General

Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) is the most famous and controversial figure in the history of political thought and one of the iconic names of the Renaissance. The Cambridge Companion to Machiavelli brings together sixteen original essays by leading...

Don Pedro Calderon de la Barca (1600-81) is Spain's most important early modern dramatist. His varied career as a playwright, courtier, soldier and priest placed him at the heart of Spanish culture, and he reflected on contemporary events in his plays,...

Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605) is one of the classic texts of Western literature and the foundation of European fiction. Yet Cervantes himself remains an enigmatic figure. The Cambridge Companion to Cervantes, first published in 2002, offers a...

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...

The Cambridge Companion to Proust, first published in 2001, aims to provide a broad account of the major features of Marcel Proust's great work A la recherche du temps perdu (1913-27). The specially commissioned essays, by acknowledged experts on Proust,...

This 2002 book explores the commedia dell'arte: the Italian professional theatre in Shakespeare's time. The actors of this theatre usually did not perform from scripted drama but improvised their performances from a shared plot and thorough knowledge of...

The Cambridge Companion to the Italian Novel provides a broad ranging introduction to the major trends in the development of the Italian novel from its early modern origin to the contemporary era. Contributions cover a wide range of topics including the...

The Liber Manualis is a distinctive guidebook to conduct and survival in tumultuous times written by a Carolingian mother for her adolescent son. This edition provides a complete translation in English, accompanied by the Latin original. Advancing views...

This 1989 book is a comparative literary study of apocalyptic themes and narrative techniques in the contemporary North and Latin American novel. Zamora explores the history of the myth of apocalypse, from the Bible to medieval and later interpretations,...

This 1991 book examines the relationship between psychoanalytic theory and the literature of the French Renaissance by exploring the issues of gender, the body, and repression in many of the key literary texts of the period, including Sceve, Rabelais,...

English metaphysical poetry, from Donne to Marvell, is notoriously witty. In this 1992 book, A. J. Smith seeks the reason for the central importance of wit in the thinking of the metaphysical poets and argues that metaphysical wit is essentially...

This is a lively and readable guide to Alexander Pushkin's novel in verse Eugene Onegin, a landmark of European Romanticism, and arguably the best of all Russian poetry. Professor Briggs addresses the question of how such remarkable poetry can have been...

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...

Dr Gray aims to encourage in students beginning to read and write about German poetry the skills which will help them to read and write with more insight. After outlining this aim in its introduction, this 1976 book takes the form of a selection of...

This book (comprising four lectures presented at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1985) is concerned with the function and status of poetry in the twentieth century, and is particularly concerned to contrast attitudes in Britain and America with those in...

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...

Professor Greenberg's lucid study examines the themes of authority, power and sexuality in Corneille's major plays, drawing on the work of Foucault, and Freudian and feminist critics. He begins by considering the question of myth and of a...

Although much work has recently been done on the relationship between poet, narrator and audience in medieval literature, no sustained attempt has yet been made to inquire into the ways in which the listener's responses are rhetorically controlled and...

This 1980 text was the first full-length study of seventeenth-century pulpit oratory since 1863, and the first to treat both Catholic and Protestant preaching. The first part opens with a general discussion on the sermon as a literary form, followed by a...

The essays in this 1987 volume are concerned with ideas of contrarity and other kinds of polar opposition in French literature of the eighteenth century. Originally these ideas were merely part of an impulse to undermine the establishment, but as the...

Originally published in 1981, this book provides an interpretation of the five Arthurian romances of Chretien de Troyes. It attempts to show the ways in which this most enigmatic and influential of medieval romance-writers reveals his ideas about man,...

Raymond Queneau (1903-76) was an important and influential contemporary of Camus and Sartre and figures among the most significant of modern French writers, though his work is still not widely known in the English-speaking world. He was a poet,...

The ten readings in this 1985 volume were originally delivered as Lecturae Dantis at the University of Cambridge. Their purpose is twofold: to offer a well-informed commentary on individual Cantos of The Divine Comedy, and to prove to those who wish to...

This 1982 book examines the novels of Theodor Fontane, one of the most important German novelists of the nineteenth century. He has been well served by English translations and is now regarded as a writer of international standing. Professor Bance begins...

This book examines the problematic area of narrative structure under conditions of severe stress. Each of the four authors is shown to be concerned with the tension between narrative coherence as a desirable goal and an unfortunate check placed on the...

This book is an intensive study of what was by far the most productive year in Baudelaire's literary career. It combines biographical investigation with detailed textual analysis in order to locate the sources of the extraordinary 'explosion'...

This book analyses the use of the crucial concept of 'taste' in the works of five major seventeenth-century French authors, Mere, Saint Evremond, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyere and Boileau. It combines close readings of important texts with a thoroughgoing...

This book is a major study of the development of French poetry in the Renaissance, which examines changes in style and vision by looking both at how poetry was read in this period and how it was written. Dr Moss examines vernacular versions of fables...

The thirteenth-century poem Roman de la Rose is one of the most significant literary contributions of the Middle Ages. The poem is a composite work by two separate authors; the first part, By Guillaume de Lorris, has always been viewed as an unfinished...

Nikolay Novikov (1744-1818) was a key figure in Russian cultural life under Catherine the Great. He was in turn a successful journalist, historiographer, educator, publisher, leading freemason and philanthropist and he left his distinctive mark on each...

This is a major English study of the novels of the Spanish Civil War. The book is based on an analysis of some eighty Spanish novels, written in Spain and abroad (in exile) during the Franco period (1936-1975), in which the Civil War is the major theme...

Among seventeenth-century classical French writers La Rochefoucauld owes his renown to his maxims and La Bruyere to his stylised portraits, or caracteres. This book starts from the basic assumption that both writers were 'moralists', and as such were...

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 term 'SerboCroatian' denotes a South Slavic language with several varieties. These varieties are spoken in areas that compromised the former Yugoslavia. People living in Serbia and Montenegro now usually call their language 'Serbian'. People living...

It has previously not been feasible to study in depth the expansion of Proust's famous novel, A la recherche du temps perdu. In 1913, the novel was to be 1500 pages; by 1922, when Proust died, it was 3000. How did it grow to such proportions? Which...

It has previously not been feasible to study in depth the expansion of Proust's famous novel, A la recherche du temps perdu. In 1913, the novel was to be 1500 pages; by 1922, when Proust died, it was 3000. How did it grow to such proportions? Which...

This book (comprising four lectures presented at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1985) is concerned with the function and status of poetry in the twentieth century, and is particularly concerned to contrast attitudes in Britain and America with those in...

This is the first book on Andrei Bitov, one of contemporary Russia's most original writers. It plots his evolution from his early publications of the post-Stalin years to his mature masterpieces of the glasnost era. Ellen Chances assesses his place both...

Despite the fashionable standing of irony in studies of modern literature and its occasional application to medieval studies in a number of recent works, no sustained analysis of this phenomenon has yet been attempted for medieval literature. Professor...

The first comprehensive study of the narrative and stylistic characteristics of all of Marguerite Duras' major works. Through close textual readings with a particular focus on women's access to language, this book shows how Duras critiques and subverts...