A meditation on time, violence, and chance by "one of America's most dazzling poets" (O, The Oprah Magazine)Fanny Howe's The Needle's Eye: Passing through Youth is a sequence of essays, short tales, and lyrics that are intertwined by an inner visual...

A "beginning," especially as embodied in much modern thought, is its own method, Edward Said argues in this classic treatise on the role of the intellectual and the goal of criticism. Distinguishing between "origin," which is divine, mythical, and...

That Sartre's study of Flaubert, The Family Idiot, is a towering achievement in intellectual history has never been disputed. Yet critics have argued about the precise nature of this novel, or biography, or "criticism-fiction" which is the summation of...

Terry Eagleton's Tragedy provides a major critical and analytical account of the concept of 'tragedy' from its origins in the Ancient world right down to the twenty-first century.A major new intellectual endeavour from one of the world's finest, and most...

Focusing on theories of verbal symbolism, Tzvetan Todorov here presents a history of semiotics. From an account of the semiotic doctrines embodied in the works of classical rhetoric to an exploration of representative modern concepts of the symbol found...

The novels of Wyndham Lewis have generally been associated with the work of the great modernists – Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Yeats – who were his sometime friends and collaborators. Lewis’s originality, however, can only be fully grasped when it is understood...

The New England Mind: From Colony to Province is one of Perry Miller’s masterworks, exploring the intellectual history of the Puritans through a deep investigation of the thought of the Puritan divines. In this book, as well as its predecessor The New...

In The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century, as well as successor The New England Mind: From Colony to Province, Perry Miller asserts a single intellectual history for America that could be traced to the Puritan belief system.

A poet, scholar, philosopher, religious thinker, translator, and teacher, Viacheslav Ivanov (1866-1949) was one of the most extraordinary figures of Russia's tumultuous twentieth century. As a young scholar, he worked with European luminaries, studying...

Susan Sontag’s celebrated essays on cancer and AIDS now available in one volume.In 1978, Sontag wrote Illness as Metaphor, a classic work described by Newsweek as “one of the most liberating books of its time.” A cancer patient herself when she was...

A brilliant, clear-eyed consideration of the visual representation of violence in our culture—its ubiquity, meanings, and effects. Considered one of the greatest critics of her generation, Susan Sontag followed up her monumental On Photography with an...

The Age of Milton: Backgrounds to Seventeenth-Century Literature paperback edited by C.A. Patrides & Raymond B. Waddington Barnes & Noble 1980

Book by Williams Raymond

A collection of seminal essays, many appearing in English for the first time, which provides an excellent overview of the critical theory developed by the Frankfurt School.

In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore an eighteenth-century walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work brought to light a crucial question for our age: Who gets to live in paradise, and how can we share it while there's...

In 2008, academic and scholar Susan Gubar was told by a trusted oncologist that she had only a few years left to live. Though she outlived that dire prognosis, this brush with mortality refocused her attention on the boons of a longevity she did not...

A vibrant guide to the world of literature, from dramatic plays to engrossing novels Literature has inspired every civilisation, from Greek myth to today's graphic novels. John Sutherland, who has researched, taught and written on the entire glorious...

Language, historically speaking, has always been slippery. Two dictionaries provide two different maps of the universe: which one is true, or are both false? Speaking in Tongues--taking the form of a dialogue between Nobel laureate novelist J. M. Coetzee...