General

In this highly original and provocative study, Bersani takes us away from the interpretative questions which the competing critics of Mallarme familiarly raise, and explores a fundamental paradox within his work as a whole. On the one hand Mallarme can...

This is a major study of the Nobel prize-winning French novelist Claude Simon. Simon is a complex figure: for all that he writes in a distinctively modern fictional tradition (exemplified by Proust, Joyce, Beckett and Robbe-Grillet), his novels contain...

The idea of man as an essentially irrational being has preoccupied some of the most influential of Russian thinkers, including the three important Soviet writers considered by Dr Edwards in this book. Since the 1917 Revolution the polemic between...

Published in 1987, this book was the first full-length interpretative study in English of the later writings of the outstanding Soviet novelist and playwright Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940). The focus is the 1930s, the period when Bulgakov was writing The...

This Dictionary has been compiled to meet the need for a reference work on the stress and morphology of Russian personal names. It indicates the stress of approximately 23,000 surnames and describes general rules that enable users to determine the stress...

Chretien de Troyes was one of the most important medieval writers of Arthurian narrative. A key figure in reshaping the 'once and future fictions' of Arthurian story, he was instrumental in the late twelfth-century shift from written and oral legendary...

From the balls and masquerades of the court to the half-naked children of the peasants; from hunting and winter sports to details of authorship and publishing; from law to sanitation, this 1935 book plunges the reader into life in Germany two hundred...

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...

First published in 1952, this is the second edition of a volume which was originally published in 1928. The text contains an English translation of The Servant of Two Masters, one of Goldoni's most celebrated comedies. An introduction and notes on...

This is a full-length study of the use of the dialogue form in Italy from the early sixteenth century until Galileo. Drawing on a wide range of sources, it examines the characteristics which determined the genre's unrivalled popularity in the period as a...

This book poses the question: what happens when reading enters the realist process? and answers it by way of a critical study of Stendhal's writing. Ann Jefferson argues that a recognition of the role of reading in representation is particularly crucial...

This book presents an interesting approach to Dante's Divine Comedy, drawing on medieval theories of reading and understanding a text, and comparing them with modern critical theories of hermeneutics and approaches to the text associated with the work of...

This valuable study illuminates the idea of nobility as display, as public performance, in Renaissance and seventeenth-century literature and society. Ranging widely from Castiglione and French courtesy manuals, through Montaigne and Bacon, to the...

It was through Stael's best-seller De l'Allemagne that the term 'Romanticism', coined in Germany, reached Europe and America. Around this term, Stael built a new and universal agenda: her manifesto offered Napoleon's Europe an alternative to everything...

Malcolm Jones, the author of an earlier, widely read book on Dostoyevsky, here approaches his subject afresh in the light of recent developments in Dostoyevsky studies and in critical theory. He takes as his starting point the vexed question of...

Gunter Grass is Germany's best-known and internationally most successful living author, from his first novel The Tin Drum to his recent controversial autobiography. He is known for his tireless social and political engagement with the issues that have...

Proust's work may sometimes offer a picture of intellectual confidence. But not enough had previously been said about the crisis of hypersensitivity in many of Proust's characters. This 1983 book attempted to fill that gap, and as such should interest...

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This collaborative, two-volume work offers a full survey of the French Romantics as a whole, and seeks to reassess their collective achievement and continuing value. The movement they created is considered within the broad terms of intellectual and...

Originally published in 1952, as part of the Cambridge Plain Texts series, this volume contains essays by Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803). A key Enlightenment figure, and the early mentor of Goethe, he was a prominent instigator of the 'Storm and...

A lively and comprehensive account of the whole tradition of European fiction for students and teachers of comparative literature, this volume covers twenty-five of the most significant and influential novelists in Europe from Cervantes to Kundera. Each...

The songs of the troubadour poets of the south of France were a pervasive influence in the development of the European lyric (and indeed other genres) from the twelfth century to the Renaissance and beyond. Much troubadour poetry is on the topic of love,...

Khlebnikov is becoming recognized as one of the major Russian poets of the twentieth century, having for years been dismissed as a purveyor of unintelligible verbal trickery. This book provides a broad survey of his work. Dr Cooke's aim is to be both...

In this 1999 book, Julie Candler Hayes offers an ambitious reinterpretation of a crucial aspect of Enlightenment thought, the rationalizing and classifying impulse. Taking issue both with traditional liberal and contemporary critical accounts of the...

This new study of the nineteenth-century French realist novel focuses on the difference, and fundamental incompatibility, between the narrative and the descriptive modes of discourse. James Reid shows how the major novelists, Balzac, Flaubert and Zola,...

Nikolai Zabolotsky (1903-1958) was one of the great poets of twentieth-century Russia. As the last link in the Russian Futurist tradition and the first significant poet to come of age in the Soviet period, Zabolotsky wrote poetry both highly experimental...

This is a 1992 study of writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, mainly in France, but also in Britain and Russia. Its focus is on the establishing and questioning of rational, 'civilized' norms of 'politeness', which in the ancien regime...

Patrick Boyde argues that the way in which Dante represents what he (or his fictional self) saw and felt was profoundly influenced by the thirteenth-century science of psychology. Professor Boyde offers an authoritative account of the way in which vision...

The first edition of this book appeared in German in 1985, and set an agenda for the study of medieval literary theory. Rather than seeing vernacular writers' reflections on their art, as found in prologues, epilogues and interpolations in literary...

This book is a systematic attempt to examine the literary consequences of German reunification. Placing the concept of the Kulturnation at the centre of its analysis, the book explores the ways in which literature both responds to and helps to constitute...

This 1999 study examines the connections between Proust's fin-de-siecle 'nervousness' and his apprehensions regarding literary form. Michael Finn shows that Proust's anxieties both about bodily weakness and about novel-writing were fed by a set of...

The turn of the nineteenth century, a time of exceptional creativity in Russia, was also a time of great receptivity to foreign cultural influences. Among the most important of these were English poetry and aesthetic thought, which gave new impetus to...

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...

The Soviet writer Andrei Platonov (1899-1951) belongs to a Russian philosophical tradition that includes such figures as Vladimir Solov'ev, Mikhail Bakhtin and Boris Pasternak. This 1992 study investigates the interrelation of themes, imagery and the use...

This work is an innovative and controversial study of how four famous Jews writing in Russian in the early Soviet period attempted to resolve the conflict between their cultural identity and their place in Revolutionary Russia. Babel, Mandelstam,...

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 this discerning study of sentimental discourse of the late eighteenth century, David J. Denby sheds new light on Enlightenment thought and sensibility. He reveals how sentimental sub-literature reflects the social attitudes of the emerging...

Iurii Trifonov (1925-81) has become well known in the West as a writer of Soviet urban life. This study, first published in 1993, concentrates on his exploration of major events in Russian history (such as the assassination of Tsar Alexander II and the...

Stefan Heym's uncompromising stance made him unpopular with a succession of political regimes. The Nazis, the CIA and the East German secret police all held files on him. He was Hitler's youngest literary exile; McCarthyism was to drive him from the USA;...

This book reassesses the love poetry of Maurice Sceve from a phenomenological viewpoint. It calls into question the traditional critical view of Sceve as a poet consumed by the anguish and darkness of unrequited love, and frustrated by poetic and erotic...