Robert M. Adams – författare

A companion to British literature explores the political, social, intellectual, and cultural history and background of English poetry, fiction, prose, and drama and analyzes the changing conditions of literary activity.

Bad Mouth: Fugitive Papers on the Dark Side examines the pervasive and complex ways in which language is used to harm, distort, and alienate. Through a series of essays, the book explores the concept of "counter-language"—words deployed as weapons to insult, deceive, and subvert standards of truth and decency. The collection broadens to examine how these linguistic tendencies mirror and contribute to modern cultural shifts, where the once exceptional use of provocative or offensive language has become increasingly normalized. Beyond language, the book delves into the aesthetics of ugliness and its metaphors—rags, garbage, and excrement—as symbols of a broader cultural fixation on the grotesque.The author reflects on a significant transformation in art, literature, and everyday discourse over the last fifty years. What was once a minority mode of offense and alienation in art is now dominant, driven by a society increasingly desensitized to shock and degradation. The book resists offering definitive explanations for this shift but presents it as a symptom of cultural upheaval. Whether this trend represents a genuine expansion of expressive possibilities or a descent into sensationalism is left open to interpretation. Ultimately, Bad Mouth challenges readers to confront the evolving vocabulary of modern life and its implications for self-definition, truth, and the human experience.This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1977.

The Roman Stamp: Frame and Facade in Some Forms of Neo-Classicism by Robert M. Adams investigates how modern writers, artists, and thinkers have repeatedly turned to Rome as both a model of authority and a stage set for self-fashioning. Adams traces how figures from Mantegna and Scaliger to Swift, Piranesi, and Johnson appropriated Roman ideals—law, order, grandeur, severity—not merely as passive inheritances but as active instruments for rebirth, critique, or parody. With clarity and wit, he shows that neo-classicism was never just a glaze of marble columns or Latin tags but a creative struggle with the Roman stamp: a masculine, disciplined style imposed on the accidents of nature and personal history.Moving across art history, literary polemic, and intellectual genealogy, Adams situates neo-classicism as both a vital energy and a contested masquerade. Whether in the martial self-discipline of Mantegna’s art, the biting authority of Scaliger’s scholarship, or the ironic inversions of Swift and Johnson, Rome offered a repertoire of forms through which moderns dramatized self-creation. By charting these variations—rebirth, war, seduction, diffusion—The Roman Stamp reframes “neo-classicism” not as a tired formula but as a set of crisis encounters with Rome’s enduring authority. The book will appeal to readers interested in classical reception, Renaissance and Enlightenment culture, and the uneasy legacy of antiquity in modern imagination.This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1974.

Bad Mouth: Fugitive Papers on the Dark Side examines the pervasive and complex ways in which language is used to harm, distort, and alienate. Through a series of essays, the book explores the concept of "counter-language"—words deployed as weapons to insult, deceive, and subvert standards of truth and decency. The collection broadens to examine how these linguistic tendencies mirror and contribute to modern cultural shifts, where the once exceptional use of provocative or offensive language has become increasingly normalized. Beyond language, the book delves into the aesthetics of ugliness and its metaphors—rags, garbage, and excrement—as symbols of a broader cultural fixation on the grotesque.The author reflects on a significant transformation in art, literature, and everyday discourse over the last fifty years. What was once a minority mode of offense and alienation in art is now dominant, driven by a society increasingly desensitized to shock and degradation. The book resists offering definitive explanations for this shift but presents it as a symptom of cultural upheaval. Whether this trend represents a genuine expansion of expressive possibilities or a descent into sensationalism is left open to interpretation. Ultimately, Bad Mouth challenges readers to confront the evolving vocabulary of modern life and its implications for self-definition, truth, and the human experience.This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1977.

The Roman Stamp: Frame and Facade in Some Forms of Neo-Classicism by Robert M. Adams investigates how modern writers, artists, and thinkers have repeatedly turned to Rome as both a model of authority and a stage set for self-fashioning. Adams traces how figures from Mantegna and Scaliger to Swift, Piranesi, and Johnson appropriated Roman ideals—law, order, grandeur, severity—not merely as passive inheritances but as active instruments for rebirth, critique, or parody. With clarity and wit, he shows that neo-classicism was never just a glaze of marble columns or Latin tags but a creative struggle with the Roman stamp: a masculine, disciplined style imposed on the accidents of nature and personal history.Moving across art history, literary polemic, and intellectual genealogy, Adams situates neo-classicism as both a vital energy and a contested masquerade. Whether in the martial self-discipline of Mantegna’s art, the biting authority of Scaliger’s scholarship, or the ironic inversions of Swift and Johnson, Rome offered a repertoire of forms through which moderns dramatized self-creation. By charting these variations—rebirth, war, seduction, diffusion—The Roman Stamp reframes “neo-classicism” not as a tired formula but as a set of crisis encounters with Rome’s enduring authority. The book will appeal to readers interested in classical reception, Renaissance and Enlightenment culture, and the uneasy legacy of antiquity in modern imagination.This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1974.

First published in Latin in 1516, Thomas More's Utopia is one of the most influential books in the Western philosophical and literary tradition and one of the supreme achievements of Renaissance humanism. This is the first edition of Utopia since 1965 (the Yale edition) to combine More's Latin text with an English translation, and also the first edition to provide a Latin text that is both accurate and readable. The text is based on the early editions (with the Froben edition of March 1518 as copy-text), but spelling and punctuation have been regularized in accordance with modern practices. The translation is a revised version of the acclaimed lively and readable Adams translation, which also appears in Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. This edition, which incorporates the results of recent Utopian scholarship, also includes an introduction, textual apparatus, a full commentary and a guide to the voluminous scholarly and critical literature on Utopia.

First published in Latin in 1516, Thomas More's Utopia is one of the most influential books in the Western philosophical and literary tradition and one of the supreme achievements of Renaissance humanism. This is the first edition of Utopia since 1965 (the Yale edition) to combine More's Latin text with an English translation, and also the first edition to provide a Latin text that is both accurate and readable. The text is based on the early editions (with the Froben edition of March 1518 as copy-text), but spelling and punctuation have been regularized in accordance with modern practices. The translation is a revised version of the acclaimed lively and readable Adams translation, which also appears in Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. This edition, which incorporates the results of recent Utopian scholarship, also includes an introduction, textual apparatus, a full commentary and a guide to the voluminous scholarly and critical literature on Utopia.

A model of what an edition of a philosohic text for an introductory level should be. Introduction does an admirable job of putting Berkeley's thought in the intellectual context of its time. --Gary C. Hatfield