Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers

For Humanity's Sake is the first study in English to trace the genealogy of the classic Russian novel, from Pushkin to Tolstoy to Dostoevsky.

Giulia Bigolina's (ca.

Taking Exception to the Law explores how a range of early modern English writings responded to injustices perpetrated by legal procedures, discourses, and institutions.

Apollo, the classical god of poetry, truth, light, and the healing arts, held a special fascination for poets and scholars in the late-medieval period.

By the time Ian Watt published The Rise of the Novel.

Samuel Butler (1835-1902), Victorian satirist, critic, and visual artist, possessed one of the most original and inquiring imaginations of his age.

A Multitude of Women looks at the ways in which both Italian literary tradition and external influences have assisted Italian women writers in rethinking the theoretical and aesthetic ties between author, text, and readership in the construction of the novel.

Grazia Deledda (1871-1936) was the author of many influential novels and remains one of the most significant Italian women writers of her time.

Miguel de Cervantes conceived his final work, The Labours of Persiles and Sigismunda: A Northern Story (1617), as a great prose epic that would accomplish for its age what Homer and Virgil had done for theirs.

Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) experimented with such a wide variety of genres that critics have tended to focus more on the differences among his works than on their underlying similarities.

Given that the Nobel Prize-winning author Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) was personally acquainted with the modernist master James Joyce, and even helped research and promote Finnegans Wake, it should come as no surprise that Beckett was greatly influenced by Joyce's own work.

One of twentieth-century Italy's greatest thinkers, Primo Levi (1919-1987) started reflecting on the Holocaust almost immediately after his return home from the year he survived in Auschwitz.

Strangers in Blood explores, in a range of early modern literature, the association between migration to foreign lands and the moral and physical degeneration of individuals.

After the restoration of the English monarchy in 1660, Protestants worried that King Charles II might favour religious freedom for Roman Catholics, and many suspected that the king was unduly influenced by his Catholic mistresses.

'Bluebeard,' the tale of a sadistic husband who murders his wives and locks away their bodies, has inspired hundreds of adaptations since it first appeared in 1697.

Literary depictions of the sacred and the secular from the Middle Ages are representative of the era's widely held cultural understandings related to religion and the nature of lived experience.

The first major work in Sino-Western comparative semiotics, Parallels, Interactions, and Illuminations is a trans-disciplinary and intercultural effort that makes intellectual connections not only across such diverse academic fields as epistemology, anthropology, linguistics, sociology, and cultural studies but also between Chinese and Western theories of the sign in the conviction that they can shed light on one another.

What is wisdom?

From two world wars to rapid industrialization and population shifts, events of the twentieth century engendered cultural anxieties to an extent hitherto unseen, particularly in Europe.

One of the particular concerns of the Victorians was the notion of ‘taste’ and the idea that good taste in any field – clothing, décor, landscape, music, art, even food – meant good taste in all, and that tastefulness was a reliable sign of moral sensitivity, indeed of national, even racial, quality.

In recent years, Canadian authors have enjoyed tremendous international success, writing novels that become Oscar-nominated films or achieve coveted success as selections for the Oprah Winfrey bookclub.

How is meaning in one text shaped by another?

Giovanni Pascoli (1855–1912) is one of Italy’s most canonical and beloved poets.

The most popular novel in Quebec since the Second World War, Yves Thériault's Agaguk, was published just before the Quiet Revolution, a period of major political and cultural transformation that radically altered Quebec society at the beginning of the 1960s.

The nineteenth century represents a crucial historical and cultural phase in the development of modern Italy.