Comparative literature Books

The theory of "literary worlds" has become increasingly important in comparative and world literatures. But how are the often-contradictory elements of Eastern and Western literatures to cohere in the new worlds such contact creates? Drawing on the...

This cross-cultural study analyses images and descriptions of breasts and breastfeeding in children's books and literature for adults, in both English and Swedish. It explores how the feeding of infants is depicted in literature in the two languages and...

A study of Wells's interest in Russian culture and development and the influence of his work on Russia and the Soviet Union.H. G. Wells and All Things Russian examines Wells's keen interest in Russian culture and development, and how Russia and the...

'Post-Multicultural Writers as Neo-Cosmopolitan Mediators' argues the need to move beyond the monolingual paradigm within Anglophone literary studies. Using Lyotard's concept of post as the future anterior (back to the future), this book sets up a...

A timely story of a forgotten emotionCheerfulness: A Literary and Cultural History tells a new story about the cultural imagination of the West wherein cheerfulness - a momentary uptick in emotional energy, a temporary lightening of spirit - functions as...

Swoon is the first extensive study of literary swooning, homing in on swooning's rich history as well as its potential to provide new insights into the contemporary.This study demonstrates that passing-out has had a pivotal place in English literature...

How Black poets have charted the direction of American poetics for the past two centuriesBefore Modernism examines how Black poetics, in antagonism with White poetics in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, produced the conditions for the...

How decolonization and the cold war influenced literature from Africa, Asia, and the CaribbeanHow did superpower competition and the cold war affect writers in the decolonizing world? In The Aesthetic Cold War, Peter Kalliney explores the various ways...

Sicily and the strategies of empire in the poetic imagination of classical and medieval EuropeIn the first century BC, Cicero praised Sicily as Rome's first overseas province and confirmed it as the mythic location for the abduction of Proserpina, known...

From the Nobel Prizewinning writer, a new collection of literary and personal essaysOld Truths and New Clichs collects nineteen essays-most of them previously unpublished in English-by Isaac Bashevis Singer on topics that were central to his artistic...

Up from the Depths tells the interconnected stories of two of the most important writers in American history-the novelist and poet Herman Melville (18191891) and one of his earliest biographers, the literary critic and historian Lewis Mumford (18951990)...

Reading literature in a time of climate emergency can sometimes feel a bit like fiddling while Rome burns. Yet, at this turning point for the planet, scientists, policymakers, and activists have woken up to the power of stories in the fight against...

On Belonging and Not Belonging provides a sophisticated exploration of how themes of translation, migration, and displacement shape an astonishing range of artistic works. From the possibilities and limitations of translation addressed by Jhumpa Lahiri...

Eating and drinking can be aesthetic experiences as well as sensory ones. The Hungry Eye takes readers from antiquity to the Renaissance to explore the central role of food and drink in literature, art, philosophy, religion, and statecraft.In this...

A rich history of underwater filmmaking and how it has profoundly influenced the aesthetics of movies and public perception of the oceans.In The Underwater Eye, Margaret Cohen tells the fascinating story of how the development of modern diving equipment...

Acclaimed literary historian Schmidt provides a unique meditation on the rediscovery of Gilgamesh and its profound influence on poets today. He describes how the poem is a work in progress even now, an undertaking that has drawn on the talents and...

Winner of the NAVSA Best Book of the Year, North American Victorian Studies AssociationFrom the opening of trade with Britain in the 1850s, Japan occupied a unique and contradictory place in the Victorian imagination, regarded as both a rival empire and...

From the recipient of the National Jewish Book Award for Lifetime Achievement, a "hugely entertaining and irreverent" (Adam Gopnik, New Yorker) account of the art of translating the Hebrew Bible into EnglishIn this brief book, award-winning biblical...

From the author of the definitive biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky, never-before-published lectures that provide an accessible introduction to the Russian writer's major works Joseph Frank (1918-2013) was perhaps the most important Dostoevsky...