David Oppenheim (1664–1736), chief rabbi of Prague in the early eighteenth century, built an unparalleled collection of Jewish books and manuscripts, all of which have survived and are housed in the Bodleian Library at Oxford.
A lively interdisciplinary study of how venereal disease was represented in eighteenth-century British literature and art In eighteenth-century Britain, venereal disease was everywhere and nowhere: while physicians and commentators believed the condition to be widespread, it remained shrouded in secrecy, and was often represented using slang, symbolism, and wordplay.
The second book in the Why I Write series provides generous insight into the creative process of the award-winning Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard “Why I Write” may prove to be the most difficult question Karl Ove Knausgaard has struggled to answer yet it is central to the project of one of the most influential writers working today.
A compact and accessible edition of Hume’s political and moral writings with essays by a distinguished set of contributors A key figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, David Hume was a major influence on thinkers ranging from Kant and Schopenhauer to Einstein and Popper, and his writings continue to be deeply relevant today.
A wide-ranging anthology of twentieth-century and contemporary writing from India and the Indian diaspora, curated by a distinguished scholar and poet Internationally renowned scholar, poet, and essayist Meena Alexander brings together leading twentieth- and twenty-first-century voices from India and the diaspora in this anthology.
A fascinating history of Chicago’s innovative and invaluable contributions to American literature and art from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century This remarkable cultural history celebrates the great Midwestern city of Chicago for its centrality to the modernist movement.
A scholarly and deeply sensitive study that explores how religion and secularism are tightly interwoven in the major works of modernist literature Matthew Mutter provides a broad survey of modernist literature, examining key works against a background of philosophy, theology, intellectual and social history, while tracing the relationship of modernism’s secular imagination to the religious cultures that both preceded and shaped it.
From the prizewinning Jewish Lives series, a moving inquiry into the dramatic life, epic success, and ultimate tragedy of the great Hebrew poet By the time he was twenty-eight, Hayim Nahman Bialik was already considered the National Hebrew Poet.
A masterful, highly engaging analysis of how Shakespeare’s plays intersected with the politics and culture of Elizabethan England With an ageing, childless monarch, lingering divisions due to the Reformation, and the threat of foreign enemies, Shakespeare’s England was fraught with unparalleled anxiety and complicated problems.
An astute literary and cultural history of World War I in France that offers a fresh perspective on the popular culture of the Great War The First World War soldier has often been depicted as a helpless victim sacrificed by a ruthless society in the trenches of the Western Front.
An award-winning scholar and author charts four hundred years of monsters and how they reflect the culture that created them Leo Braudy, a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, has won accolades for revealing the complex and constantly shifting history behind seemingly unchanging ideas of fame, war, and masculinity.
A fascinating look into the life and work of controversial French novelist Irène Némirovsky Irène Némirovsky succeeded in creating a brilliant career as a novelist in the 1930s, only to have her life cut short: a “foreign Jew” in France, she was deported in 1942 and died in Auschwitz.
Beginning with an analysis of Shakespeare's The Tempest and building to a new reading of Milton's Paradise Lost, author Seth Lobis charts a profound change in the cultural meaning of sympathy during the seventeenth century.
Annabel Patterson here turns her well-known concern with political history in early modern England into an engine for investigating our own era and a much wider terrain.
A renowned scholar’s reflections on the romantic period, its disparate participants, and our unacknowledged debt to them With his usual wit and élan, esteemed historian Peter Gay enters the contentious, long-standing debates over the romantic period.
In the late 1830s, Ralph Waldo Emerson, American essayist, poet, lecturer, and leader of the Transcendentalist movement, publicly called for a radical nationwide vocational reinvention, and an idealistic group of collegians eagerly responded.
In this fascinating and erudite book, Bryan Cheyette throws new light on a wide range of modern and contemporary writers—some at the heart of the canon, others more marginal—to explore the power and limitations of the diasporic imagination after the Second World War.
Features:* Wide chronological coverage of English literature, especially texts found in the Norton, Oxford, Blackwell and other standard anthologies* Short, punchy essays that engage with the texts, the critics, and literary and social issues* Background and survey articles* Glossaries of Bible themes, images and narratives* Annotated bibliography and questions for class discussion or personal reflection* Scholarly yet accessible, jargon-free approach - ideal for school and university students, book groups and general readersCreated for readers who may be unfamiliar with the Bible, church history or theological development, it offers an understanding of Christianity's key concepts, themes, images and characters as they relate to English literature up to the present day.
Born in Chicago in 1918, the prodigiously gifted and erudite Isaac Rosenfeld was anointed a “genius” upon the publication of his “luminescent” novel, Passage from Home and was expected to surpass even his closest friend and rival, Saul Bellow.
Spanning nearly 500 years of cultural and social history, this book examines the ways that literature and surveillance have developed together, as kindred modern practices.
A celebrated novelist and an acclaimed historian of ideas, father and daughter, unravel the chain of words at the core of Jewish life, history, and culture Why are words so important to so many Jews?
Russia’s Dangerous Texts examines the ways that writers and their works unnerved and irritated Russia’s authoritarian rulers both before and after the Revolution.
Translated here into English for the first time is a monumental work of literary history and criticism comparable in scope and achievement to Eric Auerbach’s Mimesis.
Some fifty years before Chrétien de Troyes wrote what is probably the first and certainly the most influential story of the Holy Grail, images of the Virgin Mary with a simple but radiant bowl (called a “grail” in local dialect) appeared in churches in the Spanish Pyrenees.
A perceptive literary critic, a world-famous writer of witty and playful verses for children, a leading authority on children’s linguistic creativity, and a highly skilled translator, Kornei Chukovsky was a complete man of letters.
By the time she was twenty-four, Virginia Woolf had suffered a series of devastating losses that later she would describe as “sledge-hammer blows,” beginning with the death of her mother when she was thirteen years old and followed by those of her half-sister, father, and brother.
Twelfth-century French poet Chrétien de Troyes was one of the most influential figures in Western literature, for his romantic poems on the legend of King Arthur gave rise to a tradition of storytelling that continues to this day.
A loving and admiring companion for half a century to literary titan Ezra Pound, concert violinist Olga Rudge was the muse who inspired the poet to complete his epic poem, The Cantos, and the mother of his only daughter, Mary.
Considered one of Russia’s greatest philosophers, Vladimir Soloviev (1853–1900) was also a theologian, historian, poet, and social and political critic.
