Explores the relationship between religion and authority across civilizations and cultures

The writer Hari Kunzru says “made me feel better about the Apocalypse than I have in ages” is back—with a hilarious coming-of-age love storyThe unruly undergraduates at Cambridge have a nickname for their new lecturer: Wittgenstein Jr. He’s a...

The Description for this book, The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s, will be forthcoming.

This major interpretation of the life and art of Robert Lowell exposes the full relationship between the poetry and the personal and national experience to which it is so remarkably connected. Steven Axelrod proposes that the key to our understanding of...

During her lifetime Marianne Moore was that rarest of combinations, a genuine leader in the art of poetry, as well as a bona fide celebrity. She was an instantly recognisable symbol of Brooklyn, New York, appearing on the cover of Life magazine, asked by...

“Modern Italy”may sound like an oxymoron. For Western civilization,Italian culture represents the classical past and the continuity of canonical tradition,while modernity is understood in contrary terms of rupture and rapid innovation. Charting the...

George Chapman's translations of Homer--immortalized by Keats's sonnet-- are the most famous in the English language. Swinburne praised their "romantic and sometimes barbaric grandeur," their "freshness, strength, and inextinguishable fire." And the...

A new exploration of community and classical German aesthetics. Within the German tradition, the great promise of beauty is to link particular experiences within a conception of the whole. But this aesthetic promise has long been viewed as an aesthetic...

As a propagandist Claudian offers unique illumination of the intrigues inside and between the rival courts of Milan and Constantinople in the decisive years following the death of Theodosius the Great. As a poet, though a Greek by birth, he revived Latin...

Preface by Richard Howard. Translated by Richard Miller. This is Barthes's scrupulous literary analysis of Balzac's short story "Sarrasine."

A vivid narration of the history of the tulip, from its origins on the barren, windswept steppes of central Asia to its place of honor in the lush imperial gardens of Constantinople, to its starring moment as the most coveted—and beautiful—commodity in...

Noam Chomsky is one of the most outspoken thinkers in the US and views the spread of a single global culture as resulting in a form of cultural imperialism from which only the Western world can truly benefit.

Negative Dialects is a phrase that flouts tradition. As early as Plato, dialectics meant to achieve something positive by means of negation; the thought figure of a 'negation of negation' later became the succinct term. This book seeks to free dialectics...