Queen Victoria was one of the most complex cultural productions of her age. In Royal Representations, Margaret Homans investigates the meanings Victoria held for her times, Victoria’s own contributions to Victorian writing and art, and the cultural mechanisms through which her influence was...
Although we know him as one of the greatest English poets, William Wordsworth might not have become a poet at all without the experience of personal and historical catastrophe in his youth. In Disowned by Memory, David Bromwich connects the accidents of Wordsworth’s life with the originality of his...
The highly acclaimed new play by the author of Sight Unseen and The Model Apartment.
Blue as the Lake maps out an African-American landscape unique in American literature. From Idlewild, the black resort on Lake Michigan where he vacationed as a child with his grandparents, to Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard, Robert Stepto traces a history of generations finding and making a...
Dido, Peter, Lulu, and others exercise their senses–seeing a walking stick, hearing the ice cream man, yelling, “Daddy!,” and dreaming in their sleep–in a vivid celebration of the many ways children see the world around them.
Mechanic Accents is a widely acclaimed study of American popular fiction and working-class culture. Combining Marxist literary theory with American labor history, Michael Denning explores what happened when, in the nineteenth century, working people began to read cheap novels and the “fiction...
John Rogers here addresses the literary and ideological consequences of the remarkable, if improbable, alliance between science and politics in seventeenth-century England. He looks at the cultural intersection between the English and Scientific Revolutions, concentrating on a body of work created...
A German Jewish girl whose life is destroyed by the atrocities of World War II … her uncle, who undermines the sureties of his own life in order to fight for Israeli statehood … the Jews of a 15th-century Italian ghetto . . Othello, newly arrived in Venice … a young Ethiopian...
In a fresh reading of Montaigne’s Essais, David Quint portrays the great Renaissance writer as both a literary man and a deeply engaged political thinker concerned with the ethical basis of society and civil discourse. From the first essay, Montaigne places the reader in a world of violent...
Slaves in the Family is the story of one man’s exploration of his family’s slave-owning past and his search for the descendants of the people his ancestors kept as slaves.
In 1698, Elias Ball traveled from his home in Devon, England to Charleston, South Carolina to take possession of his...
A New York Times Notable Book
Daring and fiercely original, The Women is at once a memoir, a psychological study, a sociopolitical manifesto, and an incisive adventure in literary criticism. It is conceived as a series of portraits analyzing the role that sexual and racial identity played in the...
While the term “liberalism” was not applied to political thought or political parties in England until the late eighteenth century, the author argues that its central ideas were formulated by seventeenth-century English writers in defiance of their society’s norms, and then transmitted to the...
When three-month-old Lia Lee Arrived at the county hospital emergency room in Merced, California, a chain of events was set in motion from which neither she nor her parents nor her doctors would ever recover. Lia’s parents, Foua and Nao Kao, were part of a large Hmong community in Merced,...
Rose is frightened by the strange noises emanating from the apartment upstairs, until she and her mother pay a visit to the noisy young boy who lives there.
In an astonishing book-length sequence, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Louise Gluck interweaves the dissolution of a contemporary marriage with the story of The Odyssey. Here is Penelope stubbornly weaving, elevating the act of waiting into an act of will; here, too, is a worldly Circe, a divided...
This magisterial work links the literary and intellectual history of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Britain’s overseas colonies during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to redraw our picture of the origins of cultural nationalism, the lineages of the novel, and the literary...
This edition features over three hundred letters, selected to best illustrate the complexity and textures of Hart Crane’s turbulent life –– from family pressures, to his creative ambition, to his homosexuality.
Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence has cast its own long shadow of influence since it was first published in 1973. Through an insightful study of Romantic poets, Bloom puts forth his central vision of the relations between tradition and the individual artist. Although Bloom was never the...
The English Literatures of America redefines colonial American literatures, sweeping from Newfoundland and Nova Scotia to the West Indies and Guiana. The book begins with the first colonization of the Americas and stretches beyond the Revolution to the early national period. Many texts are...
The colorful handmade costumes of beads and feathers swirl frenetically, as the Mardi Gras Indians dance through the streets of New Orleans in remembrance of a widely disputed cultural heritage. Iroquois Indians visit London in the early part of the eighteenth century and give birth to the “...
Drawing from essays, letters, journals and memoirs, this collection includes writers ranging from Thomas Mann to Joseph Brodsky.
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Winner of the 1993 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Non-Fiction, Proofs and Theories is an illuminating collection of essays by Louise Glück, whose most recent book of poems, The Wild Iris, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Glück brings to her prose the same precision of language, the same...
“Heroically brave, formidably learned… The Western Canon is a passionate demonstration of why some writers have triumphantly escaped the oblivion in which time buries almost all human effort. It inspires hope… that what humanity has long cherished, posterity will also.” –The New York Times Book...
This book argues that literature can be defined―pragmatist and historicist arguments notwithstanding―and that in its definition its unique value can be discovered. The author identifies literature ontologically as a sign of the preconceptual, as the “ostensive moment” that discloses neither the...
Includes: Found a Peanut, The Loman Family Picnic, The Model Apartment, What’s Wrong with This Picture?, and Sight Unseen.. With a palpable affection for the traditions of the stage and a taste for surreal comedy, Margulies “manages to transform what might have been kitchen-sink drama into...
In the two hundred years from 1475 London was transformed from a medieval commune into a metropolis of half a million people, a capital city, and a leading European trading center. Lawrence Manley provides a comprehensive account of the changing image and influence of London through its literature...
Examining Fielding’s sustained, often ambivalent engagement with questions of gender, this text breaks with critical commonplaces that contrast Fielding’s robust masculinity with Richardson’s feminine sensibilities. Arguing that a preoccupation with the tenuousness of gendered...
Using a variety of historical sources, Richard H. Brodhead reconstructs the institutionalized literary worlds that coexisted in nineteenth-century America: the middle-class domestic culture of letters, the culture of mass-produced cheap reading, the militantly hierarchical high culture of post-...
Phillips examines the transitions of a Caribbean nation from colonialism to a dubious state of independence through the experiences of Bertram Francis, a young man who leaves St. Kitts at the age of thirteen to study law on a coveted scholarship in England. Twenty years later he returns, chastened...
From the acclaimed author of Cambridge comes an ambitious, formally inventive, and intensely moving evocation of the scattered offspring of Africa. It begins in a year of failing crops and desperate foolishness, which forces a father to sell his three children into slavery. Employing a brilliant...
Reading Holinshed’s Chronicles is the first major study of the greatest of the Elizabethan chronicles. Holinshed’s Chronicles—a massive history of England, Scotland, and Ireland—has been traditionally read as the source material for many of Shakespeare’s plays or as an archaic form of history-...
In its recent review of the fourth (and final) Ægypt novel, Bookforum said: “We may one day look on Ægypt’s publishing history with the same head-scratching curiosity with which we now regard Melville’s tragic struggles and André Gide’s decision to turn down Swann’s Way.” As those...
The Agenda is a day-by-day, often minute-by-minute account of Bill Clinton’s White House. Drawing on hundreds of interviews, confidential internal memos, diaries, and meeting notes, Woodward shows how Clinton and his advisers grappled with questions of lasting importance - the federal deficit...
Poetry. African American Studies. “Claudia Rankine is a fiercely gifted young poet. Intelligence, a curiosity and hunger for understanding like some worrying, interior, physical pain, a gift for being alert in the world. She knows when to bless and to curse, to wonder and to judge, and she doesn...
Claude Rawson examines the evolution of satirical writing in the period 1660-1830. In a sequence of linked chapters, some new and others revised substantially from earlier articles, he focuses on English writers from Rochester to Austen, both within a contemporaneous European context and as part of...
Liberal education has been under siege in recent years. Far-right ideologues in journalism and government have pressed for a uniform curriculum that focuses on the achievements of Western culture. Partisans of the academic left, who hold our culture responsible for the evils of society, have...
This collection of stunningly beautiful poems encompasses the natural, human, and spiritual realms, and is bound together by the universal themes of time and mortality. With clarity and sureness of craft, Gluck’s poetry questions, explores, and finally celebrates the ordeal of being alive.
In this diverse and balanced collection, the contributors explore the impact of ACT UP, Queer Nation, multiculturalism, the new religious right, outing, queerness, postmodernism, and shifts in the cultural politics of sexuality.
Born on the eve of the Civil War, Charles W. Chesnutt grew up in Fayetteville, North Carolina, a county seat of four or five thousand people, a once-bustling commercial center slipping into postwar decline. Poor, black, and determined to outstrip his modest beginnings and forlorn surroundings,...
‘Zarin’s marvelous gift for linguistic play, her gentle humor and her sheer delight in imaginative stanza form and rhyme punctuate this collection and provide a relief that serves to sharpen the reflective edge of the serious poetry.’ –Robert Hosmer, ‘The Southern Review”
Focusing on the vexed friendship between Hart Crane and Allen Tate, this book examines twentieth-century American poetry’s progress toward institutional sanction and professional organization, a process in which sexual identities, poetic traditions, and literary occupations were in question...
Tracing a genealogy of colonial discourse, Suleri focuses on paradigmatic moments in the multiple stories generated by the British colonization of the Indian subcontinent. Both the literature of imperialism and its postcolonial aftermath emerge here as a series of guilty transactions between two...
One of England’s most widely acclaimed young novelists adopts two eerily convincing narrative voices and juxtaposes their stories to devastating effect in this mesmerizing portrait of slavery. Cambridge is a devoutly Christian slave in the West Indies whose sense of justice is both profound...
Alexander the Great, according to Plutarch, carried on his campaigns a copy of the Iliad, kept alongside a dagger; on a more pronounced ideological level, ancient Romans looked to the Aeneid as an argument for imperialism. In this major reinterpretation of epic poetry beginning with Virgil, David...
A ruthlessly probing family portrait in verse, Gluck’s sixth poetry collection confronts, with devastating irony, her father’s hollow life and her mother’s inability to express emotion. This might seem like a daughter’s belated rebellion, except that these fierce, rock-...
The subject of Michael Warner’s book is the rise of a nation. America, he shows, became a nation by developing a new kind of reading public, where one becomes a citizen by taking one’s place as writer or reader. At heart, the United States is a republic of letters, and its birth can be dated from...
William Empson: Prophet Against Sacrifice provides the most coherent account of Empson’s diverse career to date. While exploring the richness of Empson’s comic genius, Paul H. Fry serves to discredit the appropriation of his name in recent polemic by the conflicting parties of...
In his essay On Liberty, John Stuart Mill writes that a person “whose desires and impulses are not his own, has no character, no more than a steamengine has a character.” Although Mill never devoted an essay or treatise solely to character, Janice Carlisle argues that the subject was central to his...
This pioneering study of Afro-American narrative is far more critical, historical, and textual than biographical, chronological, and atextual. Robert Stepto asserts that Afro-American culture has its store of canonical stories or pregeneric myths, the primary one being the quest for freedom and...
In this finely wrought memoir of life in postcolonial Pakistan, Suleri intertwines the violent history of Pakistan’s independence with her own most intimate memories—of her Welsh mother; of her Pakistani father, prominent political journalist Z.A. Suleri; of her tenacious grandmother Dadi and...
