Edward W. Said locates Joseph Conrad's fear of personal disintegration in his constant re-narration of the past. Using the author's personal letters as a guide to understanding his fiction, Said draws an important parallel between Conrad's view of his...

Introduction: First And Last Romantics -- The Internalization Of Quest Romance -- Visionary Cinema Of Romantic Poetry -- Dialectic Of The Marriage Of Heaven And Hell -- Blake's Jerusalem: The Bard Of Sensibility And The Form Of Prophecy -- Napoleon And...

According to Greek mythology, Laocoon was a Trojan priest who, along with his two sons, offended the gods. As punishment, the three were strangled by sea serpents. The discovery in 1506 of an ancient Greek sculpture showing the three figures in their...

This collection of twenty-nine original essays, surveys satire from its emergence in Western literature to the present.Tracks satire from its first appearances in the prophetic books of the Old Testament through the Renaissance and the English tradition...

An exhaustive study of satire in the long eighteenth century.Outstanding Academic Title, ChoiceIn The Practice of Satire in England, 1658–1770, Ashley Marshall explores how satire was conceived and understood by writers and readers of the period. Her...

A major collection of essays on the novel.Michael McKeon, author of The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740, here assembles a collection of influential essays on the theory of the novel. Carefully chosen selections from Frye, Benjamin, Lévi-Strauss,...

A keen, ardent celebration of unbridled female ambition in the work of Taylor Swift and Sylvia PlathIn The Slicks, Maggie Nelson positions culture-dominating pop superstar Taylor Swift and feminist cult icon Sylvia Plath as twin hosts of the female urge...

In White's view, beyond the surface level of the historical text, there is a deep structural, or latent, content that is generally poetic and specifically linguistic in nature. This deeper content - the metahistorical element - indicates what an...

The first complete translation of Albert Camus's personal notebooks written between 1933 and 1959, including new material never before published in English. Throughout his career, French writer and philosopher Albert Camus kept a series of notebooks...

A quietly powerful exploration of memory and forgetting, from one of France's leading feminist public intellectuals In 2021, the award‑winning French writer Lola Lafon was granted permission to stay overnight--alone for ten hours--in the Annex in...

An NPR Most Anticipated Book of Fall 2025 A revealing exploration of a quarter century of cultural stagnation, examining the commercial and technological forces that have come to dominate contemporary culture—from music and fashion to art, film, TV, and...

One of the Washington Post’s 50 Best Nonfiction Books of 2024 | A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice | A Boston Globe Best Book of 2024“Ambitious, intelligent, and happily unpretentious.” —Louis Menand, The New Yorker“Convincing, idiosyncratic...

The first ever collection of John Edgar Wideman’s most influential essays and articles, five decades of cultural and literary criticism that paint a vivid portrait of America’s changing landscape and chronicle the emergence and evolution of a major...

We embraced the mediated life--from Facetune and Venmo to meme culture and the Metaverse--because these technologies offer novelty and convenience. But they also transform our sense of self and warp the boundaries between virtual and real. What are the...

A radiant new memoir from artist and writer Patti Smith, author of the National Book Award winner Just Kids“God whispers through a crease in the wallpaper,” writes Patti Smith in this moving account of her life. A post–World War II childhood unfolds in a...