Marx’s Literary Style argues that a true understanding of Marx’s work requires a careful study of his literary choicesIn Marx’s Literary Style, the Venezuelan poet and philosopher Ludovico Silva argues that much of the confusion around Marx’s work...

With the erudition that has distinguished his lifelong study of literary criticism, Wellek considers the trends, theories, and quarrels of recent years. He continues to insist that criticism--whether written by structuralists, phenomenologists, Marxists,...

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Discoverers demonstrates the truth behind the aphorism that if Cleopatra's nose had been shorter, the face of the world would have been changed. Boorstin goes on to uncover the elements of accident, improvisation...

From the Nobel Prize–winning writer, a new collection of literary and personal essaysOld Truths and New Clichés collects nineteen essays—most of them previously unpublished in English—by Isaac Bashevis Singer on topics that were central to his artistic...

In this lively exploration of America’s intellectual heritage, acclaimed poet, novelist, and critic Jay Parini celebrates the life and times of thirteen books that helped shape the American psyche.Moving nimbly between the great watersheds in American...

Proposes that we can best understand literature’s relationship to sex through a renewed focus on masochism. In a series of readings that engage American and European works of fiction, drama, and theory from the late nineteenth through the early...

Michèle Longino examines the ways in which Mediterranean exoticism alters the themes in French classical drama through the exploration of such plays by Corneille, Molière and Racine as Le Cid, Médée, and Le bourgeois gentilhomme among others. She...

The emperor Julian once claimed that of all things innovation was what he most abhored; the fifteen papers collected in this volume attempt to reveal various strands of innovation in Byzantine arts. Contributors include: A Kazhdan (Innovation in...

Looming large in the popular imagination as a serious poet and lively drunk who died in penury, Edgar Allan Poe was also the most celebrated and notorious writer of his day. He died broke and alone at the age of forty, but not before he had written some...

"How much history can be communicated by pressure on a guitar string?" Robert Palmer wondered in Deep Blues. Greil Marcus answers here: more than we will ever know. It is the history in the riff, in the movie or novel or photograph, in the actor's pose...

What can Alice in Wonderland teach us about childhood? Could reading Conversations with Friends guide us through first love? Does Esther Greenwood’s glittering success and subsequent collapse in The Bell Jar help us understand ambition? And, finally,...

* * * Winner of the 2014 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books * * * Stuff Matters by Mark Miodnownik is a unique and inspiring exploration of human creativity. 'Enthralling. A mission to re-acquaint us with the wonders of the fabric that sustains...

A powerful reimagining of the world in which a young Charles Darwin developed his theory of evolution.When Charles Darwin returned to Britain from the Beagle voyage in 1836, the most talked-about scientific books of the day were the Bridgewater Treatises...

Text: English, French (translation)

Richard Stonley has all but vanished from history, but to his contemporaries he would have been an enviable figure. A clerk of the Exchequer for more than four decades under Mary Tudor and Elizabeth I, he rose from obscure origins to a life of opulence;...