The classic book that has taught generations how to read Western literatureMore than half a century after its translation into English, Erich Auerbach's Mimesis remains a masterpiece of literary criticism.
The first volume of a celebrated translation of the classic Chinese novelThis is the first volume in David Roy's celebrated translation of one of the most famous and important novels in Chinese literature.
Marcel Proust was long the object of a cult in which the main point of reading his great novel In Search of Lost Time was to find, with its narrator, a redemptive epiphany in a pastry and a cup of lime-blossom tea.
The first collection of letters in English by one of the great writers of the twentieth centuryThis is the first collection in English of the extraordinary letters of one of the great writers of the twentieth century.
Published just after the Second World War, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages is a sweeping exploration of the remarkable continuity of European literature across time and place, from the classical era up to the early nineteenth century, and from the Italian peninsula to the British Isles.
Volume three of one of the greatest literary biographies of our timeJoseph Frank's award-winning, five-volume Dostoevsky is widely recognized as the best biography of the Russian novelist in any language and one of the greatest literary biographies ever written.
The term "e;biography"e; seems insufficiently capacious to describe the singular achievement of Joseph Frank's five-volume study of the life of the great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky.
A provocative new theory about fairy tales from one of the world's leading authoritiesIf there is one genre that has captured the imagination of people in all walks of life throughout the world, it is the fairy tale.
The most important poetry reference for more than four decades-now fully updated for the twenty-first century Through three editions over more than four decades, The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics has built an unrivaled reputation as the most comprehensive and authoritative reference for students, scholars, and poets on all aspects of its subject: history, movements, genres, prosody, rhetorical devices, critical terms, and more.
From eminent critic Peter Brooks, an exploration of the modern preoccupation with identity"e;We know that it matters crucially to be able to say who we are, why we are here, and where we are going,"e; Peter Brooks writes in Enigmas of Identity.
From Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Michael Dirda, a delightful introduction to the creator of Sherlock HolmesA passionate lifelong fan of the Sherlock Holmes adventures, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Michael Dirda is a member of The Baker Street Irregulars-the most famous and romantic of all Sherlockian groups.
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.
An irreverent critical lexicon of academic life and cultureThe university: The very name evokes knowledge, culture, and the magnificently universal ambition at the heart of this essential institution.
Essays from the award-winning Dostoevsky biographer In this book, acclaimed Dostoevsky biographer Joseph Frank explores some of the most important aspects of nineteenth and twentieth century Russian culture, literature, and history.
In a postcolonial world, where structures of power, hierarchy, and domination operate on a global scale, writers face an ethical and aesthetic dilemma: How to write without contributing to the inscription of inequality?
Recovering the lost history of a crucial era in African American literatureThe Indignant Generation is the first narrative history of the neglected but essential period of African American literature between the Harlem Renaissance and the civil rights era.
A rollicking story of the strangest creative writing class ever-as only Andrei Codrescu could tell it"e;Intro to Poetry Writing is always like this: a long labor, a breech birth, or, obversely, mining in the dark.
The social practice of tact was an invention of the nineteenth century, a period when Britain was witnessing unprecedented urbanization, industrialization, and population growth.
Vladimir Nabokov's famous and brilliant commentary on Pushkin's Eugene OneginWhen Vladimir Nabokov first published his controversial translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin in 1964, the great majority of the edition was taken up by Nabokov's witty and exhaustive commentary.
Drawn from the acclaimed New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, the articles in this concise new reference book provide a complete survey of the poetic history and practice in every major national literature or cultural tradition in the world.
The description for this book, Samuel Johnson and the Impact of Print: (Originally published as Printing Technology, Letters, and Samuel Johnson), will be forthcoming.
A groundbreaking study of one of the greatest encyclopedias of the medieval Islamic world-al-Nuwayri's The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of EruditionShihab al-Din al-Nuwayri was a fourteenth-century Egyptian polymath and the author of one of the greatest encyclopedias of the medieval Islamic world-a thirty-one-volume work entitled The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition.
In his play Bacchae, Euripides chooses as his central figure the god who crosses the boundaries among god, man, and beast, between reality and imagination, and between art and madness.
Recognizing Persius is a passionate and in-depth exploration of the libellus--or little book--of six Latin satires left by the Roman satirical writer Persius when he died in AD 62 at the age of twenty-seven.
From award-winning literary scholar Robert Alter, a masterful exploration of how Nabokov used artifice to evoke the dilemmas, pain, and exaltation of the human conditionAdmirers and detractors of Vladimir Nabokov have viewed him as an ingenious contriver of literary games, teasing and even outsmarting his readers through his self-reflexive artifice and the many codes and puzzles he devises in his fiction.
This book takes a fascinating look at the iconic figure of the Native American in the British cultural imagination from the Revolutionary War to the early twentieth century, and examining how Native Americans regarded the British, as well as how they challenged their own cultural image in Britain during this period.
A landmark history that traces the creation, management, and sharing of information through six centuriesThanks to modern technological advances, we now enjoy seemingly unlimited access to information.
Volume two of one of the greatest literary biographies of our timeJoseph Frank's award-winning, five-volume Dostoevsky is widely recognized as the best biography of the Russian novelist in any language and one of the greatest literary biographies ever written.
This volume, the fourth of five planned in Joseph Frank's widely acclaimed biography of Dostoevsky, covers the six most remarkably productive years in the novelist's entire career.
A groundbreaking biography of Milton's formative years that provides a new account of the poet's political radicalizationJohn Milton (1608-1674) has a unique claim on literary and intellectual history as the author of both Paradise Lost, the greatest narrative poem in English, and prose defences of the execution of Charles I that influenced the French and American revolutions.
A landmark work of literary criticismNorthrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism is the magnum opus of one of the most important and influential literary theorists of the twentieth century.
The story of how Arab editors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries revolutionized Islamic literatureIslamic book culture dates back to late antiquity, when Muslim scholars began to write down their doctrines on parchment, papyrus, and paper and then to compose increasingly elaborate analyses of, and commentaries on, these ideas.
A classic work on radical aesthetics by one of the great philosophers of the early twentieth century No work of philosopher and essayist Jose Ortega y Gasset has been more frequently cited, admired, or criticized than his response to modernism, "e;The Dehumanization of Art.
From one of the great modern writers, the acclaimed lectures in which he draws on a lifetime of experience to take the measure of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets "e;W.
An international collection of the traditional tales that inspired some of Shakespeare's greatest playsShakespeare knew a good story when he heard one, and he wasn't afraid to borrow from what he heard or read, especially traditional folktales.
A major reinterpretation of Horace's famous literary manualFor two millennia, the Ars Poetica (Art of Poetry), the 476-line literary treatise in verse with which Horace closed his career, has served as a paradigmatic manual for writers.
