A revelatory and deeply personal history of twentieth-century poetry by prize-winning poet and memoirist John BurnsidePoetry helps us to make sense of our world, transforming what the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam called the "e;noise of time"e; into a kind of music.
Over the last decade, as Jane Austen has moved center-stage in our culture, onto best-seller lists and into movie houses, another figure has slipped into the spotlight alongside her.
How rhyme became entangled with debates about the nature of liberty in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English poetryIn his 1668 preface to Paradise Lost, John Milton rejected the use of rhyme, portraying himself as a revolutionary freeing English verse from "e;the troublesome and modern bondage of Riming.
This concise edition of the biography of Walatta-Petros (1672) tells the story of an Ethiopian saint who lived from 1592 to 1642 and led a successful nonviolent movement to preserve African Christian beliefs in the face of European protocolonialism.
A literary and cultural history of the intimate space of the eighteenth-century closet-and how it fired the imaginations of Pepys, Sterne, Swift, and so many other writers Long before it was a hidden storage space or a metaphor for queer and trans shame, the closet was one of the most charged settings in English architecture.
A short, provocative book that challenges basic assumptions about Victorian fictionNow praised for its realism and formal coherence, the Victorian novel was not always great, or even good, in the eyes of its critics.
How modernist women writers used biographical writing to resist their exclusion from literary historyIt's impossible, now, to think of modernism without thinking about gender, sexuality, and the diverse movers and shakers of the early twentieth century.
The first book to explore how African American writing and art engaged with visions of Ethiopia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuriesAs the only African nation, with the exception of Liberia, to remain independent during the colonization of the continent, Ethiopia has long held significance for and captivated the imaginations of African Americans.
In a book that confronts our society's obsession with sexual violence, Maria Tatar seeks the meaning behind one of the most disturbing images of twentieth-century Western culture: the violated female corpse.
An exciting new collection from a poet whose debut was praised by Colorado Review as "e;a seduction by way of small astonishments"e;Nate Klug has been hailed by the Threepenny Review as a poet who is "e;an original in Eliot's sense of the word.
Drawing on legal cases, legal debates, and fiction including works by James Fenimore Cooper, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, and Charles Chesnutt, Nan Goodman investigates changing notions of responsibility and agency in nineteenth-century America.
Contemporary celebrations of interdisciplinary scholarship in the humanities and social sciences often harbor a distrust of traditional disciplines, which are seen as at best narrow and unimaginative, and at worst complicit in larger forms of power and policing.
A collection of magical Italian folk and fairy tales-most in English for the first timeThe Pomegranates and Other Modern Italian Fairy Tales presents twenty magical stories published between 1875 and 1914, following Italy's political unification.
An exploration of postapocalyptic fiction, from antiquity to today, and its connections to political theory and other literary genresThe literary lineage of postapocalyptic fiction-stories set after civilization's destruction-is a long one, spanning the biblical tale of Noah and Hesiod's Works and Days to the works of Mary Shelley, Octavia Butler, Cormac McCarthy, and many others.
This wide-ranging collection makes available to specialists and nonspecialists alike important critical work on the Odyssey produced during the last half century.
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.
The definitive English translation of the classic Sanskrit epic poem-now available in a one-volume paperbackThe Ramayana of Valmiki, the monumental Sanskrit epic of the life of Rama, ideal man and incarnation of the great god Visnu, has profoundly affected the literature, art, religions, and cultures of South and Southeast Asia from antiquity to the present.
The acknowledged masterpiece of Unamuno expresses the anguish of modern man as he is caught up in the struggle between the dictates of reason and the demands of his own heart.
What we can learn about caregiving and community from the Victorian novelIn Communities of Care, Talia Schaffer explores Victorian fictional representations of care communities, small voluntary groups that coalesce around someone in need.
This volume, growing out of the celebrated turn toward history in literary criticism, showcases some of the best new historical work being done today in textual theory, literary history, and cultural criticism.
A study in obsession, Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu is seemingly a self-sufficient universe of remarkable internal consistency and yet is full of complex, gargantuan digressions.
Maintaining that women's storytelling is a telling activity, Karen McPherson "e;reads for guilt"e; in novels by five twentieth-century writers--Simone de Beauvoir (L'Invitee), Marguerite Duras (Le ravissement de Lol V.
In The Twilight of the Middle Class, Andrew Hoberek challenges the commonly held notion that post-World War II American fiction eschewed the economic for the psychological or the spiritual.
A richly illustrated cultural history of the midcentury pulp paperback"e;There is real hope for a culture that makes it as easy to buy a book as it does a pack of cigarettes.
Focusing on the new theories of human motivation that emerged during the transition from feudalism to the modern period, this is the first book of new essays on the relationship between politics and the passions from Machiavelli to Bentham.
Many people in Great Britain and the United States can recall elderly relatives who remembered long stretches of verse learned at school decades earlier, yet most of us were never required to recite in class.
The definitive biography of a leading twentieth-century French writerA leading exponent of the nouveau roman, Nathalie Sarraute (1900-1999) was also one of France's most cosmopolitan literary figures, and her life was bound up with the intellectual and political ferment of twentieth-century Europe.
Based entirely on archival research, Poets in the Public Sphere traces the emergence of the "e;New Woman"e; by examining poetry published by American women in newspapers and magazines between 1800 and 1900.
Drawing on a wide array of literary, historical, and theoretical sources, Rachel Lee addresses current debates on the relationship among Asian American ethnic identity, national belonging, globalization, and gender.
