How virility and Jewishness became hallmarks of postwar New York’s combative intellectual sceneIn the years following World War II, the New York intellectuals became some of the most renowned critics and writers in the country. Although mostly male and...

How the idea of the author was born in the battleground of genderWhen Sappho sang her songs, the only word that existed to describe a poet was a male one—aoidos, or “singer-man.” The most famous woman poet of ancient Greece, whose craft was one of words,...

Studie over het werk van de Italiaanse dichter Dante Alighieri (1265-1321).

People and Places is a delightful collection of 22 articles and reviews written by Richard Cobb over the past ten years. The selections-- many appearing here for the first time--include recollections of old university friends, essays on authors and...

How decolonization and the cold war influenced literature from Africa, Asia, and the CaribbeanHow did superpower competition and the cold war affect writers in the decolonizing world? In The Aesthetic Cold War, Peter Kalliney explores the various ways...

How Black poets have charted the direction of American poetics for the past two centuriesBefore Modernism examines how Black poetics, in antagonism with White poetics in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, produced the conditions for the...

"Deep Time: A Literary History challenges the exclusive association between deep time and the modern science of geology by focusing on late Enlightenment writings that used narrative form to integrate new empirical data and methods with Western and...

A “delightful” (Vanity Fair) collection from the longest-running, most influential book review in America, featuring its best, funniest, strangest, and most memorable coverage over the past 125 years.Since its first issue on October 10, 1896, The New...

World-renowned folklorist Maria Tatar reveals an astonishing but long-buried history of heroines, taking us from Cassandra and Scheherazade to Nancy Drew and Wonder Woman.The Heroine with 1,001 Faces dismantles the cult of warrior heroes, revealing a...

By acclaimed Forward Prize winner, novelist, and poet, Kei Miller's linked collection of essays blends memoir and literary commentary to explore the silences that exist in our conversations about race, sex, and gender. In a deeply moving, critical and...

A NEW YORK TIMES CRITICS' TOP BOOK OF THE YEAR * One of our most brilliant biographers takes on one of our greatest living playwrights, drawing on a wealth of new materials and on many conversations with him. "An extraordinary record of a vital and...

An electric portrait of the artist as a young woman that asks how a writer finds her voice in a society that prefers women to be silent In Recollections of My Nonexistence, Rebecca Solnit describes her formation as a writer and as a feminist in 1980s San...

Book by Kermode, Frank

The relationship of texts and maps, and the mappability of literature, examined from Homer to Houellebecq.Literary authors have frequently called on elements of cartography to ground fictional space, to visualize sites, and to help readers get their...

What is fame? A name? A face? The "it" in "making it"? In this wide-ranging and ambitious book, Leo Braudy traces the evolving definition of fame from the time of Homer to the present. As Braudy points out, fame is far from just a 20th-century obsession:...

Articulates the role black theatricality played in the radical energy of the sixties Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left illustrates the black political ideas that radicalized the artistic endeavors of musicians, playwrights, and actors...

In this brilliant collection, the follow-up to her New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer, the distinguished novelist, literary critic, and essayist celebrates the pleasures of reading and pays homage to the works and writers she admires above...

Throughout Western history, there have been those who felt compelled to share a dissenting opinion on public matters, while still hoping to avoid the social, political, and even criminal consequences for exercising free speech. In this collection of...

Representations of Catholic women appear with surprising frequency in the literature of post-Reformation England. Playwrights and poets from William Shakespeare to Andrew Marvell invoke the figure of the nun to powerful and often perplexing effect, and...

Co-Winner, James Russell Lowell Prize, Modern Language Association This major study offers a broad view of the writing and careers of eighteenth-century women poets, casting new light on the ways in which poetry was read and enjoyed, on changing poetic...