Böcker av David Roman

Emperor Whisperers charts a comparative history of the two largest strains of ancient philosophy, from the first millennium BC to around AD 500. The book examines how philosophy arose from atheism in both China and Greece but entered a cul de sac when atheism spread from the elites to the middle classes. China's philosophy evolved to oppose law with morals, which created a mandarin class of "emperor whisperers," while Western philosophy was complicated by competing political systems that were only harmonized by the triumph of the Roman Empire. As antiquity came to an end, imported new religions - Buddhism and Christianity - reintroduced faith into elite thought and kickstarted the Middle Ages.

Argues for the centrality of theatre and performance in the American national imaginary

Includes a dossier on AIDS activist film and video, marking the twenty-fifth year of the AIDS pandemic. This book also contains essays on late-nineteenth-century male nudes, lesbian surrealism, homoerotic photography in the deep South, and the transnational, transgender contexts of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play "I Am My Own Wife".