A new, counterintuitive theory for how social networks influence the spread of behaviorNew social movements, technologies, and public-health initiatives often struggle to take off, yet many diseases disperse rapidly without issue.
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.
The social practice of tact was an invention of the nineteenth century, a period when Britain was witnessing unprecedented urbanization, industrialization, and population growth.
This insightful and elegantly written book examines how the popular media of the Victorian era sustained and transformed the reputations of Romantic writers.
Nabokov's dream diary, published for the first time-and placed in biographical and literary contextOn October 14, 1964, Vladimir Nabokov, a lifelong insomniac, began a curious experiment.
How New York's Lower East Side inspired new ways of seeing AmericaNew York City's Lower East Side, long viewed as the space of what Jacob Riis notoriously called the "e;other half,"e; was also a crucible for experimentation in photography, film, literature, and visual technologies.
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.
How vocabularies once associated with outsiders became objects of fascination in eighteenth-century BritainWhile eighteenth-century efforts to standardize the English language have long been studied-from Samuel Johnson's Dictionary to grammar and elocution books of the period-less well-known are the era's popular collections of odd slang, criminal argots, provincial dialects, and nautical jargon.
An accessible and authoritative new history of French literature, written by a highly distinguished transatlantic group of scholarsThis book provides an engaging, accessible, and exciting new history of French literature from the Renaissance through the twentieth century, from Rabelais and Marguerite de Navarre to Samuel Beckett and Assia Djebar.
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.
"e;We have many poets of the First Book,"e; the poet and critic Louis Simpson remarked in 1957, describing a sense that the debut poetry collection not only launched the contemporary poetic career but also had come to define it.
The study of Homeric imitations in Vergil has one of the longest traditions in Western culture, starting from the very moment the Aeneid was circulated.
A compelling portrait of a beloved poet from one of today's most acclaimed novelistsIn this book, novelist Colm Toibin offers a deeply personal introduction to the work and life of one of his most important literary influencesthe American poet Elizabeth Bishop.
Poker Nation is a travelogue to the quirky world of competitive poker, an exploration of poker obsession and addiction (not necessarily the same thing) and a primer on mathematics, poker lingo and technique.
One of the new forms of prose fiction that emerged in the eighteenth century was the first-person narrative told by things such as coins, coaches, clothes, animals, or insects.
From Pulitzer Prize-winner Garry Wills, the story of Augustine's ConfessionsIn this brief and incisive book, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Garry Wills tells the story of the Confessions--what motivated Augustine to dictate it, how it asks to be read, and the many ways it has been misread in the one-and-a-half millennia since it was composed.
Although Classical Athenian ideology did not permit women to exercise legal, economic, and social autonomy, the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides often represent them as influential social and moral forces in their own right.
By "e;literary criticism"e; we usually mean a self-conscious act involving the technical and aesthetic appraisal, by individuals, of autonomous works of art.
This wide-ranging study of language and cultural change in fourteenth-century England argues that the influence of oral tradition is much more important to the advance of literacy than previously supposed.
Whether were buying a pair of jeans, ordering a cup of coffee, selecting a long-distance carrier, applying to college, choosing a doctor, or setting up a 401(k), everyday decisionsboth big and smallhave become increasingly complex due to the overwhelming abundance of choice with which we are presented.
As the specter of religious extremism has become a fact of life today, the temptation is great to allow the evil actions and perspectives of a minority to represent an entire tradition.
Wedding the American oral storytelling tradition with progressive music journalism, Mitch Myers' The Boy Who Cried Freebird is a treatise on the popular music culture of the twentieth century.
The definitive oral history of the iconic and beloved TV show The Wire, as told by the actors, writers, directors, and others involved in its creationSince its final episode aired 10 years ago, the acclaimed crime drama The Wire has only become more popular and influential.
A photography book that is a vital accompaniment to the many fans of Hilary Mantel's bestselling Wolf Hall Trilogy, now a major TV series'At the very beginning of the twentieth century, Zola said, 'In my view you cannot claim to have really seen something till you have photographed it.
SUNDAY TIMES NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER'The most important book of the year' Daily MailThe brilliant and provocative new book from one of the world's foremost political writers'The anti-Western revisionists have been out in force in recent years.
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.
