A deep dread of puppets and the machinery that propels them surfaced in Romantic literature in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century; Romantic Automata is a collection of essays examining the rise of cultural suspicion of all imitations of homo sapiens and similar machinery, as witnessed in the literature and arts of the time. For most of the eighteenth century, automata were deemed a celebration of human ingenuity, feats of science and reason. Among the Romantics, however, they prompted a contradictory apprehension about mechanization and contrivance: such science and engineering threatened the spiritual nature of life, the source of compassion in human society. Recent scholarship in post-humanism, post-colonialism, disability studies, post-modern feminism, eco-criticism, and radical Orientalism has significantly affected the critical discourse on this topic. The essays in this collection open new methodological approaches to understanding human interaction with technology that strives to simulate or to supplement organic life.

Early Modern Visual Culture Representation, Race, and Empire in Renaissance England Edited by Peter Erickson and Clark Hulse "As a picture of what currently might be most profitably studied in the visual culture of early modern England, and of how to conduct scholarship in the field, the volume is exemplary. . . . It] treats a culture for which there is considerable scholarly interest, but from angles which have been woefully ignored up until now."--Joseph Koerner, Harvard University An interdisciplinary group of scholars applies the reinterpretive concept of "visual culture" to the English Renaissance. Bringing attention to the visual issues that have appeared persistently, though often marginally, in the newer criticisms of the last decade, the authors write in a diversity of voices on a range of subjects. Common among them, however, is a concern with the visual technologies that underlie the representation of the body, of race, of nation, and of empire. Several essays focus on the construction and representation of the human body--including an examination of anatomy as procedure and visual concept, and a look at early cartographic practice to reveal the correspondences between maps and the female body. In one essay, early Tudor portraits are studied to develop theoretical analogies and historical links between verbal and visual portrayal. In another, connections in Tudor-Stuart drama are drawn between the female body and the textiles made by women. A second group of essays considers issues of colonization, empire, and race. They approach a variety of visual materials, including sixteenth-century representations of the New World that helped formulate a consciousness of subjugation; the Drake Jewel and the myth of the Black Emperor as indices of Elizabethan colonial ideology; and depictions of the Queen of Sheba among other black women "present" in early modern painting. One chapter considers the politics of collecting. The aesthetic and imperial agendas of a Van Dyck portrait are uncovered in another essay, while elsewhere, that same portrait is linked to issues of whiteness and blackness as they are concentrated within the ceremonies and trappings of the Order of the Garter. All of the essays in "Early Modern Visual Culture" explore the social context in which paintings, statues, textiles, maps, and other artifacts are produced and consumed. They also explore how those artifacts--and the acts of creating, collecting, and admiring them--are themselves mechanisms for fashioning the body and identity, situating the self within a social order, defining the otherness of race, ethnicity, and gender, and establishing relationships of power over others based on exploration, surveillance, and insight. Peter Erickson, of the Clark Art Institute, is author of "Patriarchal Structures in Shakespeare's Drama" and "Rewriting Shakespeare, Rewriting Ourselves." Clark Hulse is Professor of English and Art History at the University of Illinois at Chicago and author of "The Rule of Art: Literature and Painting in the Renaissance." New Cultural Studies 2000 408 pages 7 x 10 133 illus. ISBN 978-0-8122-1734-6 Paper $32.50s 21.50 World Rights Fine Arts, Cultural Studies, History Short copy: A collection of 10 original essays that explore the social context in which paintings, statues, textiles, maps, and other artifacts were produced and consumed in Renaissance England.

For most of the eighteenth century, automata were deemed a celebration of human ingenuity, feats of science and reason. Among the Romantics, however, they prompted a contradictory apprehension about mechanization and contrivance: such science and engineering threatened the spiritual nature of life, the source of compassion in human society. A deep dread of puppets and the machinery that propels them consequently surfaced in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century literature. Romantic Automata is a collection of essays examining the rise of this cultural suspicion of mechanical imitations of life. Recent scholarship in post-humanism, post-colonialism, disability studies, post-modern feminism, eco-criticism, and radical Orientalism has significantly affected the critical discourse on this topic. In engaging with the work and thought of Coleridge, Poe, Hoffmann, Mary Shelley, and other Romantic luminaries, the contributors to this collection open new methodological approaches to understanding human interaction with technology that strives to simulate, supplement, or supplant organic life. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press. 

Take a quick tour of the 1990s stock market situation and know where it is going today in Peter Erickson's Passport to Poverty: The '90s Stock Market And What It Can Still Do To You. Learn the grisly detail about how the Clinton Administration and Fed regulators manipulated the stock market to make the economy appear healthy, when it wasn't.

Participants in the current debate about the literary canon generally separate the established literary order--of which Shakespeare is the most visible icon--from the emergent minority literatures. In this challenging study, Peter Erickson insists on bringing the two realms together. He asks: what impact does a revision of the literary canon have on Shakespeare's status?
Part One of his book is about Shakespeare on women. In analyses of several Shakespearean works, Erickson discusses Shakespeare's ambivalence about women as a reflection of male anxiety about the cultural authority of Queen Elizabeth. Part Two is about (contemporary) women on Shakespeare. Erickson discusses Adrienne Rich's revision of the very concept of canon and discusses how several African-American women writers (in particular Maya Angelou and Gloria Naylor) have reflected on the ambivalent status of Shakespeare in their worlds.
Erickson here offers a model for multicultural literary criticism and a new conceptual framework with which to discuss issues of identity politics. "Rewriting Shakespeare, Rewriting Ourselves" makes an important contribution to the national debate about educational policy in the humanities.