Duke Wolff was a flawless specimen of the American clubman -- a product of Yale and the OSS, a one-time fighter pilot turned aviation engineer. Duke Wolff was a failure who flunked out of a series of undistinguished schools, was passed up for military...

I am trying to learn, with my tongue, sounds that are unfamiliar to me. A foreign-sounding word learned out of curiosity is not "imitation" per se. All of these things I learn leave traces that slowly grow to coexist with my accent. And that balancing...

"Wielding the satiric tone of a Gen-X Jonathan Swift or leftist Andy Kaufman . . . Svenonius is an engaging companion . . . and he lands some scathing blows, as when he links internet porn to contemporary Christianity by noting that both are...

Terry Eagleton's book, in this vital new series from Blackwell, focuses on discriminating different meanings of culture, as a way of introducing to the general reader the contemporary debates around it.

Terry Eagleton's work has had a powerful influence in debates about the politics of literature and culture. His writings have had a marked impact too on how these subjects are taught and studied. Always maintaining a clear sense of political goal, his...

"Black Knights is the first book to offer a broad, theoretically grounded exploration of race in the creative literature of the Islamic Middle Ages (ca. eighth to fourteenth centuries). Rachel Schine reveals how the creators of popular epics of the...

First published in 1979, Joan Didion's The White Album records indelibly the upheavals and aftermaths of the 1960s. Examining key events, figures, and trends of the era—including Charles Manson, the Black Panthers, and the shopping mall—through the lens...

Una clase magistral sobre la actualidad y el oficio de novelista por el Premio Nobel de Literatura Mario Vargas Llosa.Universidad de Princeton, Nueva Jersey, 2015. Durante un semestre, Mario Vargas Llosa impartió junto a Rubén Gallo un curso sobre...

This book offers a detailed account of Spinoza's influence on various schools of present-day critical thought. That influence extends from Althusserian Marxism to hermeneutics, deconstruction, narrative poetics, new historicism, and the unclassifiable...

Jerome Mazzaro examines Dante's Vita Nuova as an artistic correlative to what Dante conceived as an image of himself. Specifically, he explores the structure of the work in relation to medieval views of memory, self, music, form, and interpretation, and...

Analyzing literature, architecture, and patterns of living, the author traces the persistent meanings of modernity, seeing in its chief concerns and expressions a will to change accompanied by a terror of life falling apart

This study explores two categories―empire and citizenship―that historians usually study separately. It does so with a unifying focus on racialization in the lives of outstanding women whose careers crossed national borders between 1880 and 1965. It puts...

The story of our ongoing fascination with Homer, the man and the myth. Homer, the great poet of the Iliad and the Odyssey, is revered as a cultural icon of antiquity and a figure of lasting influence. But his identity is shrouded in questions about who...

Continuing the project begun in The Poetics of Postmodernism, Linda Hutcheon focuses on the politics of representation. Looking at both mass media and high art forms, she challenges the seeming transparency and apparent apolitical innocence of our visual...

Best-selling author Umberto Eco's latest work unlocks the riddles of history in an exploration of the "linguistics of the lunatic," stories told by scholars, scientists, poets, fanatics, and ordinary people in order to make sense of the world. Exploring...

A penetrating study and celebration of Northern Irish literature--telling the region's story through the extraordinary novels and poetry produced by decades of conflict. Northern Ireland is one hundred years old. Northern Ireland does not exist. Both...

Should art be determined by political ideals? In recent decades art institutions have sought to embody liberal values of universal equality and social justice. This move toward greater inclusivity has borne witness to a countervailing trend: artworks are...

How did creative genius develop in tandem with the criminalization of Blackness in the early United States?In Criminal Genius in African American and US Literature, 1793–1845, Erin Forbes uncovers a model of racialized, collective agency in American...

Essays on music, art, pop culture, literature, and politics by the renowned essayist and observer of contemporary life, now collected together for the first time. The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick is a companion collection to The Collected...