Literature: history and criticism Books

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United...

This book is a literary English translation of the Biblical book Ecclesiastes as a chorus of different voices (like the book of Job) contesting the meaning of things. A careful introduction delineates the various speakers--Qohelet, editor,...

In the early twentieth century, historical imaginings of Japan contributed to the Argentine vision of "transpacific modernity." Intellectuals such as Eduardo Wilde and Manuel Domecq García celebrated Japanese customs and traditions as important values...

This work traces how Gothic imagination from the literature and culture of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe and twentieth-century US and European film has impacted Latin American literature and film culture. Serrano argues that the Gothic has...

Musically Sublime rewrites musically the history and philosophy of the sublime. Music enables us to reconsider the traditional course of sublime feeling on a track from pain to pleasure. Resisting the notion that there is a single format for sublime...

This introduction to the fundamentals of Native American women's studies first looks at several definitive topics created by the western cultural notion of feminism, and western historical and religious perspectives on women. These include ecofeminism,...

A scene of self-sacrifice can never be staged or secured. The work of Friedrich Hölderlin, arguably one of the most profound writers of the German Enlightenment, supports this idea in fascinating ways. Much of Hölderlin's critical reception, however, has...

Fast Cars and Bad Girls: Nomadic Subjects and Women's Road Stories explores the road narratives of women and the various ways their work re-maps American space. Moving from Mary Rowlandson's famous captivity narrative to the frontier texts of the...

Southwestern American Indian Literature: In the Classroom and Beyond addresses several challenges that teaching Southwestern American Indian literature presents, and suggests innovative ways of teaching the material. Drawing on the author's experiences...

The Drama of Gender fills the scholarly gap between women's dramaturgy and feminism as women manifest themselves on contemporary stages across the Americas. The plays examined - Lua nua by Leilah Assução, Simply Maria or the American Dream by Josefina...

Islands, both literal and figurative, recur in fiction authored by many prominent Canadian women writers. Using a critical lens based on Northrop Frye and Julia Kristeva, this book closely examines fourteen novels by eight twentieth-century authors,...

The end of the twentieth century witnessed a boom in the production, publication, readership, and scholarship of women's writing from Latin America. In fact, the emergence of women writers is perhaps the most significant phenomenon of the post-boom...

The first epic poem written in Italian is the Teseida delle nozze di Emilia (Theseid of the Nuptials of Emilia) by Giovanni Boccaccio, the well-known author of the Decameron. Conceived and composed during the Florentine author's stay in Naples, it...

Jorge Luis Borges is acknowledged as one of the great Spanish writers of the twentieth century. On the broader literary scene, he is recognized as a modern master. His fascination with philosophy - especially metaphysics - sets him apart from his...

The Francophone World: Cultural Issues and Perspectives introduces readers to French-speaking communities across the globe and offers a perspective on the cultures that have developed in the wake of French exploration and colonization. This book explores...

Behind every mother lurks The Great Mother with her awesome power over life and death. Numerous fairy tales deal with women's and men's fear of this power and its threat to their individuality. This fascinating study discusses the psychology of this fear...

This volume is an introduction to those works of György Lukács that have established him as a classic authority in literary criticism: his pre-Marxist The History of the Evolution of Modern Drama (1911), still not available in English, which Eva Corredor...

An exploration of the work of Jewish women graphic novelists and the intricate Jewish identity is complicated by gender, memory, generation, and place-that is, the emotional, geographical, and psychological spaces that women inhabit. Victoria Aarons...

Focusing on films from Chile since 2000 and bringing together scholars from South and North America, Chilean Cinema in the Twenty-First-Century World is the first English-language book since the 1970s to explore this small, yet significant, Latin...

Do we take pleasure in reading ancient Greek tragedy despite the unsettling content or because of it? Does a safe aesthetic distance protect us from tragic suffering, or does the proximity to death tap into something more primal? Aristotle proposed...

Since the mid-1960s, the war on crime has reshaped public attitudes about state authority, criminal behavior, and the responsibilities of citizenship. But how have American writers grappled with these changes? What happens when a journalist...

Over the last few decades, Victorian scholars have produced many nuanced studies connecting the politics of crime to the generic developments of the novel-and vice versa. Ellen L. O'Brien's Crime in Verse grants the same attention and status to poetic...

In Financial Speculation in Victorian Fiction: Plotting Money and the Novel Genre, 1815-1901, Tamara S. Wagner explores the ways in which financial speculation was imagined and turned into narratives in Victorian Britain. Since there clearly was much...

Throughout the Middle Ages, witnessing was a crucial way religious and legal "truths" were understood and produced. Religious and secular officials alike harnessed the power of testimony to assert doctrinal, political, or legal responsibilities. Swearing...

How did fears of cultural inadequacy play out in the English language after American independence and the War of 1812? Like many of his nineteenth-century contemporaries, essayist Walter Channing suggests that the country's perceived deficiency in...

In the first published book-length study of Indian fiction in South Africa, Pallavi Rastogi demonstrates that Indians desire South African citizenship in the fullest sense of the word, a longing for inclusion that is asserted through an "Afrindian"...

In medieval allegory, Body and Soul were often pitted against one another in debate. In Body Against Soul: Gender and Sowlehele in Middle English Allegory, Masha Raskolnikov argues that such debates function as a mode of thinking about psychology,...

Jennifer Phegley presents an examination of four mid-Victorian magazines that middle-class women read widely. Educating the Proper Woman Reader reevaluates prevailing assumptions about the vexed relationship between nineteenth-century women readers and...

Fictions, we are so often told, are everywhere in America today. The extravagant claims of advertising are everywhere, much of the day's news concerns "pseudo-events" like rallies or ceremonies staged so that they can be reported on, and philosophers...

Science fiction goes green? Eric C. Otto explores literary science fiction's engagement with a central concern of our times: ecological degradation. Situated at the intersection of science fiction studies and environmental philosophy, Green Speculations:...

Stanley Orr's Darkly Perfect World offers a large-scale historical narrative about the way American crime fiction and film have changed throughout the twentieth century. Orr argues that films noirs and noir fictions dramatize Raymond Chandler's...

In postbellum America, publishers vigorously reprinted books that were foreign in origin, and Americans thus read internationally even at a moment of national consolidation. A subset of Americans' international reading-nearly 100 original texts,...

Historians of workingmen in the antebellum United States have long been preoccupied with labor politics and with the racism, nativism, and misogyny of their public culture. Reading and Disorder in Antebellum America expands our account of such men by...

Throughout its history, the city of Rome has inspired writers to describe its majesty, to situate themselves within its sweeping landscape, and to comment upon its contribution to their own identity. The Roman elegiac poet Propertius was one such author...

Over the centuries, Latin love elegy has inspired love poetry in the West from Petrarch to Pound. A Latin Lover in Ancient Rome: Readings in Propertius and His Genre offers a critical reevaluation of the Latin elegiac poet Propertius, situating him...

In American literature, domestic fictions-that is, novels focused on the home and homemaking-are linked with white, middle-class women's fiction and culture. Employing a spatial lens, Neodomestic American Fiction joins and extends other studies in...

When Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, and Gwendolyn Brooks began to write poetry during the 1940s and '50s, each had to wonder whether she could be taken seriously as a poet while speaking in a woman's voice. I Made You to Find Me, the last line...

Literature and Identity in The Golden Ass of Apuleius is the first English translation of a work published in 2007 as Le Metamorfosi di Apuleio: Letteratura e identità, by Luca Graverini. The second-century CE novel The Golden Ass, or Metamorphoses, has...

Art after Philosophy: Boris Pasternak's Early Prose, by Elena Glazov-Corrigan, redefines an area in Slavic studies which has suffered from neglect for several decades, namely, Pasternak's early prose narratives. In her bold new study, Glazov-Corrigan...

"The burden of the past" invoked by any discussion of eclecticism is a familiar aspect of modernity, particularly in the history of literature. The Age of Eclecticism: Literature and Culture in Britain, 1815-1885 by Christine Bolus-Reichert aims to...

Deciphering Race engages with the complex and contested world of Victorian racial discourse. In the five central texts under consideration in this study-Harriet Martineau's The Hour and the Man, Robert Knox's The Races of Men, Charles Dickens and Wilkie...

The 1963 publication of Thomas Pynchon's V. changed the landscape of American fiction. Becoming Pynchon: Genetic Narratology and V. offers a detailed examination of the dramatic transformations that took place as Pynchon's foundational novel went from...

Finalist, 2021 Locus AwardIn Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century, eminent contributors pay tribute to Afrofuturism as a powerful and evolving aesthetic practice that communicates the experience of science, technology, and race...

Most students of American literature probably can recall the playful French nom de plume-Monsieur de l'Aubépine-that Nathaniel Hawthorne occasionally employed to disguise some of his early attempts at authorship. But very few will know that Monsieur de...