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Seizing the Hungarian throne at fifteen, the effervescent Matthias Corvinus reigned long (1459-1490) and extraordinarily well. This book is the first in English to tell the gripping story of the Raven King and of the fate of his fabled 2000-volume library. Dispersed across Europe after his death, the king’s exquisite volumes have been pursued with fervor for ce...

With an ear always cocked for an interesting tale, Nicholas Basbanes, the prize-winning author of A Gentle Madness, recounts the lively stories behind the first hundred years of publishing at Yale University Press. Filled with colorful characters and surprising events, the book is a fascinating case study about scholarship and books in America.

How do books map the intellectual tastes of their readers? This alluring volume provides an intimate look at the personal libraries and top ten reading lists of twelve of the world’s leading architects.

This ground-breaking book, the first to examine Milton’s thinking about matter and substance throughout his entire poetic career, seeks to alter the prevailing critical view pertaining to Milton’s philosophy.

In this brilliant new work, Amanda Vickery unlocks the homes of Georgian England to examine the lives of the people who lived there. Writing with her customary wit and verve, she introduces us to men and women from all walks of life: gentlewoman Anne Dormer in her stately Oxfordshire mansion, bachelor clerk and future novelist Anthony Trollope in his dreary London lo...

In this new verse translation of the Theban plays of Sophocles, one of the most important translators of our time presents an elegant and economical version of Antigone, Oedipus Tyrannos, and Oedipus at Colonus. David R. Slavitt preserves the innate verve and energy of the dramas for a fresh rendition that will appeal both to readers and to theat...

Erdmut Wizisla’s groundbreaking work explores for the first time the important friendship between Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht during the crucial interwar years in Berlin, and illuminates nearly two decades of European intellectual life.

This breath-taking record of Sartre’s spirited conversations with his godson are an essential companion to the works of one of the 20th-century’s most important thinkers.

This anthology introduces readers to Victor Hugo, considered by many to be France’s best, most beloved poet. Unlike other Hugo anthologies, Victor Hugo on Things That Matter offers key Hugo texts in the original French, as well as providing supplemental notes and overviews in English.

This intimate portrayal of the friendship between two Nobel prize-winning icons of twentieth-century poetry, Czeslaw Milosz and Joseph Brodsky, incorporates the author’s personal reminiscences of both poets.

The Maine Woods, Thoreau’s best-known book after Walden, is now available for the first time in a lavishly produced, fully-annotated gift-book edition that provides deep insights into the life and work of the great author and naturalist.

How did a nation so famously associated with freedom become internationally identified with imprisonment? In this timely and provocative study, Caleb Smith argues that the dehumanization inherent in captivity has always been at the heart of American civil society.

In this beautifully curated collection of essays, Steven Johnson heralds the arrival of a new generation of technology writing.  Whether it is Nicholas Carr worrying that Google is making us stupid, Dana Goodyear chronicling the rise of the cellphone novel, or Andrew Sullivan explaining the rewards of blogging, this new generation does not waste time speculating...

In this highly enjoyable reminder of why we should care about eloquence in literature and speech, Denis Donoghue insists that eloquence is not just a rhetorical tool, but an intrinsically valuable “upsurge of vitality for its own sake.” He offers many instances of eloquence in words and suggests the forms our appreciation of them should take.

Winner of the second annual Yale Drama Series competition, Grenadine is the fantastical story of a man’s quest for love in the company of his three devoted friends.

This book is the first to collect the best columns and essays of Henry Fairlie, the colorful political and cultural commentator renowned for his brilliant style, original ideas, and fearless criticism of those in power on both sides of the Atlantic.

In the pages of this slim, powerful book Rob Riemen argues with passion that “nobility of spirit” is the quintessence of a civilized world. It is, as Thomas Mann believed, the sole corrective for human history. Without nobility of spirit, culture vanishes. Yet in the early twenty-first century, a time when human dignity and freedom are imperiled, the conc...

In this important book, an eminent scholar seeks to reconcile accounts of the world given in the natural sciences and religion by examining initiatives in cognitive science and evolutionary biology on one hand and theology on the other.

The most complete anthology of Futurist manifestos, poems, plays, and images ever to be published in English, spanning from the movement’s beginning in 1909 to its end in 1944.

In this timely book, Claude Hagège, a renowned linguist and leading French public intellectual, ranges over all continents and language families to uncover not only how languages die, but also how they can be revitalized.

This remarkable work of literary detection resolves longstanding mysteries surrounding the composition of T. S. Eliot’s poetic masterpiece and overturns traditional interpretations. Lawrence Rainey offers new insights into the poet’s intentions and shows us that The Waste Land is even stranger and more startling than we knew.

This book, by an internationally acclaimed biblical scholar, examines the many and varied ways that the biblical story of Joseph, which ranks alongside The Odyssey and other ancient legends as a canonical test, has been interpreted in early modern Europe.

This book is the first full-scale appraisal of the life and work of Jacques Derrida, one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth-century.

Drawing on an incredible cache of thousands of letters and dozens of diaries only recently discovered, this book brings to light the untold story of Mrs. Tennant—close friend of Flaubert, mother-in-law of the explorer Stanley, and hostess of a glittering salon that was a hub of European social, literary, and intellectual life for nearly half a century.

This masterly biography uncovers Dickens the man through the profession in which he excelled. Michael Slater explores the personal and emotional life, the high-profile public activities, the relentless travel, the charitable works, the amateur theatricals and the astonishing productivity. But his core focus is Dickens’ career as a writer and professional author...

A timeless story of love, morality, and tragedy, Fernando de Rojas’s novel Celestina is second only to Don Quixote in its importance in Spanish-language literature.

Through the keen eye of award-winning translator Rika Lesser, Göran Sonnevi’s revelatory long-form poem on the inner workings of human consciousness comes to life for the English reader.

Chinese author Can Xue’s Five Spice Street stands out as one of the most astonishing novels written in any language over the last twenty years. The first of Xue’s full-length works to be translated into English, this compelling book explores a secret that takes on a life of its own as neighbors speculate, argue, indulge their fantasies, and reveal ...

Umberto Saba’s reputation in Italy and Europe has steadily grown since his death in 1957, and today he is positioned alongside Eugenio Montale and Giuseppe Ungaretti as one of the three most important Italian poets of the first half of the twentieth century. Until now, however, English-language readers have had access to only a few examples of this poet’s work. This bilingual volume at...

This delightful book tells the story of ancient libraries from their very beginnings, when “books” were clay tablets and writing was a new phenomenon. Renowned classicist Lionel Casson takes us on a lively tour from the royal libraries of the ancient Near East, through the private and public libraries of Greece and Rome, down to the first Christian monastic libraries. Casson explains w...

James Raven presents a lively and original history of the English book trade and the printers, booksellers, and entrepreneurs who promoted its development from the advent of printing to 1850. Introducing a cast of heroes and heroines, villains, and rogues, he presents an entirely new view of the business of books and how it was conducted.

This gorgeous book presents over 200 artworks for children’s books from the Betsy Beinecke Shirley collection at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Offering a unique view of the reading lives of children throughout American history, the book reproduces works by such favorite artists as Ludwig Bemelmans, N. C. Wyeth, and Maurice S...

This book, a catalogue for a major exhibition, celebrates the achievements of Rudyard Kipling, prolific author of novels, poems, and children’s stories, including The Jungle Books and The Just So Stories. With 80 full-color illustrations, the book creates a time-line of Kipling’s works and displays the variety and breadth of his printed prod...

Inspired by the process of creating a library for his fifteenth-century home near the Loire, in France, Alberto Manguel, the acclaimed writer on books and reading, has taken up the subject of libraries. “Libraries,” he says, “have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I’ve been seduced by their labyrinthi...

This entertaining journey through five centuries of acquiring, reading, and enjoying books looks at a wide range of collectors, including Samuel Pepys and Thomas Jefferson, and those who marketed and sold them their books.

A. D. Nuttall’s profound and elegantly written study of Shakespeare’s thought is a literary tour de force, a marvelous inquiry into the questions that engrossed the playwright throughout his life. Nuttall investigates the dynamic nature of Shakespeare’s evolving answers and provides for twenty-first-century readers an unparalleled guide to Shakespea...

Readers of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies have long noted the absence of readily explainable motivations for Hamlet, King Lear, Othello and other characters. In this penetrating book, Millicent Bell shows that the inexplicable actions of these characters reflect the playwright’s philosophical skepticism. In his works Shakespeare repeatedly calls attention to the essential unknowabili...

This prize-winning work provides a facsimile of the 1609 Quarto printed in parallel with a conservatively edited, modernized text, as well as commentary that ranges from brief glosses to substantial critical essays. Stephen Booth’s notes help a modern reader toward the kind of understanding that Renaissance readers brought to the works.

With numerous portraits, images of costumes, theater models, manuscripts, and maps, this compelling book explores the connections between theatrical performance and Shakespeare's references in the visual arts.

The fundamental subject of A. D. Nuttall’s bold and daring first book, Two Concepts of Allegory, is a particular habit of thought—the practice of thinking about universals as though they were concrete things. His study takes the form of an inquiry into certain conceptual questions raised, in the first place, by the allegorical critics of The Tempest, and, in the second pl...

In pursuit of a powerful, common-sense argument about realism, renowned scholar A. D. Nuttall discusses English eighteenth-century and French neo-classical conceptions of realism, and considers Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and both parts of King Henry IV as a prolonged feat of mimesis, with particular emphasis on Shakespeare’s...

In this erudite and entertaining book, a renowned literary critic explores the ways we have thought about scholars and scholarship through the ages. How is it, he asks, that in the nineteenth century, scholars became seen as “dead from the waist down”—anemic and servile, impotent figures of ridicule?

 

One of our most influential theater figures takes a provocative look at how Shakespeare’s plays were influenced by misogyny, racism, elitism, and other social and sexual prejudices of his age, and how he managed to transcend them and write universal works of art.

In no other play has Shakespeare created two such equally titanic personages as Rome’s great soldier and statesman Mark Antony and the Egyptian Queen Cleopatra. The story of their irresistible attraction, their jealous quarrels and betrayals, and the effects on friends and subjects of their ruinous choices is a tale leading irretrievably to despair and defeat. ...

Treacherous, power-hungry, untempered by moral restraint, and embittered by physical deformity, Richard, the younger brother of King Edward IV, is ablaze with ambition to take England’s throne. Richard III, Shakespeare’s long chronicle of Richard’s machinations to be king, is a tale of murder upon murder. He gains the throne, but only briefly...

Twelfth Night is one of Shakespeare’s funniest plays and also one of his most romantic. A young noblewoman, Viola,  shipwrecked in a foreign land and separated from her twin brother, dresses as a man in order to enter the service of Orsino, duke of Illyria. Complications ensue—deceptions, infatuations, misdirected overtures, malevolent pranks—as everyone is drawn into...

King Lear, one of Shakespeare's darkest and most savage plays, tells the story of the foolish and Job-like Lear, who divides his kingdom, as he does his affections, according to vanity and whim. Lear’s failure as a father engulfs himself and his world in turmoil and tragedy.

In this lively comedy of love and money in sixteenth-century Venice, Bassanio needs funds if he is to impress the wealthy heiress Portia. Soon hopelessly entangled with the Jewish moneylender Shylock, Bassanio and his merchant friend Antonio escape their predicament only through Portia’s clever intervention.

The first tragedy to be performed in the new Globe Theatre, Julius Caesar is set at a crucial historical moment--when Republican government is giving way to imperial. Removed in time and place from Shakespeare’s Elizabethan England, Rome makes a safe laboratory for the playwright to engage in his political musings.

One of the most powerful dramas ever written for the stage, Othello throbs with passion, jealousy, the desire for revenge, illusion, mistrust, and murder. This new and fully annotated edition invites modern readers to appreciate and understand every nuance of Shakespeare’s unforgettable play.

Shakespeare’s valedictory play is one of his most poetical and magical, involving spirits, savages, banishment, a duke-turned-wizard, a shipwreck, and more. This volume, like all volumes in The Annotated Shakespeare series, features helpful information and comprehensive annotations to assist with vocabulary, pronunciation, alternate meanings, and more.

Perhaps no other Shakespearean drama so engulfs us in the ruinous journey of surrender to evil as does Macbeth. The on-page annotations of this edition provide readers with all the tools they need to comprehend the play fully and to examine its profound grip on the Western imagination.

Romeo and Juliet, one of the most beloved stage works of all time, is the latest addition to The Annotated Shakespeare series. Burton Raffel offers readers generous help with Elizabethan English and annotates throughout, providing the tools we need to comprehend the play and explore its many possible interpretations.

In this bawdy comedy, rapid-fire verbal battles between the shrewish Katarina and the canny Petruchio have delighted generations of audiences. Contemporary readers will especially enjoy this new edition of The Taming of the Shrew with comprehensive annotations that make the play completely accessible.

With an informative introduction, a critical essay by Harold Bloom, and on-page annotations, this new edition of Henry IV, Part One assists twenty-first century readers to appreciate fully the tale of Young Prince Hal, cavorting in London with Falstaff and his band of rogues even as England is threatened by the Earl of Northumberland.

From the hilarious mischief of the elf Puck to the rough humor of the self-centered Bottom and his fellow players, from the palace of Theseus in Athens to the magic wood where fairies play, Shakespeare’s marvelous A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a play of enchantment and an insightful portrait of the predicaments of love.

This first fully annotated version of Hamlet makes the play totally accessible to today’s readers. In addition to generous on-page annotations, it provides an introduction by Burton Raffel that gives background on the origins and previous versions of the Hamlet story and a concluding essay by Harold Bloom that discusses the originality of Shakespeare’s achie...

In this utterly original book, cultural critic Ilan Stavans engages in an exhilarating conversation about love and its various manifestations. Roaming through millennia, across geographical boundaries, and from culture to culture, Stavans surprises us again and again with new perspectives on the many facets of love.

A foremost critic of the English language here reflects on beauty and the language that it inspires. Denis Donoghue is an appreciative and wide-ranging reader, drawing into his discussion the work of authors from Kant to Keats, Hawthorne to Housman. With his customary lucidity, Donoghue shows us that beauty as a topic is once again interesting and even fashionable.

In this bold and extraordinary collection of writings, China’s only Nobel Laureate in literature offers provocative meditations on the meaning and importance of literary creation. The essays include Xingjian Gao's brilliant Nobel Lecture, “The Case for Literature.”

Here Mark Roche examines literature in its function as teacher of virtue and moral excellence, arguing that the current crisis in the humanities may be traced to the separation of art and morality. As our sense of intrinsic value becomes lost in this technological age, says Roche, literature helps us grapple with ethical challenges.

In this remarkable book a renowned art historian chronicles his own shifting responses to two extraordinary paintings by Poussin that he viewed almost daily over a period of months. T. J. Clark provides a riveting analysis of the two landscapes and much more--deeply considered meditations on the hold of the visual image on the viewer’s imagination.

In this lively book, Peter Brooks offers a distinctive view of realism in great modern novels and art of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He examines the invention of “reality” beginning with Balzac and Dickens and the legacy of this invention both in literature (Woolf, Joyce, Proust) and visual works (Manet, Tissot, Lucian Freud).

In eighteenth-century England, before the conventions of the novel were firmly established, fiction writing was exuberantly mutable and wildly experimental. This celebratory account of the early history of the English novel evokes the excitement of an era of unpredictable growth and change and explores its wide range of narrative forms and themes.

One of our most respected literary critics investigates the ways that runaway growth of urban centers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries irrevocably altered the Western imagination. In sensitive interpretations of novels by Flaubert, Dickens, Woolf, Kafka, and others, Robert Alter probes the responses of writers to the new reality of the modern city.

In this monumental work of literary history and criticism, Italian critic Francesco Orlando explores Western literature’s obsession with outmoded and nonfunctional objects--ruins, obsolete machinery, trash, etc. He roams across centuries, languages, and genres, tracing the obsession to an eighteenth-century turning point when functionality became a dominant value.

A world authority on the decadent novel here offers an entertaining and wide-ranging commentary on thirty-two international works of literary decadence. George C. Schoolfield throws new light on the literary and cultural phenomenon of decadence and on the intellectual kinship of authors as diverse as August Strindberg, Bram Stoker, and Thomas Mann.

Lively and learned, this up-to-date guide to literary words and concepts is an essential volume for every student and reader of literature. David Mikics sketches the derivations and history of each term, offers useful bibliographic suggestions for most entries, and clarifies the often confusing terrain of literary theory today.

The Elements of Teaching
James M. Banner and Harold C. Cannon

In this inspiring book two distinguished educators describe the intellectual, moral, and emotional qualities of successful teachers, along the way encouraging those who teach to understand the components of their noble art.

Our schools and colleges often make the intellectual life seem more impenetrable, narrowly specialized, and inaccessible than it is or needs to be, argues this eminent literary critic. Gerald Graff offers a wealth of practical suggestions for making the culture of ideas and arguments more readily understandable, showing how students can enter the public debates that permeate their lives. 

In this pathbreaking book, a major critic and theoretician of literature considers the impact of post-structuralist theory upon teaching, with particular attention to the textual issues raised by Jacques Derrida, Fredric Jameson, and Stanley Fish.

Originally published in 1980, this now classic work of literary theory explores the wilderness of positions that grew out of the collision between Anglo-American practical criticism and Continental philosophic criticism. This second edition includes a new preface by the author as well as a foreword by Hayden White.

Focusing on Marcel Duchamp and associates Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Max Ernst, and André Breton, this provocative book investigates the homosocial structures in Dada and Surrealist art and their relevance to contemporary artistic and theoretical debates.

In this engaging book, David Rosen offers a radically new account of Modern poetry and its relation to Romanticism. Shedding light on what was innovative as well as self-deceptive about Modern poetry, Rosen transforms the way we view the history of English-language poetry and the work of poets from Wordsworth to Auden.

How does the jazz of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, Billie Holiday, and Charlie Parker fit into the great tradition of modernist art? In this book, an eminent cultural historian provides the answer and offers a brilliant new way of understanding jazz.

Waiting for Godot has been acclaimed as the greatest play of the twentieth century. It is also the most elusive. This book—an illuminating introduction to Beckett’s work for general readers, students, and specialists—approaches the play scene by scene, exploring the text linguistically, philosophically, critically, and biographically. 

Paul Schwaber, both a professor of literature and a practicing psychoanalyst, brings the skills of both fields to this intriguing analysis of characterization in Ulysses. Not imposing formulations but subtly drawing them from the text, Schwaber reads openly—as an analyst listens—and illuminates the extraordinary psychological verity of Joyce’s complex characters.

This book presents the new and definitive edition of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, along with all the essays Eliot wrote as he was composing his masterpiece. Enriched with period photographs, a London map of cited locations, groundbreaking information on the origins of the work, and full annotations, the volume is itself a landmark in literary history.

This remarkable work of literary detection resolves longstanding mysteries surrounding the composition of T. S. Eliot’s poetic masterpiece and overturns traditional interpretations. Lawrence Rainey offers new insights into the poet’s intentions and shows us that The Waste Land is even stranger and more startling than we knew.

In this volume a highly distinguished reader of modern literature offers his most personal book of literary criticism. Denis Donoghue gives us a lucid and illuminating account of his engagement with the works of T. S. Eliot. Whether writing about Eliot’s poetry or confronting the poet’s (often contentious) prose, Donoghue eloquently demonstrates what it means to read and to hear a mast...

Neat polar oppositions commonly used to define modern art and literature—high/low, old/new, poetry/rhetoric—confuse and mislead, says Robert Scholes in this lively book. Exploring the delights of both well-known and underappreciated modernist writings and art, he argues for a more complex view of modernism that employs such paradoxes as “durable fluff” and “formulaic ...

This major anthology is the first to apply a fully interdisciplinary approach to environmental studies. A comprehensive guide to environmental literacy, the book demonstrates how the sciences, social sciences, and humanities all contribute to understanding our interrelationships with the natural world. Though not specialized, Environment is a book that even specialists can learn from. Ten innovative case studies--climate shock, species endangerment, nuclear power, biotechnology, sustainable development, deforestation, environmental security, globalization, wilderness, and the urban environment--are followed by readings from specific disciplines. These can be integrated with the case studies to shape individual interests and teaching strategies. The volume presents an imaginative array of texts, from scientific papers to poetry, legal decisions to historical accounts, personal essays to economic analysis. Taken together, these selections provide a balanced, authoritative, and up-to-date treatment of key issues in environmental studies.

Glenn Adelson teaches biology and environmental studies at Wellesley College and is coauthor of Biodiversity: Exploring Values and Priorities in Conservation. James Engell is chair, English and American literature and language, and faculty member of the Harvard University Center for the Environment. Brent Ranalli is senior analyst at The Cadmus Group, Inc., an employee-owned environmental consulting firm. K. P. Van Anglen teaches English at Boston University and helps edit the Princeton Thoreau Edition.

Long before 9/11, visions of the destruction of New York City were a part of America’s collective imagination. This book investigates images of the city’s end in literature and art to understand why the destruction genre has been popular for two centuries and what it tells us about Americans, New Yorkers, and the city itself.

Alfred Kazin, the son of barely literate Jewish immigrants, rose from near poverty to become a dominant figure in literary criticism and one of America’s last great men of letters. This book provides the first complete portrait of Kazin, his troubled personal life, his relationships with such figures as Lionel Trilling and Hannah Arendt, and his prodigious cont...

This engaging book reveals Benjamin Franklin’s human side—his tastes and habits, his enthusiasms, and his devotion to democracy and the people of the United States. Historian Edmund S. Morgan draws on Franklin’s vast archives to offer insights into the most unusual founding father, a gregarious man with boundless curiosity and a vision of what America could be. 

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This authoritative edition of the complete texts of the Federalist Papers, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Articles of Confederation is accompanied by essays in which leading scholars provide historical context and thematic background.

This fascinating book reinterprets Benjamin Franklin’s social and political thought, examining for the first time his participation in eighteenth-century debates over the rise of the modern commercial republic. The author shows how Franklin offered practical and inventive proposals and urged Americans to improve themselves and their society through cooperation.

Translated into a dozen languages, printed in hundreds of editions, and read by millions of people, Franklin’s autobiography has had an influence perhaps unequaled by any other book by an American writer. Written ostensibly as a letter to his son William, the autobiography offers Franklin’s reflections on philosophy and religion, politics, war, education, material success, and the stat...

Begun in 1837, Thoreau’s Journal spans twenty-five years and functions as a record of his interior life and a key to his other writings. This beautifully produced gift edition of the Journal, carefully selected and annotated by Jeffrey S. Cramer, provides a fully rounded portrait of Thoreau. The volume will make a welcome addition to any book lover’s libr...

The ultimate gift edition of Walden, this volume is the most authoritative and richly annotated version of Thoreau’s American classic ever published. New readers as well as those well familiar with the text will find themselves immersed in Thoreau’s unique and fascinating world, guided by notes that illuminate the bibliographical, historical, and geographical contexts of his lif...

This handsome, affordable paperback edition of Walden is the most authoritative version of Thoreau’s masterpiece to date.  Cramer’s newly edited text is based on the original 1854 edition of Walden, with emendations taken from Thoreau’s draft manuscripts, his own markings on page proofs, and notes in his personal copy of the book. An elegantly produced paperbac...

Distinguished scholar Martha Banta investigates the peculiarly American quest for an indigenous and all-encompassing aesthetic. She focuses on the nineteenth-century, when artists, architects, writers, politicians, and other Americans sought One True Theory in order to uncover the theoretical principles underlying "the idea of creation."

This book is the first to explore the profound impact of the Bible on African American culture and history, from the colonial era to the present. Connecting hip-hop, soul, sermons, and a wide range of other arts to the Bible, Allen Callahan shows how certain biblical themes have helped African Americans deal with extraordinary injustice and find a collective identity.

 

The creator of uniquely American forms of fiction—the Western, the sea tale, the Revolutionary War romance—James Fenimore Cooper profoundly influenced literary and intellectual history. The first biographer to draw upon complete family archives, Wayne Franklin argues that Cooper was a representative figure of the early American republic.

This groundbreaking book views the rise of celebrity culture in nineteenth-century America through the eyes of Walt Whitman. Part biography, part cultural history, the book examines Whitman’s attitudes toward fame and publicity, discusses the celebrity of notable contemporaries, and proposes a new way of thinking about a seminal American poet and a major national icon.

This beautifully written book is the first to examine the ancient literary tradition of listing, the pleasures offered by cataloguing, and the wide range of ways writers use lists. Examining lists through the centuries, it focuses on their presence in the works of four American Renaissance authors: Emerson, Whitman, Melville, and Thoreau.

Prepared by editors of the distinguished series The Works of Jonathan Edwards, this authoritative anthology includes selected treatises, sermons, and autobiographical material by early America's greatest theologian and philosopher.

Denied the opportunity to follow their evangelist father and seven brothers into the ministry, the Beecher sisters traveled other paths to prominence in nineteenth-century America. This engrossing biography examines the fascinating lives of Catherine Beecher, founder of the Hartford Female Seminary, Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Isabella Beecher Hooker, outsp...

This book offers the first intensive study of the religious thought and experience of Henry David Thoreau. Alan Hodder recovers the lost spiritual dimension of the writer’s life, revealing—Thoreau’s rejection of organized religion notwithstanding —a writer whose inner life was fed by spiritual currents. At the heart of Thoreau’s life were episodes he called his ecstas...

Roderick Nash’s classic study of America’s changing attitudes toward wilderness has received wide acclaim since its initial publication in 1967. The Los Angeles Times has listed it among the one hundred most influential books published in the last quarter century, Outside Magazine has included it in a survey of “books that changed our world,” and it has been c...

George S. Schuyler, a popular black journalist of the 1920s, was one of the most important intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance. This book analyzes his life and early career and his use of satire to expose the foibles of blacks as well as whites. The book provides insights into the paradoxes of Schuyler’s ideas and into a formative period of African-American cultural history.

Among all the works of American literature, which deserve the designation “classic”? An eminent literary critic names five works—Moby-Dick, The Scarlet Letter, Walden, Leaves of Grass, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—and offers contemporary readings of them, demonstrating why they are important and how very much they have to say.

Seven years after his escape from slavery in 1838, the young Frederick Douglass published this celebrated account of his life in bondage and his triumph over oppression. His story—revealing the terrors of his enslavement, the brutality of his owners and overseers, and his harrowing escape to the North—has become a classic of American autobiography. This authoritative edition includes a...

Bringing together more than 400 poems and poetic excerpts on slavery by writers both famous and unknown, this landmark anthology charts the emergence of slavery in the collective consciousness of the English-speaking world. The poems speak eloquently of capture, torture, endurance, rebellion, and spiritual longing, and they reveal the surprising extent of early discourse on slavery.

This book presents, the first comprehensive and authoritative collection of Emerson's writings against slavery and the subjugation of American Indians, writings that reveal Emerson's deep commitment to this reform movement. Included are some speeches and lectures that have never before been collected in any edition of Emerson's writings.

This volume presents substantial selections from the writings of such key American Transcendentalists as Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, and Theodore Parker. Included are sermons and diary entries as well as essays on labor, religion, education, slavery, women’s rights, literature, and German metaphysics.

Here Joel Porte focuses on Emerson and Thoreau as writers, tracing their individual achievements and their points of intersection and arguing that they were complementary literary geniuses, mutually inspiring and inspired.

This magisterial biography paints a rich portrait of Alexis de Tocqueville, the French aristocrat whose voyage to America resulted in one of the most vital texts in the history of democratic thought. Hugh Brogan brings Tocqueville to life and elucidates his thinking on the nature of democracy.

French poet and critic Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux (1636-1711) was by turns venerated and reviled as the lawgiver of French classicism. This selection of Boileau’s poems, translated and annotated by Burton Raffel, reintroduces English-speaking readers to the spirited, witty, and satiric work of Boileau for the first time in a generation.

Norman R. Shapiro here presents a collection of superb new translations of more than 150 poems by the three most highly acclaimed French Renaissance poets—Clément Marot, Joachim Du Bellay, and Pierre de Ronsard. The original French lyric poems—some well-known, others less familiar—appear alongside Shapiro’s creative and spirited English translations.

This eagerly anticipated volume is the first comprehensive bilingual representation of French poetic achievement in the twentieth century. Mary Ann Caws has selected the work of more than 100 poets, an international roundup that includes numerous Francophone poets and many more female poets than have appeared in previous anthologies. English translations accompany each poem.

In this new translation of Voltaire’s best-known work, distinguished translator Burton Raffel captures the irreverent spirit of Candide and renders the novel in clear, vivacious English. Stylistically superior to all predecessors, Raffel’s version now stands as the translation of choice for twenty-first-century readers.

 

In 1764-65 the irrepressible playwright Beaumarchais traveled to Madrid where he immersed himself in the culture and society of the day. Inspired by his visit, Beaumarchais returned home to create The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro. This entertaining book offers a lively account of the playwright’s trip and of the society that fired his imagination.

This book presents a new English translation of two seminal works by Jean-Paul Sartre, the most dominant European intellectual of the post-World War II decades. The volume includes Sartre’s “Existentialism Is a Humanism” and his analysis of Camus’s The Stranger, along with a discussion of these works by acclaimed Sartre biographer Annie Cohen-Solal.

This vivid biography focuses on Proust’s troubled love life, from his adolescent sexual experiences to his great loves. With a gallery of photographs and many new details about the author’s lovers, flirtations, affairs, and fear of exposure as a homosexual, the book provides insights into his writings and an unprecedented view of Proust’s gay Paris.

The memoirs of Ernest A. Forssgren, the young Swede who served as Marcel Proust’s last valet, have never before been published in full. This annotated volume presents Forssgren’s complete text, which sheds new light on two key periods in Proust’s life and affords an intimate glimpse of French and American high-society life.

The essays in this double volume explore some recent cultural phenomena that appear symptomatic of a malaise stemming from a loss of French “identity” and French “exception.”

A fresh investigation of the fate of Picasso, Cocteau, Messiaen, and dozens of other French artists and intellectuals who lived and worked under Nazi occupation.

The entire history of Scotland has been colored by myth, says one of Britain’s greatest historians in this lively and controversial book. Hugh Trevor-Roper looks at the role of myth in history and memory, and analyzes the impact of three important myths on Scottish history and identity.

Ralph Pite’s biography of Thomas Hardy challenges long-held views of the popular Victorian novelist and presents him in fuller dimension than ever before. Setting the author in social, family, and local contexts, the book reveals details of Hardy’s personal and emotional life that have until now remained obscure.

This authoritative account of the secret Hell-Fire Clubs that scandalized eighteenth-century England reveals who joined them (wealthy industrialists, landed gentry, government elites, at least two royal figures), why the clubs became popular, and which of the many notorious legends about orgies, erotic libraries, and blasphemous rituals are true.

This history of the celebrated Oxford English Dictionary and its makers examines how and why the dictionary developed from 1928 to the present. The book explores the methods, biases, tradeoffs, and intentions of OED editors and others who battled to keep pace with the explosion in vocabulary, changing cultural attitudes, and technological advances.

Focusing on two of the most influential figures in the Pre-Raphaelite movement, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris, this book explores new ways of considering art and literature together. Elizabeth Helsinger traces the unprecedented relationship between the poetry and poetics of two poet-artists and their contemporary practice of visual art and design. ...

This authoritative anthology is the first to gather in one volume a selection of the best essays published in eighteenth- and early- nineteenth-century British periodicals. Thirteen consummate essayists from the era in which the genre was invented address the such contested topics as taste, war, natural history, manners, and gender relations.

Gigante shows how Christopher Smart, William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats engaged with scientific ideas about vital power and its generation and how they broke with poetic convention in imagining new forms of “life.”

This wide-ranging collection of Victorian essays reflects a varied and vigorous intellectual life quite unlike the narrow-minded, inhibited, and moralistic era that stereotypes suggest. With an introduction and notes by a leading expert in Victorian thought, the volume presents writings by Mill, Dickens, Eliot, Wilde, and many others of this spirited age.

Leonard Woolf’s satirical second novel, begun during his honeymoon with Virginia Stephen, offers an intriguing group portrait of the Woolfs and other members of the Bloomsbury Group as well as an engaging account of English society just before World War I. This new paperback edition includes a foreword by acclaimed biographer Victoria Glendinning.

This new collection of essays on Chaucer’s poetry is a single-volume guide to the best and most inventive work in Chaucerian studies today. Written with American undergraduate and graduate students in mind, the book considers the history and textual contexts of Chaucer’s work, current critical interpretation, and the poet’s place in literary history.

This hauntingly beautiful study explores how the English, in the centuries before the Norman Conquest, located themselves literally and imaginatively in the world. Nicholas Howe examines Anglo-Saxon representations of “place” in their texts and arrives at fascinating conclusions about how these migratory peoples made the island of Britain their home.

All but forgotten today, eight historic gardens that once flourished along the length of the Thames in early Tudor London are here historically recreated and analyzed in this richly illustrated book. One of the gardens belonged to Sir Thomas More, and the others to politically powerful friends and acquaintances of his. The stories of these long-lost gardens, brought together here for the first tim...

In this absorbing analysis of modern Irish writing, David Pierce examines the impact of the colonial encounter between Ireland and Britain. Considering themes of loss and struggle in works by Yeats and Joyce, Pierce also surveys contemporary Irish writing and the postmodern or postnationalist work of such crucial living writers as John Banville and Derek Mahon.

This inviting book explores reading practices in the Romantic Age through the lens of the notations that readers jotted in their books. H. J. Jackson analyzes the marginalia of British readers both famous and obscure. She discovers fascinating details about literacy, the availability of books, and how people were reading during the years from 1790 to 1830.

A major poet, writer, and painter, Rossetti was seen as the dominating cultural presence in the second half of the nineteenth century. This book presents a generous selection of his poetry, prose, and original translations, along with incisive commentaries and notes by eminent scholar Jerome McGann.

This book presents a generous sampling of the poetry and prose of Algernon Charles Swinburne, a touchstone Victorian poet and a major critic and fiction writer. The selections are accompanied by learned and critically incisive commentaries and notes.

This highly entertaining biography draws a full portrait of one of the most colorful figures in English political history, John Wilkes. Remembered as the father of the British free press, a champion of liberty, and a hero to American colonists, Wilkes enjoyed a rancorous political career (involving duels, imprisonments, and a famous massacre) as well as a notorious private life.

This book challenges prevailing assumptions, arguing that English literature emerged as a distinct category during the late sixteenth century in response to severely strained relations between England and Rome. Sean Keilen shows how English poets reworked familiar classical myths to invent a new point of departure for their own poetic history.

This volume collects the most important statements on the English language by Samuel Johnson, one of its greatest expositors and speakers. The book includes scholarly, fully annotated editions of Johnson’s main writings on the history, structure, and cultural importance of the English language as well as his reflections on lexicography. These texts represent Johnson’s thinking as he un...

This volume is the first scholarly edition of Samuel Johnson’s translation of Jean Pierre de Crousaz’s Commentaire sur la traduction en vers de M. Abbé Du Resnel, de l’Essai de M. Pope sur l’homme, published in 1739. Included are notes comparing Johnson’s translation with the French original to show his method of translation and historical annotations.

Rebecca West’s never-before-published Survivors in Mexico brings to readers a daring and provocative work by a major twentieth-century author. This book is an exhilarating exploration of Mexican history, religion, art, and culture, exploring the inner lives of figures ranging from Cortés and Montezuma to Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and Leon Trotsky.

This anthology of Edmund Burke’s important speeches, letters, and pamphlets shows the genius of the great eighteenth-century British statesman and the depth of his concern with reform—particularly in America, India, and Ireland. Selected, introduced, and annotated by David Bromwich, these writings cover Burke’s thinking over his entire career and across the wide range of his poli...

Essayist, lecturer, and radical pamphleteer, William Hazlitt (1778-1830) was the greatest of English critics and a master of the art of prose. This book is a superb appreciation of the man and his works, at once a revaluation of the aesthetics of Romanticism and a sustained intellectual portrait. Nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism when it was first published in 1983,...

What was the life of an eighteenth-century British genteel woman like? This lively book, based on letters, diaries, and account books of over on hundred middle class women, transforms our understanding of the position of women in Georgian England.

Nearly five centuries after Thomas More wrote Utopia, his book continues to address issues of powerful contemporary concern—religious pluralism, women’s rights, state-sponsored education, colonialism, and justified warfare. Clarence Miller’s new translation of this foundational text in philosophy and political theory reflects with unprecedented accuracy the sense and tone ...

This pathbreaking book of feminist criticism is now reissued with a substantial new introduction by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar that reveals the origins of their revolutionary realization in the 1970s that “the personal was the political, the sexual was the textual.”

In 1762 James Boswell, then twenty-two years old, left Edinburgh for London. The famous Journal he kept during the next nine months is an intimate account of his encounters with the high-life and the low-life in London. Frank and confessional as a personal portrait of the young Boswell, the Journal is also revealing as a vivid portrayal of life in eighteenth-century London. This new ...

In Ronald Paulson’s latest book, he turns his attention to the subject of sin vs. evil and the important distinction between the two that today is widely ignored. Roaming through Western literature, Paulson shows how questions of evil and sin—and evil and sinful behavior—are addressed by authors from Ovid to Shakespeare to Vonnegut.

Recorded in the massive archives of the great Oxford English Dictionary are previously untold tales of complex word battles fought by the OED creators. This delightful book charts the arguments and controversies over words, definitions, pronunciation, and more as lexicographers struggled to provide the definitive inventory of the English language. 

In his lifetime considered the equal of contemporaries Coleridge and Wordsworth, Robert Southey has faded in prominence since his death. This lively new biography restores him to the map of English literature, revealing a more complex man than previously assumed and one whose writings and political views had greater impact than has been recognized.

This book is a fresh account of liberal thought from its roots in seventeenth-century English thinking to the end of the eighteenth century. Annabel Patterson examines the careers of such prominent individuals as Edmund Burke, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Thomas Erskine, arguing that while these and many other Whigs strayed from liberal principles on occasion, they were true progressives.

John Wilmot, the notorious Earl of Rochester, was the darling of the polished, profligate court of Charles II. One of the finest poets of the Restoration, patron to important playwrights, model for countless witty young rakes in Restoration comedies, he lived a full but short life, dying in 1680 (with a dramatic deathbed renunciation of his atheism) at the age of thirty-three. This edition of Roch...

Although Andrew Marvell is best known as the author of exquisite lyrics and provocative political poems, in his own seventeenth century he was famous for his brilliant political polemics. This is the first modern edition of all Marvell’s prose pamphlets, complete with introductions and annotation explaining the historical context.

Although Andrew Marvell is best known as the author of exquisite lyrics and provocative political poems, in his own seventeenth century he was famous for his brilliant political polemics. This is the first modern edition of all Marvell’s prose pamphlets, complete with introductions and annotation explaining the historical context.

The 121 letters in this volume were exchanged between James Boswell and twenty-six correspondents between 1760 and 1763. The letters, all but one written after Boswell’s first brief escapade in London, concern the period up to and including his second momentous visit there in 1763. During this period Boswell savors the delights of London’s high life and low, first meets Samuel Johnson,...

This book rewrites the standard history of aesthetics. Focusing on the dramatic tension between appetite and aesthetics in British literature, Taste resituates Romanticism as a period that naturally saw the rise of the restaurant and gastronomy as a cultural field for the practice of aesthetics.

James Raven presents a lively and original history of the English book trade and the printers, booksellers, and entrepreneurs who promoted its development from the advent of printing to 1850. Introducing a cast of heroes and heroines, villains, and rogues, he presents an entirely new view of the business of books and how it was conducted.

The style of the medieval period, which flows through the bloodstream of western culture, was vigorously re-established in post-Enlightenment England. This one-volume history of the Medieval Revival is the first coherent account of it, especially those aspects that are expressed and reflected in literature. The book focuses on the period 1760 to 1971, with an Epilogue on the reverberations of medi...

Hubbub takes us on a not-for-the-squeamish tour of pre-Industrial Revolution England, where city streets are crowded, noisy, filthy, and reeking of smoke and decay. Focusing on offenses to the eyes, ears, nose, taste buds, and skin, the book explores the daily experience of the rich and the poor and paints a nuanced and highly detailed portrait of English city life.

What makes the English so English? Is there such a thing as an English national character? This highly original book traces the surprisingly varied history of ideas among the English about their own “national character” and how it has changed over the last two hundred years.

This book provides a lively account of Charles II’s Long Parliament, drawing on unofficial contemporary accounts—letters, memoirs, diaries, scofflaw pamphlets and more—to uncover an accurate historical picture for the first time.

This volume, first in the Yale Research Series of Boswell’s journals, presents the complete and fully annotated text of Boswell’s diaries and notes as he travelled through the German and Swiss territories from mid-June, 1764 to New Year’s Day, 1765.

This timely and groundbreaking study of the history and reception of Horace Walpole’s extraordinary collections coincides with a planned restoration of his home, Strawberry Hill. An international team of distinguished scholars explores the ways in which the house and its collections engaged with the creation of various and interconnected political, national, dy...

This book explores the Bluestocking Salon, an intellectual center of debate established in 18th-century England by a group of women.

This excellent verse translation brings to English-language readers the great German epic poem that inspired Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Written 800 years ago, the poem tells the sweeping story of the downfall of the Burgundians at the hands of the Huns and their King Attila. The translation underscores both the literary and historic value of the poem.

This elegantly written book—a major reinterpretation of Spain’s theater of kings in the Golden Age—examines Spanish drama’s complex relations with the culture of absolutism and the rise of the modern state.

When they first met in 1794, shortly after the Reign of Terror, Germaine de Staël and Benjamin Constant were both in their twenties, both married, and both outsiders. She was already celebrated and a published writer, whereas he, though ambitious, was unknown. This compelling dual biography tells the extraordinary story of their union and disunion, set against a...

This book offers a new perspective on the fraught processes through which Spain has attempted to construct a national identity from the Enlightenment to the present day. Cultural critic Susan Martin-Márquez focuses on the nation’s ambivalence toward its Islamic/African legacy to illuminate the complexities and disorientations of modern Spanish identity.

In this groundbreaking study, unique in English, Joseph Luzzi considers Italian Romanticism and the modern myth of Italy. Ranging across European and international borders, he examines the metaphors, facts, and fictions about Italy that were born in the Romantic age and continue to haunt the global literary imagination.

This lavishly illustrated book explores medieval Castilian culture and the Arabic, Hebrew, and Christian strands that are inextricably woven into its fabric. The authors paint a vivid portrait of the culture through its arts, architecture, poetry and prose, all enriched by dynamic interaction with disparate cultures and peoples.

In this monumental work of literary history and criticism, Italian critic Francesco Orlando explores Western literature’s obsession with outmoded and nonfunctional objects--ruins, obsolete machinery, trash, etc. He roams across centuries, languages, and genres, tracing the obsession to an eighteenth-century turning point when functionality became a dominant value.

Rolena Adorno investigates the works of Spanish and Amerindian writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—Bartolomé de las Casas in particular—and argues that the debates over the Spanish conquests have resonated in Latin American literature ever since.

A complete man of letters, Kornei Chukovsky stood for several decades at the center of the Russian literary milieu and knew virtually everyone involved in twentieth-century Russian literature. His extensive diaries, for the first time translated into English, provide a candid commentary on fifty years among Soviet literati and their predicament under a totalitarian regime.

This diary by the famed twentieth-century Russian writer—now available in English for the first time—recounts Babel’s experiences with the Cossack cavalry during the Polish-Soviet war of 1919-1920. The basis for Red Cavalry, Babel’s best-known work, it records the devastation of the war, the extreme cruelty of the Polish and Red armies alike toward the Jewish populat...

First published in Paris in 1511, The Praise of Folly has enjoyed enormous and highly controversial success from the author’s lifetime down to our own day. The Folly has no rival, except perhaps Thomas More’s Utopia, as the most intense and lively presentation of the literary, social, and theological aims and methods of Northern Humanism. Clarence H. ...

This rich anthology of contemporary Italian fiction in English presents short stories and excerpts from novels that were originally published in Italian between 1975 and 2001. Each selection is accompanied by a short introduction and biography of the writer, and there is also a comprehensive general introduction to recent Italian literary trends.

Among the most influential novels of all time, Cervantes’ Don Quixote remains as appealing today as when it was written four hundred years ago. This book is an original and beautifully written literary excursion into Cervantes’ masterpiece, how he came to write it, and how it has influenced great writers and thinkers across centuries and continents.

Legal developments during Spain’s Golden Age not only transformed the country into a modern state, they also irrevocably changed Western literature. This fascinating book explores Cervantes’ work to show how the author drew on new legal records to explore human deviance and desire and as inspiration for modern representations of love.

Perhaps more than any other writer, Franz Kafka jolted twentieth-century consciousness. This compelling biography of the great Czech novelist, diarist, and short story writer chronicles Kafka’s entire life, offering new insights into the enigmatic genius and his unsettling works. The book is the first to address the importance of Kafka’s complex relationship with his father.

Norman R. Shapiro here presents a collection of superb new translations of more than 150 poems by the three most highly acclaimed French Renaissance poets—Clément Marot, Joachim Du Bellay, and Pierre de Ronsard. The original French lyric poems—some well-known, others less familiar—appear alongside Shapiro’s creative and spirited English translations.

Les Femmes et la tradition littéraire, a two-part anthology, offers a sweeping historical overview of women’s literature in France from the twelfth century to the present. Generously illustrated and richly annotated, it presents writers such as Hélisenne de Crenne, Gabrielle de Villeneuve, Louise Ackermann and Renée Vivien along with more familiar figures including Lab&...

This second volume of Les Femmes et la Tradition Littéraire encompasses women’s literature in France from the nineteenth century to the present day. Presenting the work of writers both famous and little-known, the anthology introduces each writer, annotates each selection, and offers analyses of the roles the writings have played in French literature and culture.  
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Surrealism was perhaps the most prominent avant-garde movement of the twentieth century, and its most famous arbiter, André Breton, wrote extensively about the history and nature of the movement. This volume examines the works and theories of an array of writers, artists, and thinkers who engage in dialogue with Breton’s surrealism.

Arp’s renown as a foremost artist and sculptor of the 20th century has overshadowed the fact that he considered himself above all a poet. This groundbreaking book reveals that Arp’s practices as painter, poet, and sculptor are not only complementary but mutually dependent facets of a coherent aesthetic strategy.

In this inspired book—a literary gem full of sardonic wit, brilliant insights, and provocative criticism—eminent Polish author Witold Gombrowicz reflects on seven great philosophers. He discusses Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Heidegger in six “one-hour” essays, then allows Marx a short “fifteen-minute” piece.

Witold Gombrowicz’s final novel, here translated into English for the first time directly from the Polish, is a compelling and multifaceted work. Within the genre of crime fiction, the author explores the arbitrariness of language, the joke of human freedom, the psychological travails of humanity, and other themes central to his writings.

This new translation for the first time offers a complete and accurate English rendition of Mikhail Bulgakov’s first novel. Recounting the saga of a Russian family plunged into the chaos of civil war, Bulgakov contrasts the cruelty and violence of the era with individual acts of humanity, addressing important themes that concerned him throughout his writing lif...

In this engaging book, Witold Gombrowicz presents the only account he ever wrote of his early life and literary beginnings in Poland. Here translated into English for the first time, Polish Memories reveals the importance of his experiences in interwar Poland as well as the numerous autobiographical allusions in his fiction.

Ferdydurke is translated here directly from the Polish for the first time. Danuta Borchardt deftly captures Gombrowicz’s playful and idiosyncratic style, and she allows English speakers to experience fully the masterpiece of a writer whom Milan Kundera describes as “one of the great novelists of our century.”

This original examination of the work of Czeslaw Milosz, Witold Gombrowicz, and seven other modern Polish writers demonstrates their concerns not only with the social and political issues of their day but also with the metaphysical and transcendent.

This book tells the story of a generation of leading Polish literary intellectuals who came of age after the First World War. Using newly available archival material, Marci Shore explores why these writers came to embrace Marxism and what the implications of that choice were: a tragic, half-century-long journey of intellectual idealism and disillusionment.

In this invigorating new assessment of Anna Karenina, Gary Saul Morson overturns traditional interpretations of the classic novel. He offers brilliant analyses of Anna and other characters, argues that Tolstoy’s ideas are far more radical than has been thought, and shows that the author’s ethical, philosophical, and social concerns resonate with important issues of our own time....

A work of universal appeal and significance, The Brothers Karamazov today “remains harrowingly alive in the face of our present day worries, paradoxes, and joys,” observes Dostoevsky scholar Robin Feuer Miller. In this engaging and original book, she guides us through the complexities of Dostoevsky’s masterpiece, offering keen insights...

This groundbreaking book examines how five writers and poets of Jewish descent contributed to the development of a Ukrainian-Jewish literary tradition from the 1880s through the 1990s. The author challenges assumptions about modern Jewish acculturation, Ukrainian-Jewish relations, post-colonial culture, and more.

This book examines the great burst of artistic experimentation that transformed the modest Russian town of Vitebsk into an influential center of the avant-garde soon after the October Revolution. Marc Chagall, El Lissitsky, Kazimir Malevich and other luminaries flourished there, inspiring one another and changing the course of modern art history.

Robin Feuer Miller approaches Dostoevsky’s major works from a variety of angles and offers new keys to understanding the continuing power of his fiction in our own times. Miller explores Dostoevsky’s recurring themes, focusing particular attention on the conversions, perversions, and deconversions that abound in his fiction.

This collection of splendid new translations of Maxim Gorky’s classic writings on Tolstoy, Chekhov, and other great Russian authors, along with selected reminiscences about Gorky by his contemporaries, brings the private and enigmatic author into clearer view than ever before. Donald Fanger’s Introduction to the volume is nothing short of a tour de force.

This book presents superb new translations of three of the most important poems of Anna Akhmatova, one of twentieth-century Russia’s greatest poets. Extensive commentary accompanies each poem, and a biography and an overview of the political and cultural forces that shaped Akhmatova’s work are also featured.

This diary by the famed twentieth-century Russian writer—now available in English for the first time—recounts Babel’s experiences with the Cossack cavalry during the Polish-Soviet war of 1919-1920. The basis for Red Cavalry, Babel’s best-known work, it records the devastation of the war, the extreme cruelty of the Polish and Red armies alike toward the Jewish populat...

This book offers the original hypothesis that the novels of Russian-turned-American writer Vladimir Nabokov are highly relevant to the political transformation underway in Russia today. Nina Khrushcheva suggests that Nabokov’s fictional Western characters can be useful guides for acquiring new skills that the advent of democracy, capitalism, and open borders re...