General

This 1993 reading of Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris is a response to Baudelaire's own challenge to read his text as one in which 'everything ... is head and tail, alternately and reciprocally'. Margery Evans proposes that Le Spleen de Paris serves to...

This book of linked essays contains the first critical study of Baudelaire's development as a poet, from his youth onwards. It also includes studies of the development of Baudelaire's aesthetic, detailed commentaries on a number of his finest poems, and...

This new textbook series is ambitious in scope. It will provide concise and lucid introductions to major works of world literature from classical antiquity to the twentieth century. It is not confined to any single literary tradition or genre, and will...

This 1980 book is designed to help university students to master the technicalities and techniques of French verse. The author assumes that part of the difficulty encountered by readers derives from the need to approach French verse through English...

In this short introductory book, Professor Forster examines Petrarchism as a European phenomenon transcending national boundaries. He begins with a general survey of themes and conventions, providing, with quotation, something like a repertory of the...

This 1983 volume comprises essays written by British and American scholars to mark the centenary of Dostoyevsky's death in 1881. In many respects it is a companion volume to New Essays on Tolstoy published by Cambridge University Press in 1978. The book...

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This book, originally published in 1982, was the first monograph in English to offer a critical study of an important twentieth-century German novelist, Arno Schmidt. Schmidt, who died in 1979, was a controversial figure on the German literary scene. His...

Originally published in 1981, the ten essays in this collection were originally delivered as public Lecturae Dantis in the University of Cambridge. As far as possible the contributors have preserved the form of the original lectures, which combined...

Bertolt Brecht, one of the most influential European playwrights of the twentieth century, was also a poet of distinction. Brecht's Poetry of Political Exile is the first comprehensive study devoted to his most important collection of political poetry,...

This pioneering 1994 study documents the extent and diversity of the impact of Nietzschean ideas on Soviet literature and culture. It shows how these ideas, unacknowledged and reworked, entered and shaped that culture and stimulated the imagination of...

This 1982 book offers an evaluation of one of Flaubert's major and most controversial novels. Dr Green begins by discussing the nineteenth-century debate about the relation between history and fiction, and examines Flaubert's distinctive responses to it...

Are works of art imitations? If so, what exactly do they imitate? Should an artist remind his audience that what it is perceiving is in fact artifice, or should he try above all to persuade it to accept the illusion as reality? Questions such as these,...

The beginnings of psychology are usually dated from experimental psychology and Freudian psychoanalysis in the late-nineteenth century. Yet the period from 1700 to 1840 produced some highly sophisticated psychological theorising that became central to...

Nick Havely examines the connections between Dante, the Franciscans and the Papacy as they appear in the Commedia and presents the poem as one concerned with an often dramatic confrontation between authority and idealism in the Church. Havely draws on a...

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This wide-ranging 1996 study presents an examination of the extraordinary diversity and range of satirical writing in Russian literature and will be of interest not only to Slavicists but also to those interested in genre theory. Through the close...

As a leading thinker of the European Enlightenment, Voltaire is a central figure in France's collective cultural memory. The popularity of Candide has made him perhaps best known as a writer of tales. Yet these represent only a fraction of his entire...

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw an extraordinary flowering of arts and culture in Germany which produced many of the world's finest writers, artists, philosophers and composers. This volume, first published in 2004, offers students...

Vladimir Nabokov held the unique distinction of being one of the most important writers of the twentieth century in two separate languages, Russian and English. Known for his verbal mastery and bold plots, Nabokov fashioned a literary legacy that...

Simon Gilson explores Dante's reception in his native Florence between 1350 and 1481. He traces the development of Florentine civic culture and the interconnections between Dante's principal 'Florentine' readers, from Giovanni Boccaccio to Cristoforo...

Reid Barbour's 2002 study takes a fresh look at English Protestant culture in the reign of Charles I (1625-1649). In the decades leading into the civil war and the execution of their monarch, English writers explored the experience of a Protestant life...

The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Poetry presents the major themes, forms, genres and styles of Russian poetry. Using examples from Russia's greatest poets, Michael Wachtel draws on three centuries of verse, from the beginnings of secular literature...

This book casts new light on the life and work of Francois Villon, one of the most famous but least understood poets of the later Middle Ages. Traditionally Villon has been viewed by scholars as an alienated outsider in his own time, whose work was in...

Dostoevsky is one of Russia's greatest novelists and a major influence in modern debates about religion, both in Russia and the West. This collection brings together Western and Russian perspectives on the issues raised by the religious element in his...

The Cambridge Introduction to French Poetry is a comprehensive survey of French poetry. The poets discussed - all quoted in the original, followed by an English translation - belong to every period from the eleventh century to the present, and include...

If the rise of modernism is the story of a struggle between the burden of tradition and a desire to break free of it, then Rilke's poetic development is a key example of this tension at work. Taking a sceptical view of Rilke's own myth of himself as a...

Writing Marginality in Modern French Literature, first published in 2001, explores how cultural centres require the peripheral, the outlawed and the deviant in order to define and bolster themselves. It analyses the hierarchies of cultural value which...

In the Russian modernist era, literature threw itself open to influences from other art forms, most particularly the visual arts. Collaborations between writers, artists, designers, and theatre and cinema directors took place more intensively and...

This book addresses the issues of collecting, consuming, classifying and describing the curiosities, antiques and objets d'art that proliferated in French literary texts during the last decades of the nineteenth century. After Balzac made such issues...

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The Development of Russian Verse explores the Russian verse tradition from Pushkin to Brodsky, showing how certain formal features are associated with certain genres and, at times, specific themes. Michael Wachtel's basic thesis is that form is never...

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...

Given the restrictions on political action and even political discussion in Russia, Russian literary journals have served as the principal means by which Russia discovered, defined and shaped itself. Every issue of importance for literate Russians -...

The Literature of Misogyny in Medieval Spain examines the medical underpinnings of two major misogynist works from fifteenth-century Iberia: Alonso de Martinez's Arcipreste de Talavera and Jacme Roig's Spill. Michael Solomon argues that these works gain...

The Family in Crisis in Late Nineteenth-Century French Fiction, first published in 1999, focuses on a key moment in the construction of the modern view of the family in France. Nicholas White's analysis of novels by Zola, Maupassant, Hennique, Bourget...

Originally published in 1996, this collection of fascinating essays by leading western and Russian specialists gives an overview of key issues in Russian women's writing and of important representations of women by men, between 1600 and the present. This...

This book was originally published in 1997. The Bildungsroman - the story of the development or formation of a young man - is the most famous German contribution to the European novel. Most studies of the Bildungsroman have concentrated on its underlying...

This volume offers a unique and valuable insight into the novel in French over the past two centuries. In a series of essays, acknowledged experts discuss a variety of topics including nineteenth-century realism, women and fiction, popular fiction,...

This is the first full-length study in English of Michel Leiris's work. Frequently cited as a central figure in contemporary French culture, Leiris was an outstanding writer whose double career as ethnographer and creative writer places him at important...