General

These narratives recount the harrowing experiences of Englishmen abducted by the Barbary pirates of North Africa. After being sold into slavery, the narrators succeeded in returning to their homeland where their stories were printed. Never before...

-- Modern PhilologyNot only a meditation on Proust, this is a commentary on how the experience of literature is manifested in time and sensation. Kristeva uses Proust as a starting point to reflect upon broader notions of character, time, sensation,...

Nobel Prize-winner Thomas Mann (1875-1955) is not only one of the leading German novelists of the twentieth century, but also one of the few to transcend national and language boundaries to achieve major stature in the English-speaking world. Famous from...

Essays on the various manifestations of Charlemagne and his legends. This book explores the multiplicity of ways in which the Charlemagne legend was recorded in Latin texts of the central and later Middle Ages, moving beyond some of the earlier...

Since the sixteenth century, Western literature has produced picaresque novels penned by authors across Europe, from Aleman, Cervantes, Lesage and Defoe to Cela and Mann. Contemporary authors of neopicaresque are renewing this traditional form to express...

Harrison's elegant poems follow in the steps of his work on interpreting the classic "Divine Comedy"by Dante. (Poetry)About the AuthorRobert Pogue Harrison is a professor of literature at Stanford University, where he is Rosina Pierotti Professor in...

In volumes 7 and 8, Casanova is now close to forty. His various manipulations of the credulous rich have made him rich in turn. His travels take him to France, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. In Rome he charms the Pope; in Naples, he nearly marries a...

This volume brings together a series of essays by acknowledged experts on Flaubert. It offers a coherent overview of the writer's work and critical legacy, and provides insights into the very latest scholarly thinking. While a central place is given to...

The Tragedy of Mariam (1613) is the first original play by a woman to be published in England, and its author is the first English woman writer to be memorialized in a biography, which is included with this edition of the play. Mariam is a distinctive...

In the 1970s and 80s, Northrop Frye and Jay Macpherson co-taught a very influential course at the University of Toronto's Victoria College on the history of Western mythology - Frye focusing on the biblical myths; Macpherson on the classical. Biblical...

Robert Musil's The Man without Qualities is perhaps the most important novel in German written in the twentieth century - certainly it is among the most brilliant, puzzling and profound. This, the first comprehensive study of the work to appear in...

Roland Barthes (1915-1980) was a major French writer, literary theorist and critic of French culture and society. His classic works include "Mythologies" and "Camera Lucida". "Criticism and Truth" is a brilliant discussion...

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This collection of essays by international specialists in the literature of Berlin provides a lively and stimulating account of writing in and about the city in the modern period. The first eight chapters chart key chronological developments from 1750 to...

Nobel Prize-winner Thomas Mann (1875-1955) is not only one of the leading German novelists of the twentieth century, but also one of the few to transcend national and language boundaries to achieve major stature in the English-speaking world. Famous from...

Henri Bergson, central to European philosophy at the beginning of the C20th, is returning to that position at the beginning of the C21st. Bergson's legacy reaches across the disciplines of philosophy, humanities and the arts, and has especial relevance...

Leading scholar Albert Russell Ascoli traces the metamorphosis of Dante Alighieri - minor Florentine aristocrat, political activist and exile, amateur philosopher and theologian, and daring experimental poet - into Dante, author of the Divine Comedy and...

This book is the first to offer a cultural history of French literature from its very beginnings, analysing the relationship between French literature and France s evolving power structures from the Middle Ages through to the present day. It shows the...

"This book is about the obsessive strategies people use to keep the arbitrary out of their lives; it is about the fanaticism and intolerance linked to their ideas of perfection and permanence.... Those readers who have brushed against the dangers of the...

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Volumes 3 and 4 offer some of the most extraordinary episodes in Casanova's extraordinary life, including his liaison with the nun M. M., and his flight from the State Inquisitor's prison-each in its own way a feat of singular dash and daring.The...

Mallarme is widely regarded as one of the most original and distinctively modern writers of the late nineteenth century. At the same time, his fame is accompanied by a certain notoriety, and his works are often thought of as unnecessarily complicated. In...

Alexander Pushkin stands in a unique position as the founding father of Russian literature. In this Companion, leading scholars discuss Pushkin's work in its political, literary, social and intellectual contexts. In the first part of the book individual...

This ground-breaking interdisciplinary collection explores the complex, ambiguous, and contradictory sense of touch in early modern culture. If touch is the sense that mediates between the body of the subject and the world, these essays make apparent the...

When we catastrophize, we think the worst. We make too much of too little, or something of nothing. Yet what looks simply like a bad habit, Gerard Passannante argues, was also a spur to some of the daring conceptual innovations and feats of imagination...

Against the Event: The Everyday and the Evolution of Modernist Narrative investigates how a modernity famed for temporal acceleration - from Benjamin's 'shock' and 'distraction' to the postmodern loss of historical consciousness diagnosed by Jameson -...

The short stories in this bilingual anthology are from the works of some of the great masters of the German literary tradition - including Goethe, Glister, Mann, and Kafka - and offer a representative collection illustrating the development of German...

An original study of late Enlightenment aesthetics, poetics, and environmental medicine as overlapping ways of comprehending the dislocations of historical existence lodged in the movements of bodies and minds This book studies later eighteenth-century...

Osip Mandelstam, who died in 1938 in one of Stalin's labour camps, is one of the greatest poets of this century. Brown's 1978 volume is a very full and important book which tells of Mandelstam's earlier life and gives an introduction to the poetry...

This book is a challenging investigation of the idea of literary mimesis in the light of contemporary literary theory. Drawing on a range of theoretical perspectives developed in and around the work of Barthes, Kristeva, Genette and Derrida, Dr...

Paul Valery's work is a unique odyssey in the universe of ideas and mental forms. The most recently acknowledged - and the most private - of the masters of modernity, Valery is perhaps the most radical and wide-ranging. He navigates freely within the...

Explores the network of social, political and spiritual connections in north west England as a site for regional drama, introducing the reader to the non-metropolitan theatre spaces which formed a vital part of early modern dramatic activity. Uses the...

Confrontations brings, together in one volume six essays by the distinguished critic Rene Wellek. Five have been previously published but are now practically unobtainable; one, "German and English Romanticism: A Confrontation," is previously unpublished...

In this study, Steven Botterill explores the intellectual relationship between the greatest poet of the fourteenth century, Dante, and the greatest spiritual writer of the twelfth century, Bernard of Clairvaux. Botterill analyses the narrative episode...

In The Chastity Plot, Lisabeth During tells the story of the rise, fall, and transformation of the ideal of chastity. From its role in the practice of asceticism to its associations with sovereignty, violence, and the purity of nature, it has been loved,...

The first full-length study of incest in the Gothic genre, this book argues that Gothic writers resisted the power structures of their society through incestuous desires. It provides interdisciplinary readings of incest within father-daughter, sibling,...

The Politics of Home examines the changing representations of "home" in twentieth-century English literature. Examining imperial fiction, contemporary literary and cultural theory, and postcolonial narratives on belonging, exile and immigration, Rosemary...

The underground has been a dominant image of modern life since the late eighteenth century. A site of crisis, fascination, and hidden truth, the underground is a space at once more immediate and more threatening than the ordinary world above. In...

Max Frisch (1911 91) was a giant of twentieth-century German literature. When Frisch moved into a new apartment in Berlin's Sarrazinstrasse, he began keeping a journal, which he came to call the Berlin Journal. A few years later, he emphasized in an...

Professor Boitani's latest book explores the areas of the tragic and the sublime in medieval literature by asking what medieval texts mean to modern readers. Boitani, who has written widely on medieval and comparative literature, studies tragic and...