Literature: History & Criticism

During the eighteenth century, some of the most popular British poetry showed a responsiveness to animals that anticipated the later language of an...

"One Kind of Everything" elucidates the uses of autobiography and constructions of personhood in American poetry since World War II, with helpful r...

During the eighteenth century, some of the most popular British poetry showed a responsiveness to animals that anticipated the later language of an...

French symbolist artist Odilon Redon (1840-1916) seemed to thrive at the intersection of literature and art. Known as "the painter-writer", he drew...

Our thoughts are shaped as much by what things make of us as by what we make of them. Lyric poetry is especially concerned with things and their re...

Praised in recent years as a “calculating, improvisatory, essential poet” by Daisy Fried in the New York Times, Charles Bernstein is a leading voic...

"After Auschwitz to write even a single poem is barbaric." "The Conflagration of Community" challenges Theodor Adorno's famous statement about aest...

What was the Enlightenment? Though many scholars have attempted to solve this riddle, none has made as much use of contemporary answers as Dan Edel...

At the start of the twentieth century, tales of "how the other half lives" experienced a surge in popularity. People looking to go slumming without...

Praised in recent years as a “calculating, improvisatory, essential poet” by Daisy Fried in the New York Times, Charles Bernstein is a leading voic...

At the start of the twentieth century, tales of "how the other half lives" experienced a surge in popularity. People looking to go slumming without...

In "Works of Hesiod and the Homeric Hymns", highly acclaimed poet and translator Daryl Hine brings new life to the words of Hesiod and the world of...

Who is a citizen? What is a person? Who is my neighbor? These fundamental questions about group membership and social formation have been posed rep...

Philosophers have long debated the subjects of person and personhood. Sharon Cameron ushers this debate into the literary realm by considering impe...

What was the Enlightenment? Though many scholars have attempted to solve this riddle, none has made as much use of contemporary answers as Dan Edel...

The past decade has seen the medium of comics reach unprecedented heights of critical acclaim and commercial success - and that new prominence has ...

One of the most memorable and affecting Shakespearean characters is Edgar in King Lear. He has long been celebrated for his faithfulness in the fac...

Driven by global economic forces to innovate, today's society paradoxically looks forward to the future while staring only at the nearest, most loc...

Shylock, the Jewish moneylender in The Merchant of Venice who famously demands a pound of flesh as security for a loan to his antisemitic tormentor...

Charles Bernstein is our postmodern jester of American poesy, equal part surveyor of democratic vistas and scholar of avant-garde sensibilities. In...

For decades, Roger Grenier has been charming readers with compact, erudite books that draw elegant connections between our lives and our love of th...

At the turn of the nineteenth century, publishing houses in London, New York, Paris, Stuttgart, and Berlin produced books in ever greater numbers. ...

To write or read a poem is often to think in distinctively poetic ways-guided by metaphors, sound, rhythms, associative movement, and more. Poetry'...