Medical, popular, and literary understanding about the imagination converged when Thomas Willis asserted that he had discovered the area of the brain that facilitated imagining.
To what extent can the leaky, porous bodies in Philip Roth's fiction be read as symbols of resistance against anti-Semitism, white supremacy, and racism?
The dissemination of classical material to children has long been a major form of popularization with far-reaching effects, although until very recently it has received almost no attention within the growing field of classical reception studies.
By the middle 1800s, toys were appearing in forms that drew upon--and that inspired--advances in areas such as optics, biology, geography, transportation, and automation.
This book is essential reading for an understanding of Conrad's fiction both as a product of the political, social and intellectual forces dominating the period 1870-1920, and of the pressures and influences in Conrad's own life.
John Barth represents most completely what has been termed postmodernism, not because his work comprises more postmodernist features than other contemporary writers but because, for Barth, "e;life"e; and "e;art"e; are two sides of the same coin.
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in CriticismShortlisted for the Christian Gauss Award, Phi Beta Kappa SocietyA history of the chapter from its origins in antiquity to todayWhy do books have chapters?
This special edition of The Oxford Companion to the Brontes commemorates the bicentenary of Emily Bronte's birth in July 1818 and provides comprehensive and detailed information about the lives, works, and reputations of the Brontes - the three sisters Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, their father, and their brother Branwell.
Award-winning epics like the Mars Trilogy and groundbreaking alternative histories like The Days of Rice and Salt have brought Kim Stanley Robinson to the forefront of contemporary science fiction.
The detective story--the classic whodunit with its time-displacement structure of crime--according to most literary historians, is of relatively recent origin.
Trained as a printer when still a boy, and thrilled throughout his life by the automation of printing and the headlong expansion of American publishing, Mark Twain wrote about the consequences of this revolution for culture and for personal identity.
Francisco Collado se ocupa en este libro de la difícil tarea de encontrar un orden subyacente detrás del aparente caos y la paranoia del universo literario de Pynchon.
One of the great intellectual achievements of the 20th century, Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces is an elaborate articulation of the monomyth: the narrative pattern underlying countless stories from the most ancient myths and legends to the films and television series of today.
This study contextualizes magical realism within current debates and theories of postcoloniality and examines the fiction of three of its West African pioneers: Syl Cheney-Coker of Sierra Leone, Ben Okri of Nigeria and Kojo Laing of Ghana.
Published between 1975 and 2000 and completed shortly before his death, Hugh Hood's twelve-volume novel-series The New Age/Le nouveau siecle represents a major achievement in Canadian fiction.
Tolstoy's fame as one of the world's greatest novelists has never been in doubt, but the importance of his views on the social, moral and religious issues of his time is not so widely recognised.
This book, first published in 1978, demonstrates how Dostoyevsky's novels grew directly out of the pressures of their creator's tormented experience and personality.
Traditional critics of Jane Austen's novels consider her fiction from the perspective of male literature, male social values, and male myths and assumptions about women.
This is the first collection of essays in any language on Aulus Gellius; its contributors, both established and younger scholars, include Gellian experts looking out with specialists in other fields looking in; they combine traditional and new approaches.
Reconstructing Modernism establishes for the first time the centrality of modernist buildings and architectural periodicals to British mid-century literature.