Giuseppe Mazzotta provides both a powerful framework for reading the Decameron and an important contribution to medieval and contemporary debates in esthetics.
Contemporary with the Romantic generation, peer of Keats, Holderlin, and Goethe, and forerunner of Valery and Pound, Ugo Foscolo is nevertheless little known outside Italy.
Ronald Hush traces the organic development of the poem and demonstrates that what seems to be eccentricity in the Cantos frequently corresponds to the common practice of Pound's contemporaries.
In a century torn by violent civil uprisings, civilian bombings, and genocides, war has been an immediate experience for both soldiers and civilians, for both women and men.
For generations, critics have noticed in nineteenth-century American women's sentimentality a streak of masochism, but their discussions of it have over-simplified its complex relationship to women's power.
This book studies major works of literature from classical antiquity to the present that reflect crises in the evolution of Western law: the move from a prelegal to a legal society in The Eumenides, the Christianization of Germanic law in Njal's Saga, the disenchantment with medieval customary law in Reynard the Fox, the reception of Roman law in a variety of Renaissance texts, the conflict between law and equity in Antigone and The Merchant of Venice, the eighteenth-century codification controversy in the works of Kleist, the modern debate between "e;pure"e; and "e;free"e; law in Kafka's The Trial and other fin-de-siecle works, and the effects of totalitarianism, the theory of universal guilt, and anarchism in the twentieth century.
A superbly illustrated history of five centuries of Jewish manuscriptsThe love of books in the Jewish tradition extends back over many centuries, and the ways of interpreting those books are as myriad as the traditions themselves.
By attempting to suspend moral, ideological, or psychological assumptions, a phenomenological interpretation of literature hopes to reach "e;the things themselves,"e; the essential phenomena of being, space, and time, as they are constituted, by consciousness, in words.
An authoritative English translation of one of the most important works in the history of the novelWilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1795-1796), Goethe's second novel, is a foundational work in the history of the genre-perhaps the first Bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story focusing on the growth and self-realization of the main character.
'Enlightening, moving' SIR IAN MCKELLENFrom the acclaimed and bestselling biographer Jonathan Bate, a luminous new exploration of Shakespeare and how his themes can untangle comedy and tragedy, learning and loving in our modern lives.
The eighteenth-century Hongloumeng, known in English as Dream of the Red Chamber or The Story of the Stone, is generally considered to be the greatest of Chinese novels--one that masterfully blends realism and romance, psychological motivation and fate, daily life and mythical occurrences, as it narrates the decline of a powerful Chinese family.
Making available for the first time the entire known corpus of Beckett's poetry and extensive excerpts from the early unpublished prose, the author's study of Beckett's poetry and criticism provides the opening chapter in the story of the evolution of a formidable talent.
This volume brings together studies by a distinguished classical scholar that address specific problems associated with the development of literacy in ancient Greece.
An authoritative and comprehensive intellectual biography of the author of the Divine ComedyFor all that has been written about the author of the Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) remains the best guide to his own life and work.
Contents include: The Style of the Mythical Age: An Introduction by Hermann BrochON THE ILIAD Hector Thetis and Achilles Helen The Comedy of the Gods Troy and Moscow Priam and Achilles Break Bread Poets and ProphetsOriginally published in 1947.
Examining those medieval texts which were extant for sixteenth-century use and reading, Professor Tuve attempts to discover how certain writers at a given time and for reasons we can trace read the allegorical books of the Middle Ages.
Martin Swales explores the interrelation in the novelle of aesthetic theory and textual practice, suggesting that the characteristic mode of the novelle is a specific kind of narrative constellation advocated by theoreticians and practiced by writers.
From Rabelais's celebration of wine to Proust's madeleine and Virginia Woolf's boeuf en daube in To the Lighthouse, food has figured prominently in world literature.
In applying the standards of modern literary criticism to medieval Arabic literature, Andras Hamori concentrates on those aspects of the literature that appear most alien to modern Western taste: the limitation of themes, the sedimentation with conventions, and the use of elusive patterns of composition.
Although Rene Char's distinctive voice has brought him to the forefront of contemporary French writers; his complex poetry has remained virtually inaccessible to the general reader.
Based on a comparison of early editions, manuscripts, and copies annotated by the poet himself, this edition provides a reliable text of Coleridge's last prose work, first published in 1830.
Arguing that Beckett's understanding of subjectivity cannot be reduced to that of phenomenology or existential humanism, Thomas Trezise offers a major reinterpretation of Beckett in light of Freud and such post-modernists as Bataille, Blanchot, and Derrida.
In this bold reconceptualization of Shakespeare's histories as plays that ultimately generate and seek to legitimize new kings, Barbara Hodgdon examines how closure contests as well as celebrates power relations dominant in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean society--particularly those between sovereign and subjects.
Here Ekbert Faas examines the complex interrelationships among the fields of early psychiatry, poetry, and aesthetics through an in-depth study of the Victorian dramatic monologue and its Romantic antecedents.
Noted for her contradictory words and actions, Penelope has been a problematic character for critics of the Odyssey, many of whom turn to psychological explanations to account for her behavior.
Post-Petrarchism offers a theoretical study of lyric poetry through one of its most long-lived and widely practiced models: the lyric sequence, originated by Francis Petrarch in his Canzoniere of the late fourteenth century.
Callimachus has usually been seen as the archetypal ivory-tower poet, the epitome if not the inventor of the concept of art for art's sake, author of erudite works written to be read in book form by fellow poets and scholars.
Pedro Calderon de la Barca (1600-1681), one of the great dramatists of Spain's Golden Age, wrote a series of mythological spectacle plays for the Habsburg courts.
