach to music. The accompanying audio CD includes two previously unrecorded works by Adams. Adams's music explores natural phenomena from the songs of birds, to the complex nature of chaos, fractal geometry, and elemental noise. Similarly, his writings explore "that region between place and culture, between environment and imagination," reflecting a philosophy of deep awareness that makes him one of the most original composers working today.

In her second collection of poems, Rachel Zucker returns to a more autobiographical stance and writes about the particulars of marriage, pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood-experiences that radically surprised her. But this is no simple reportage. With candor, humor, and compassion, Zucker discovers a new poetic territory: a landscape between story and fragment, a way of telling that is neither confessional nor intellectually detached. At the cliff-edge of narrative, a high place where language is the rope and falling the perception, Zucker's poems are unsentimental, true to the disjunctive experiences of loving, giving birth, raising a child, being lonely, being alive. A poetry of the body, of desire, about human frailty and strength, The Last Clear Narrative fills a void in the history of women writing about everyday experience and speaks to the nature of narrative itself.

In this chilling dystopian novel, four men and women attempt an escape to legendary Avalon after the "Movement" threatens the liberty and comforts they have taken for granted. Visa for Avalon takes place in an unnamed country and an unnamed time. In it, Bryher uses her knowledge of history and psychology to examine political crisis in a familiar setting. First published in 1965, it resonates profoundly today. The style is understated and tense as Bryher suggests that closing our eyes to growing restrictions and loss of liberties does not protect us. She offers a provocative commentary about the paradise of King Arthur's Avalon as well. This is a wake-up book that encourages readers of all ages and backgrounds to defend democracy.

The English writer Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) is one of the giants of science fiction. His early novels, The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds, invented a number of themes now classic in science fiction. But he also wrote mainstream novels, journalism, political tracts, a memoir, and purely didactic fiction designed to support his various causes. In this comprehensive new critical study, W. Warren Wagar traces Wells's obsession with the unfolding of public time-in short, with the history and future of humankind-to show the persisting and provocative relevance of Wells's work.Most interest in Wells today centers on his science fiction, but Wagar contends that one cannot fully understand or enjoy the science fiction without exploring the mind that produced it. This accessible overview takes the reader through dozens of Wells's most important works, following the twists and turns of his thought as he struggled with the great issues of human provenance and destiny.

Best known for Neon Vernacular, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1994, and for Dien Cai Dau, a collection of poems chronicling his experiences as a journalist in Vietnam, Yusef Komunyakaa has become one of America's most compelling poets. Pleasure Dome gathers the poems in these two distinguished books and five others-over two and a half decades of Komunyakaa's work. In addition, Pleasure Dome includes 25 early, uncollected poems and a rich selection of 18 new poems.