Literature: History & Criticism

What does it mean to consider philosophy as a species of not just literature but world literature? The authors in this collection explore philosoph...

Emotion takes place. Rather than an interior state of mind in response to the outside world, emotion per se is spatial, at turns e...

Following The People and the Books, which "covers more than 2,500 years of highly variegated Jewish cultural expression" (Robert Alter, The New Yor...

The 1950s witnessed both the birth of both rock and roll and the creation of Southern literature as we know it. Around the time that Chuck Berry an...

The question of life, Michael Naas argues, though rarely foregrounded by Plato, runs through and structures his thought. By characterizing being in...

Black Orpheus and Transition stand as towering landmarks in Africa’s cultural and intellectual history between 1957 and 1978, serving as incubators...

A fascinating, richly illustrated exploration of the poignant origins of Rudyard Kipling’s world-famous children’s classic“In this concise and rema...

Architrenius, a satirical allegory in dactylic hexameters completed in 1184 by the Norman poet Johannes de Hauvilla, follows the journey of its epo...

Can poetry act as an aesthetic amplification device, akin to a microscope, through which we can sense minute or nearly imperceptible phenomena such...

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org.  There is a vast body of imaginal literature in Bengali th...

Arnold Schoenberg and Thomas Mann, two towering figures of twentieth-century music and literature, both found refuge in the German-exile community ...

Intimate and richly detailed, The Beauty of Living begins with Cummings’s Cambridge, Massachusetts upbringing and his relationship with his sociall...

For decades, we have been told we live in the “information age”—a time when disruptive technological advancement has reshaped the categories and so...

Things looked bleak for comic books throughout the 1970s because of plummeting sell-through rates. With each passing year, the newsstand became les...

David Oppenheim (1664–1736), chief rabbi of Prague in the early eighteenth century, built an unparalleled collection of Jewish books and manuscript...

What caused England's literary renaissance? One answer has been such unprecedented developments as the European discovery of America. Yet England i...

The Renaissance in the 19th Century examines the Italian Renaissance revival as a Pan-European critique: a commentary on and reshaping of a ninetee...

This ground breaking collection of essays is the first to examine the phenomenon of how, in the twenty-first century, Shakespeare has been experien...

Why do contemporary writers use myths from ancient Greece and Rome, Pharaonic Egypt, the Viking north, Africa’s west coast, and Hebrew and Christia...

In this volume, Nicholas R. Jones analyzes white appropriations of black African voices in Spanish theater from the 1500s through the 1700s, when t...

Why is belief in an afterlife so persistent across times and cultures? And how can it coexist with disbelief in an afterlife? Most modern thinkers ...