Literature: history and criticism Books

This volume examines the poems of T.S. Eliot, work by work.

The much-vilified Renaissance politico, and author of The Prince, comes to life as a diabolically clever, yet mild mannered and conscientious civil servant in this nonfiction novel. Author Joseph Markulin presents Machiavelli's life as a true adventure...

By turns bleak, nostalgic, and lighthearted, Jerusalem Stands Alone explores the interconnected lives of its mostly Palestinian cast. This series of quick moving vignettes tells the story of occupied Jerusalem-tales of the daily tribulations and personal...

These articles, orginally published in the American quarterly Salmagundi since 1983, provides a record of some of the thinking about a wide range of cultural, political and literary issues.

Detective, horror, fantasy, romance, science fiction, spy thrillers, westerns, zombie novels. In recent decades, acclaimed and ambitious writers of literary fiction have increasingly gravitated to popular fiction genres. In this comprehensive account,...

Evelyn Eaton (1902-1983) was born in Montreux, Switzerland to Anglophile Canadian parents, and educated in England and France. She began writing while still in her teens; her first collection of poems was published in England in 1923 (the same year that...

"We, the readers and students of literature, have been hijacked. The literary critics, our teachers, those assassins of culture, have put us up against the wall and held us captive." So begins Jonah Raskin's The Mythology of Imperialism. When first...

Conversations with LeAnne Howe is the first collection of interviews with the groundbreaking Choctaw author, whose genre-bending works take place in the US Southeast, Oklahoma, and beyond our national borders to bring Native American characters and...

In 1957, Duke Ellington released the influential album A Drum Is a Woman. This musical allegory revealed the implicit truth about the role of women in jazz discourse-jilted by the musician and replaced by the drum. Further, the album's cover displays an...

Conversations with LeAnne Howe is the first collection of interviews with the groundbreaking Choctaw author, whose genre-bending works take place in the US Southeast, Oklahoma, and beyond our national borders to bring Native American characters and...

"We, the readers and students of literature, have been hijacked. The literary critics, our teachers, those assassins of culture, have put us up against the wall and held us captive." So begins Jonah Raskin's The Mythology of Imperialism. When first...

This reissue of the pioneering and standard book on antebellum women's domestic novels contains a new introduction situating the book in the context of important recent developments in the study of women's writing. Nina Baym considers 130 novels by 48...

And now I will unclaspe a Secret booke,And to your quicke conceyving Discontents,Ille reade you Matter, deepe and dangerousAs full of peril and adventurous Spirit...- William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Part IWhilst Shakespeare's genius is universally...

Much like his novels, Steve Erickson (b. 1950) exists on the periphery of our perception, a shadow figure lurking on the margins, threatening to break through, but never fully emerging. Despite receiving prestigious honors, Erickson has remained a...

In 1957, Duke Ellington released the influential album A Drum Is a Woman. This musical allegory revealed the implicit truth about the role of women in jazz discourse-jilted by the musician and replaced by the drum. Further, the album's cover displays an...

Peculiar Whiteness: Racial Anxiety and Poor Whites in Southern Literature, 1900-1965 argues for deeper consideration of the complexities surrounding the disparate treatment of poor whites throughout southern literature and attests to how broad such...

Georg Trakl (1887-1914) has emerged as one of the most influential poets of the century. Kudszus both explores and participates in the relentless process of Trakl's writing. Presumptions of objectivity, authority, dialogue, and coherence are questioned...

Charles Baudelaire is usually read as a paradigmatically modern poet, whose work ushered in a new era of French literature. But the common emphasis on his use of new forms and styles overlooks the complex role of the past in his work. In Grotesque...

Notoriety struck the Belgian-born literary critic Paul de Man more than once. First came his fame as one of the principal-and most controversial-theorists of deconstruction in the 1970s and early 1980s. After his death in 1983, notoriety struck a second...

In 1843 Margaret Fuller, already a well-established figure in the Transcendental circle of Emerson and Thoreau, traveled by train, steamboat, carriage, and on foot to make a roughly circular tour of the Great Lakes. ''Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 was...

The Romantics lived through a turn of the century that, like our own, seemed to mark an end to history as it had long been understood. They faced accelerated change, including unprecedented state power, armies capable of mass destruction, a polyglot...

''Unlike those narcoleptic cryptics who nod through the motions of pomo in a prose sterile and besmirched with jargon as that of the most tedious traditional scholarship, McCaffery is locked in a crazy love affair with the contemporary. . . . These...

The Gothic novel emerged out of the romantic mist alongside a new conception of the home as a separate sphere for women. Looking at novels from Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Kate Ferguson Ellis investigates the...

Women Writers of the American West, 1833-1927 recovers the names and works of hundreds of women who wrote about the American West during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some of them long forgotten and others better known novelists, poets,...

A salient take on psychoanalysis as a cultural phenomenon, intersecting with African American literatureThis thought-provoking cultural history explores how psychoanalytic theories shaped the works of important African American literary figures. Badia...

Recording the important role of music in the life and work of British author E. M. ForsterDifficult Rhythm examines E. M. Forster's irrepressible interest in music, providing plentiful examples of how the eminent British author's fiction resonates with...

The friendship of Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank was one of the most emotionally intense, racially complicated, and aesthetically significant relationships in the history of American literary modernism. Waldo Frank was an established white writer who...

First published in 1912, Theodore Dreiser's third novel, The Financier, captures the ruthlessness and sparkle of the Gilded Age alongside the charismatic amorality of the power brokers and bankers of the mid-nineteenth century. This volume is the first...

A new look at the unique poetics of C. P. Cavafy.Konstantinos P. Kavafis--known to the English-reading world as C. P. Cavafy - has been internationally recognized as an important poet and attracted the admiration of eminent literary figures such as E. M...

Although literary postmodernism has been defined in terms of difference, multiplicity, heterogeneity, and plurality, some of the most vaunted authors of postmodern American fiction--such as Thomas Pynchon, Paul Auster, and other white male authors--often...

Theodore Dreiser led a long and controversial life, almost always pursuing some serious question, and not rarely pursuing women. This collection, the second volume of Dreiser correspondence to be published by the University of Illinois Press, gathers...

To mark the bicentenary of Walt Whitman's death, Carcanet publishes a distillation from Horace Traubel's conversations with the great American poet. Whitman speaks from the heart, an old man who changed the course of American poetry and, by extension,...

Each of Carcanet's fifty years is marked by an exchange of letters between an author and the editor. The aim is to reveal a half century's history of publishing and one small, ambitious press's contribution, the nature of editing, the author/editor...

Any translation is a reading. Chris McCully reads Beowulf as an epic written in English using all the complex metrical conventions of its time, as well as distinctive epic tropes including sea-crossings, oracular pronouncements and encounters with the...

Jane Draycott's translation of Pearl reissued as a Carcanet Classic. A Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation. In a dream landscape radiant with jewels, a father sees his lost daughter on the far bank of a river: `my pearl, my girl'. One of the...

Is there a significant difference in attitude between immersion in a game and immersion in a movie or novel? What are the new possibilities for representation offered by the emerging technology of virtual reality? As Marie-Laure Ryan demonstrates in...

HD (Hilda Doolittle, 1886-1961) wrote Hermetic Definition at the height of her poetic powers. With her celebrated War Trilogy ('The Walls Do Not Fall', 'Tribute to the Angels', and 'Flowering of the Rod'), it transcends her earlier purist style,...

Oaths, vows, contracts, and promises are among the most momentous actions human beings can perform, in art as well as life. Although virtually ignored by literary theorists, these obligations motivate plots, test characters, provide rhetorical occasions,...

Against the Stream is the latest volume of Frederic Raphaels acclaimed memoirs Personal Terms, an unrivalled parade of the authors eventful and provocative life, opinions and times drawn from his living and breathing cahiers and journals. `Shrewd, funny,...

When we speak of the English Renaissance, what is it that we are naming, what are we recognizing reborn? As the essays in this latest collection from the English Institute demonstrate, our basic notions of the period have themselves been reconceived. In...

How did academic and literary writers living in rural Britain in the 1680s establish their careers and find audiences for their work? What factors influenced the choices of essayists and dramatists who lived outside London and the university cities? Who...

When Sartre referred to Georges Bataille as a ''new mystic,'' he meant the label as an insult. Sartre considered mysticism to be a less rigorous mode of inquiry than philosophy -- especially dangerous where the writings of mystics adapt philosophical...

Author of six novels, five volumes of biographical lives, two travel books, and numerous short stories, essays, and reviews, Mary Shelley is largely remembered as the author of Frankenstein, as the wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, and as the daughter of...

`The title of journalist is probably very noble, but I lay no real claim to it. I am, I think, a novelist and a musical composer manque: I make no other pretensions ...' (Anthony Burgess). Despite his modest claims, Anthony Burgess was an enormously...

''In this invigorating study, Gabrielle Starr shows that the lyric and the novel in the eighteenth century, far from being rivals or opposites, were codependents. In addition to novelistic elements in poems and lyric passages in novels, there were deeper...

Winner of the 2006 Andrés Bello Award for Memory and Ibero-American ThoughtIn this evocatively written book, Germán Patiño Ossa presents the cultural universe and national identities of Colombia through the lens of traditional cuisine...

Known as “La Chièvre de Reims,” Robert de Reims was among the earliest trouvères—poet-composers who were contemporaries of the troubadours, but who wrote their works in the northern dialects of France. This critical edition...

William Muggins, an impoverished but highly literate weaver-poet, lived and wrote in London at the turn of the seventeenth century, when few of his contemporaries could even read. A Weaver Poet and the Plague’s microhistorical approach uses...