How cable television upended American political life in the pursuit of profits and influenceAs television began to overtake the political landscape in the 1960s, network broadcast companies, bolstered by powerful lobbying interests, dominated screens across the nation.
The message of Virgil's Aeneid once seemed straightforward enough: the epic poem returned to Aeneas and the mythical beginnings of Rome in order to celebrate the city's present world power and to praise its new master, Augustus Caesar.
In Ladies' Greek, Yopie Prins illuminates a culture of female classical literacy that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century, during the formation of women's colleges on both sides of the Atlantic.
We have grown accustomed to understanding world literature as a collection of national or linguistic traditions bound together in the universality of storytelling.
Site Reading offers a new method of literary and cultural interpretation and a new theory of narrative setting by examining five sites-supermarkets, dumps, roads, ruins, and asylums-that have been crucial to American literature and visual art since the mid-twentieth century.
The Russian writer Lydia Ginzburg (1902-90) is best known for her Notes from the Leningrad Blockade and for influential critical studies, such as On Psychological Prose, investigating the problem of literary character in French and Russian novels and memoirs.
Why writing in captivity is a vitally important form of literary resistanceBoethius wrote The Consolation of Philosophy as a prisoner condemned to death for treason, circumstances that are reflected in the themes and concerns of its evocative poetry and dialogue between the prisoner and his mentor, Lady Philosophy.
South Africa came late to television; when it finally arrived in the late 1970s the rest of the world had already begun to boycott the country because of apartheid.
How Arabic influenced the evolution of vernacular literatures and anticolonial thought in Egypt, Indonesia, and SenegalSacred Language, Vernacular Difference offers a new understanding of Arabic's global position as the basis for comparing cultural and literary histories in countries separated by vast distances.
How Black poets have charted the direction of American poetics for the past two centuriesBefore Modernism examines how Black poetics, in antagonism with White poetics in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, produced the conditions for the invention of modern American poetry.
A comparative history of the practices, technologies, institutions, and people that created distinct literary traditions around the world, from ancient to modern timesLiterature is such a familiar and widespread form of imaginative expression today that its existence can seem inevitable.
An ambitious look at the African novel and its connections to African philosophy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuriesThe African Novel of Ideas focuses on the role of the philosophical novel and the place of philosophy more broadly in the intellectual life of the African continent, from the early twentieth century to today.
How Japan captured the Victorian imagination and transformed Western aesthetics From the opening of trade with Britain in the 1850s, Japan occupied a unique and contradictory place in the Victorian imagination, regarded as both a rival empire and a cradle of exquisite beauty.
From the author of the definitive biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky, never-before-published lectures that provide an accessible introduction to the Russian writer's major worksJoseph Frank (1918-2013) was perhaps the most important Dostoevsky biographer, scholar, and critic of his time.
From a leading figure in comparative literature, a major new survey of the field that points the way forward for a discipline undergoing rapid changesLiterary studies are being transformed today by the expansive and disruptive forces of globalization.
A major reinterpretation of Horace's famous literary manualFor two millennia, the Ars Poetica (Art of Poetry), the 476-line literary treatise in verse with which Horace closed his career, has served as a paradigmatic manual for writers.
A wide-ranging exploration of the creative power of literary tradition, from Chaucer to the presentIn literary and cultural studies, tradition is a word everyone uses but few address critically.
An engaging look at how debates over the fate of literature in our digital age are powerfully conditioned by the nineteenth century's information revolutionWhat happens to literature during an information revolution?
How poetic modernism shaped Arabic intellectual debates in the twentieth century and beyondCity of Beginnings is an exploration of modernism in Arabic poetry, a movement that emerged in Beirut during the 1950s and became the most influential and controversial Arabic literary development of the twentieth century.
The dual biography of the great British comedy double-act and the rise and fall of mass audience television by the respected biographer of Cary Grant .
An entertaining and illuminating celebration of televisual history by cultural historian Phil NormanFor decades, television occupied a unique position in the national imagination.
This richly illustrated short, extracted from the official book The Chronicles of Downton Abbey, focuses on the characters individually, examining their motivations, their actions and the inspirations behind them.
The exciting tie-in to the major new series on Radio 4, written and presented by one of the UK's leading commentators on social and political life - Jim Naughtie.
A terrifically engaging and original biography about one of England's greatest novelists, and the glamorous, eccentric, debauched and ultimately tragic family that provided him with the most significant friendships of his life and inspired his masterpiece, 'Brideshead Revisited'.
Strange Days Indeed tells the story of how the paranoia exemplified by Nixon and Wilson became the defining characteristic of western politics and culture in the 1970s.
