Author: By Lisa A. Freeman If the whole world acted the player, how did the player act the world? In Character's Theater, Lisa A. Freeman uses this question to test recent critical discussion of eighteenth-century literature and culture. Much current work, she observes, focuses on the concept of theatricality as both the governing metaphor of social life and a primary filter of psychic perception. Hume's theater of the mind, Adam Smith's impartial spectator, and Diderot's tableaux are all invoked by theorists to describe a process whereby the private individual comes to internalize theatrical logic and apprehend the self as other. To them theatricality is a critical mechanism of modern subjectivity but one that needs to be concealed if the subject's stability is to be maintained.Finding that much of this discussion about the Age of the Spectator has been conducted without reference to the play texts or actual theatrical practice, Freeman turns to drama and discovers a dynamic model of identity based on eighteenth-century conceptualizations of character. In contrast to the novel, which cultivated psychological tensions between private interiority and public show, dramatic characters in the eighteenth century experienced no private thoughts. The theater of the eighteenth century was not a theater of absorption but rather a theater of interaction, where what was monitored was not the depth of character, as in the novel, but the arc of a genre over the course of a series of discontinuous acts.In a genre-by-genre analysis of plays about plays, tragedy, comedies of manners, humours, and intrigue, and sentimental comedy, Freeman offers an interpretive account of eighteenth-century drama and its cultural work and demonstrates that by deploying an alternative model of identity, theater marked a site of resistance to the rise of the subject and to the ideological conformity enforced through that identity formation.

Author: Gregory A. Waselkov Considered a classic study of southeastern Indians, Powhatans Mantle demonstrates how ethnohistory, demography, archaeology, anthropology, and cartography can be brought together in fresh and meaningful ways to illuminate life in the early South. In a series of provocative original essays, a dozen leading scholars show how diverse Native Americans interacted with newcomers from Europe and Africa during the three hundred years of dramatic change beginning in the early sixteenth century.For this new and expanded edition, the original contributors have revisited their subjects to offer further insights based on years of additional scholarship. The book includes four new essays, on calumet ceremonialism, social diversity in French Louisiana, the gendered nature of Cherokee agriculture, and the ideology of race among Creek Indians. The result is a volume filled with detailed information and challenging, up-to-date reappraisals reflecting the latest interdisciplinary research, ranging from Indian mounds and map symbolism to diplomatic practices and social structure, written to interest fellow scholars and informed general readers.

Author: George Aaron Broadwell This book is the most comprehensive reference grammar of Choctaw, an American Indian language spoken by approximately eleven thousand people located primarily in Mississippi and Oklahoma. Based on nineteen years of field work with speakers of the Mississippi and Oklahoma dialects and more than 150 years of written Choctaw material, A Choctaw Reference Grammar contains the most complete description to date of the morphology of the language as well as a thorough treatment of phrase structure, word order, case marking, and complementation.The Choctaw tribe was divided into Oklahoma and Mississippi groups during the Indian Removal of the 1830s. Today the majority of fluent speakers among the Oklahoma Choctaws are more than forty years old, and few children speak the language. Although more children among the Mississippi Choctaws learn the language, the number is declining. Because language is vital to preserving the Choctaws way of life and both dialects of Choctaw are endangered, careful documentation of the grammatical structure of the language is critically important. Compiled by the leading scholarly expert on the Choctaw language, George Aaron Broadwell, this volume is both a practical guide to Native speakers and an indispensable handbook for linguists.

Author: William G. Resh Why do presidents face so many seemingly avoidable bureaucratic conflicts? And why do these clashes usually intensify toward the end of presidential administrations, when a commander-in-chiefs administrative goals tend to be more explicit and better aligned with their appointed leaderships prerogatives? In Rethinking the Administrative Presidency, William G. Resh considers these complicated questions from an empirical perspective. Relying on data drawn from surveys and interviews, Resh rigorously analyzes the argument that presidents typically start from a premise of distrust when they attempt to control federal agencies. Focusing specifically on the George W. Bush administration, Resh explains how a lack of trust can lead to harmful agency failure. He explores the extent to which the Bush administration was able to increase the reliabilityand reduce the costof information to achieve its policy goals through administrative means during its second term. Arguing that President Bushs use of the administrative presidency created trust between appointees and career executives to increase knowledge sharing throughout respective agencies, Resh demonstrates that functional relationships between careerists and appointees help to advance robust policy. He employs a joists vs. jigsaws metaphor to stress his main point: that mutual support based on optimistic trust is a more effective managerial strategy than fragmentation founded on unsubstantiated distrust.