General

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...

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...

For many years the study of pre-seventeenth-century English drama was shaped largely by an understanding that everything written revolved around the individual author, either as part of the tradition that prepared the way for Shakespeare or as part of...

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 is a student guide to Franz Kafka, focusing on giving guidance through the difficulties readers can encounter in studying his work. Franz Kafka is one of the most widely taught, and read, writers in world literature. Readers encountering texts like...

Surveying the night sky, a charming philosopher and his hostess, the Marquise, are considering the possibility of travelers from the moon. 'What if they were skillful enough to navigate on the outer surface of our air, and from there, through their...

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...

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...

Since its first publication in 1954, The Classical Heritage has become established as a classic introduction to cultural and intellectual history from the Carolingian age to the end of the Renaissance.Reviews'Mr Bolgar continually suppies concrete and...

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...

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...

At the turn of the sixteenth century, Italian playwrights rediscovered and recast an old art form-the ancient Latin comedy-to create witty, ribald, and intricately plotted plays that delighted Renaissance audiences with their clever reversals of gender...

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...

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...

Generally considered the least lively and most bleak of casts, gray is the taint of vagueness and uncertainty. Marking the threshold region where luminous life seems suspended but death has not yet darkened the horizon, it belongs to an evasive and...

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...

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...

In a remarkable piece of detective work, Shakespeare scholar James Bednarz traces the Bard's legendary wit-combats with Ben Jonson to their source during the Poets' War. Bednarz offers the most thorough reevaluation of this "War of the Theaters" since...

“All art and the love of art,” Victor Brombert writes at the beginning of the deeply personal Musings on Mortality, “allow us to negate our nothingness.” As a young man returning from World War II, Brombert came to understand this truth as he immersed...

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,...

Once a controversial genre of Victorian fiction that produced the major best sellers of its century, the now-forgotten sensation novel was a publishing phenomenon in its time. In a vivid portrait of this subversive and discomfiting popular literature,...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.About the AuthorNick Selby teaches at the University of Wales, Swansea.Book InformationISBN 9780231124256Author Nick SelbyFormat PaperbackPage Count 192Imprint Columbia...

Nicholas Boyle begins with a fascinating survey of earlier versions of the Faust story. He then offers a detailed reading of Faust Part One, emphasising the poetic and dramatic coherence of the work and tracing its links with the thought and culture of...

Published in 1913, Thomas Mann's Death in Venice is one of the most widely read novellas in any language. In the 1970s, Benjamin Britten adapted it into an opera, and Luchino Visconti turned it into a successful film. Reading these works from a...

This new critical volume, the second to appear in the three-volume "Lectura Dantis", contains expert, focused commentary on the Purgatorio by thirty-three international scholars, each of whom presents to the nonspecialist reader one of the cantos of the...

Presents, in an immensely readable yet profoundly scholarly account, the history of German literature from the Reformation and Renaissance to the late twentieth century, in the wider context of Germanic culture, over the whole German-speaking area of...

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...

"Our daily encounters with forgetting have not taught us enough about how much power it exercises over our lives, what reflections and feelings it evokes in different individuals, how even art and science presuppose-with sympathy or antipathy-forgetting,...

Futures features some of the most daring new voices in Greek poetry, together with international poets with Greek connections. These bold, impassioned and critically aware texts stake new poetic and political ground: they articulate what it means to live...

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...

In the Middle Ages, religious crusaders took up arms, prayed, bade farewell to their families, and marched off to fight in holy wars. These Christian soldiers also created accounts of their lives in lyric poetry, putting words to the experience of...

Hidden in Plain Sight: Jews and Jewishness in British Film, Television, and Popular Culture is the first collection of its kind on this subject. The volume brings together a range of original essays that address different aspects of the role and presence...

Bits of late Roman coinage, the mutilated torso of a marble Venus, blue debris from an early medieval glassworks, and the powder rasped from the reputed tomb of Mary Magdalene - these tantalizing mementos of human history found scattered throughout the...

This innovative study of the works of Robert Musil opens a new window on the history of modern identity in western culture. Stefan Jonsson argues that Musil's Austria was the first postimperial state in modern Europe. Prior to its destruction in 1918,...

What do Philip Pullman and J.K. Rowling have in common that has made both of their stories so successful? What does Pullman listen to while he writes - and who, or what, is Dust?Pullman's award-winning trilogy His Dark Materials has been appreciated by...

Giovanni Verga (1840-1922) is the most important of the Italian Realist School of novelists. This new edition of "The House by the Medlar Tree" ("I Malavoglia") makes the complete English version of his masterpiece available once more. The story of the...

The period of reform, revolution, and reaction that characterized seventeenth - and eighteenth-century Europe also witnessed an intensified interest in lesbians. In scientific treatises and orientalist travelogues, in French court gossip and Dutch court...

Alison Cornish offers a compelling new take on the Commedia with modern sensibilities in mind. Believing in Dante re-examines the infernal dramas of Dante's masterpiece that alienate and perplex modern readers, offering an invigorating view of the whole...

Through critical readings of key works of modern European literature, Victor Brombert shows how a new kind of hero - the antihero - has arisen to replace the toppled heroic model. Though they fail, by design, to live up to conventional expectations of...