Books

The Forms of Utopia: Paradox, Labyrinth, and Recursion in the Renaissance

Princeton University Press · 2026

Although we commonly understand “utopia” as an ideal society, this book shifts our understanding of utopia from its politics to its form. Mann mobilizes concepts from logic and mathematics to demonstrate how paradox, labyrinth, and recursion become the techniques of utopian invention in the early modern period.

The Trials of Orpheus: Poetry, Science, and the Early Modern Sublime

Princeton University Press · 2021

Princeton University Press Amazon

A revealing look at how the Orpheus myth helped Renaissance writers and thinkers understand the force of eloquence.

Outlaw Rhetoric: Figuring Vernacular Eloquence in Shakespeare's England

Cornell University Press · 2012

Cornell University Press Amazon

Outlaw Rhetoric argues that the translation of classical rhetoric into the everyday vernacular becomes a means of literary invention in the sixteenth century, turning classical figures of transport and exchange into native stories of fairies and Robin Hood.