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...
From the late seventeenth century to the beginning of the twentieth, no figure was more central to debates in England about the relations between the sexes than that of the modest woman. Drawing on a wide range of narratives from the period, Ruth Bernard Yeazell analyzes the multiple and...
“This collection is … a lesson to editors about how different types of subjects may profitably be brought together in one volume. And though the feminist orientation is provocative, there is a complete absence of any tone of vindictiveness, and an obvious determination to get at the truth.” -...
It is impossible to examine any part of the war on terrorism in the twenty-first century without seeing the hand of Dick Cheney, Colin Powell or one of their loyalists. The Commanders, an account of the use of the military in the first Bush administration, is in many respects their story—the...
From Michael Cunningham, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours, comes this widely praised novel of two boyhood friends: Jonathan, lonely, introspective, and unsure of himself; and Bobby, hip, dark, and inarticulate. In New York after college, Bobby moves in with Jonathan and his roommate,...
A Companion to Shakespeare is an indispensable book for students and teachers of Shakespeare, indeed for anyone with an interest in his plays.
Contains 28 newly commissioned essays written by the most distinguished historians and literary scholars
Situates Shakespeare in the historical and...
In The School of Hawthorne, Brodhead uses Hawthorne as a prime example of how literary traditions are made, not born. Under Brodhead’s scrutiny, the Hawthorne tradition opens out onto a wide array of subjects, many of which have received little previous attention. He offers a detailed account...
For the last two centuries, literature has tested the authority of the individual and the community. During this time, in David Bromwich’s words, “A motive for great writing…has been a tension, which is felt to be unresolvable, between the claims of social obligation and of personal autonomy. That...
As the title suggests, ‘Bearing the Word’ looks with particular intensity at the intersections of women’s reproductive and literary roles. Through close readings of works by Dorothy Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, Emily and Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Gaskell, Margaret Homans...
Deals with thought, nature, meditation, the past, language, friendship, renewal, love, failure, travel, and the imagination
Based on hundreds of inside sources and secret documents, the author reveals the inner operations of the C.I.A., the world’s largest and most sophisticated espionage apparatus, its players, and its clandestine relationships throughout the world
Describes farmers in Minnesota, Iowa, and Montana as they cut and bale hay for their cattle ranches
First published in 1987, this title tracks the spy thriller from John Buchanan to Eric Ambler, Ian Fleming and John Le Carré, and shows how these tales of spies, moles, and the secret service tell a history of modern society, translating the political and cultural transformations of the twentieth...
This is the dazzling first novel in a series that will certainly take its place amongst the great books of our time.
Reengaging the ideas of alternate lives, worlds, and worldviews that pulsed through his remarkable Little, Big, John Crowley’s Agypt series is a landmark in contemporary fiction. The...
The American Novel series provides students of American literature with introductory critical guides to the great works of American fiction by giving details of the novel’s composition, publication history and contemporary reception. The group of essays, each specially commissioned from a...
This reinterpretation of acting theories in light of the history of science examines acting styles from the seventeenth century to the twentieth century and measures them against prevailing conceptions of the human body and its inner workings.
From the British-West Indian novelist who is rapidly emerging as the bard of the African diaspora comes a haunting work about “the final passage”—the exodus of black West Indians from their impoverished islands to the uncertain opportunities of England. In her village of St. Patrick’s, Leila...
Bob Woodword’s classic book about John Belushi—one of the most interesting performers and personalities in show business history—“is told with the same narrative style that Woodward employed so effectively in All the President’s Men and The Final Days” (Chicago Tribune).
John Belushi was found dead...
David Stark, an adolescent and mainstay of a family of women nearing physical or emotional collapse, hitchhikes from Southern California to San Francisco to locate a wandering sister and encounters adulthood
It has often been held that scholasticism destroyed the literary theory that was emerging during the twelfth-century Renaissance, and hence discussion of late medieval literary works has tended to derive its critical vocabulary from modern, not medieval, theory. In Medieval Theory of Authorship,...
Rush that speaks. Born into the community of Truthful Speakers one thousand years after the Storm, he was raised on stories of the old days - a world filled with saints, a world in which all things were possible, a world which finally destroyed itself. In love with a beautiful woman, Rush journeys...
Critical essays examine the works of a wide range of authors, including Walt Whitman, Sigmund Freud, Hart Crane, and Ralph Waldo Emerson
A wide-ranging, comparative study of the problematic status of originality in Renaissance literature.
