Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish is one of the best-selling works of critical theory and a key text on many undergraduate courses. However, it is a long, difficult text which makes Anne Schwan and Stephen Shapiro's excellent step-by-step reading guide a welcome addition to the How to Read Theory series.

Undergraduates across a wide range of disciplines are expected to have a solid understanding of Foucault's key terms, which have become commonplace in critical thinking today. While there are many texts that survey Foucault's thought, these are often more general overviews or...

The Productive Body asks how the human body and its labor have been expropriated and re-engineered through successive stages of capitalism; and how capitalism s transformation of the body is related to the rise of scientific psychology and social science disciplines complicit with modern regimes of control. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault cited Guery and Deleule in order to link Marx s diagnosis of capitalism with his own critique of power/knowledge. The Productive Body brings together Marxism and theories of the body-machine for the goal of political revolution."

Bringing together new accounts of the pulp horror writings of H.P. Lovecraft and the rise of the popular early 20th-century religious movements of American Pentecostalism and Social Gospel, Pentecostal Modernism challenges traditional histories of modernism as a secular avant-garde movement based in capital cities such as London or Paris. Disrupting accounts that separate religion from progressive social movements and mass culture, Stephen Shapiro and Philip Barnard construct a new Modernism belonging to a history of regional cities, new urban areas powered by the hopes and...