Comparative literature

A look at 100 inspiring novels that have left a significant mark on the world of literature and popular culture. Before the novel, the world of books was dominated by scientific tomes, religious tracts and histories of the victorious in war. There had...

A dazzling biography of two interwoven, tragic lives: John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald.‘Highly engaging … Go now, read this book’ THE TIMES ‘For awhile after you quit Keats,’ Fitzgerald once wrote, ‘All other poetry seems to be only whistling or...

A 2023 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Finalist in the Anthologies CategoryThis anthology, the first of this kind in twenty-five years, collects eighteen astounding works of Jewish fiction. This is the first anthology of translated multilingual Jewish...

Why do books have chapters? With this seemingly simple question, Nicholas Dames embarks on a literary journey spanning two millennia, revealing how an ancient editorial technique became a universally recognised component of narrative art and a means to...

The Critical Situation: Vexed Perspectives in Postmodern Literary Studies comprises a diverse selection of essays that register the situatedness of critical theory and practice amid various intellectual, institutional, and cultural contexts.In recent...

A timely story of a forgotten emotionCheerfulness: A Literary and Cultural History tells a new story about the cultural imagination of the West wherein cheerfulness - a momentary uptick in emotional energy, a temporary lightening of spirit - functions as...

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...

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...

Sicily and the strategies of empire in the poetic imagination of classical and medieval EuropeIn the first century BC, Cicero praised Sicily as Rome's first overseas province and confirmed it as the mythic location for the abduction of Proserpina, known...

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collection of literary and personal essaysOld Truths and New Clichs collects nineteen essays-most of them previously unpublished in English-by Isaac Bashevis Singer on topics that were central to his artistic...

Up from the Depths tells the interconnected stories of two of the most important writers in American history-the novelist and poet Herman Melville (18191891) and one of his earliest biographers, the literary critic and historian Lewis Mumford (18951990)...

Reading literature in a time of climate emergency can sometimes feel a bit like fiddling while Rome burns. Yet, at this turning point for the planet, scientists, policymakers, and activists have woken up to the power of stories in the fight against...

On Belonging and Not Belonging provides a sophisticated exploration of how themes of translation, migration, and displacement shape an astonishing range of artistic works. From the possibilities and limitations of translation addressed by Jhumpa Lahiri...

Eating and drinking can be aesthetic experiences as well as sensory ones. The Hungry Eye takes readers from antiquity to the Renaissance to explore the central role of food and drink in literature, art, philosophy, religion, and statecraft.In this...

A rich history of underwater filmmaking and how it has profoundly influenced the aesthetics of movies and public perception of the oceans.In The Underwater Eye, Margaret Cohen tells the fascinating story of how the development of modern diving equipment...

Acclaimed literary historian Schmidt provides a unique meditation on the rediscovery of Gilgamesh and its profound influence on poets today. He describes how the poem is a work in progress even now, an undertaking that has drawn on the talents and...

Winner of the NAVSA Best Book of the Year, North American Victorian Studies AssociationFrom the opening of trade with Britain in the 1850s, Japan occupied a unique and contradictory place in the Victorian imagination, regarded as both a rival empire and...

From the author of the definitive biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky, never-before-published lectures that provide an accessible introduction to the Russian writer's major works Joseph Frank (1918-2013) was perhaps the most important Dostoevsky...