Systems of Life offers a wide-ranging revaluation of the emergence of biopolitics in Europe from the mid- eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. In staging an encounter among literature, political economy, and the still emergent sciences of life in that historical moment, the essays collected here reopen the question of how concepts of animal, vegetable, and human life, among other biological registers, had an impact on the Enlightenment project of thinking politics and economics as a joint enterprise. The volume's contributors consider politics, economics, and the biological as distinct, semi-autonomous spheres whose various combinations required inventive, sometimes incomplete, acts of conceptual mediation, philosophical negotiation, disciplinary intervention, or aesthetic representation.

"Plots of Enlightenment" explores the emergence of the English novel during the early 1700s as a preeminent form of popular education at a time when educators were defining a new kind of "modern" English citizenship for both men and women. This new individual was imagined neither as the free, self-determined figure of early modern liberalism or republicanism, nor, at the other extreme, as the product of a nearly totalized disciplinary regimen. Instead, this new citizen materialized from the tensile process of what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls "regulated improvisation," a strategy of performed individual identity that combines both social orchestration and individual agency.
This book considers how the period's diverse forms of educational writing (including chapbooks, conduct books, and philosophical treatises) and the most innovative educational institutions of the age (such as charity schools, working schools, and proposed academies for young women) produced a shared concept of improvised identity also shaped by the early novel's pedagogical agenda. The model of improvised subjectivity contributed to new ways of imagining English individuality as both a private and public entity; it also empowered women authors, both educators and novelists, to transform traditional ideals of femininity in forming their own protofeminist versions of enlightened female identity.
While offering a comprehensive account of the novel's educational status during the Enlightenment, "Plots of Enlightenment" focuses particularly on the first half of the eighteenth century, when novelists such as Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, and Charlotte Lennox were first exploring concepts of fictional character based on educational and moral improvisation. A close examination of these authors' work illustrates further that by the 1750s, the improvisational impulse in England had forged the first perceptible outlines of the fictional subgenre later called the novel of education or the "Bildungsroman." This book is the first study of its kind to account for the complex interplay between the individualist and collectivist protocols of early modern fiction, with an eye toward articulating a comprehensive description of socialization and literary form that can accommodate the similarities and differences in the works of both male and female writers.

Few directors in the past three decades have produced movies more compelling, controversial, or confounding than David Lynch (b. 1946). And fewer still have been so reluctant to talk about what they do. In this collection, editor Richard A. Barney has chosen the rare interviews in which Lynch opens up to questions rather than deflecting them. Whether Lynch is talking about his earliest film shorts such as "The Grandmother" or the break-out surrealist feature "Eraserhead," the hit TV series "Twin Peaks" or his Oscar-nominated "The Elephant Man" or "Blue Velvet" or his most recent experimental tours de force, "Mulholland Drive" and "Inland Empire," he stresses the power of image and sound to communicate his vision.

"David Lynch: Interviews" is the first survey of conversations with the director covering the broad spectrum of his artistic activities throughout his career, including filmmaking, painting, music production, and furniture design. It documents the evolution of Lynch's role in discussing his movies, from his self-described "pre-verbal stage" in the early years to his increasingly elaborate, though persistently elusive, articulations. It also registers the intense international interest in Lynch's work, with interviews from French and Spanish sources translated here for the first time.

Systems of Life offers a wide-ranging revaluation of the emergence of biopolitics in Europe from the mid- eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. In staging an encounter among literature, political economy, and the still emergent sciences of life in that historical moment, the essays collected here reopen the question of how concepts of animal, vegetable, and human life, among other biological registers, had an impact on the Enlightenment project of thinking politics and economics as a joint enterprise. The volume's contributors consider politics, economics, and the biological as distinct, semi-autonomous spheres whose various combinations required inventive, sometimes incomplete, acts of conceptual mediation, philosophical negotiation, disciplinary intervention, or aesthetic representation.