In "Air's Appearance", Jayne Elizabeth Lewis enlists her readers in pursuit of the elusive concept of atmosphere in literary works. She shows how diverse conceptions of air in the eighteenth century converged in British fiction, producing the modern...

Constraints on freedom, education, and individual dignity have always been fundamental in determining who is able to write, when, and where. Taking the singular instance of the African American writer to heart, William W. Cook and James Tatum here ar...

"Literary criticism, as I attempt to practice it", writes Harold Bloom in "The Anatomy of Influence", "is in the first place literary, that is to say, personal and passionate". For more than half a century, Bloom has shared his profound knowledge of...

Members of adoption triangles-adoptees, birthparents, and adopting parents-must struggle with difficult and sometimes heartrending issues. Should adopted children be enabled to trace their biological parents? Does the individual's right to self-disco...

Leopold Sedar Senghor (1906-2001) was a Senegalese poet and philosopher who in 1960 also became the first president of the Republic of Senegal. In "African Art as Philosophy", Souleymane Bachir Diagne takes a unique approach to reading Senghor's infl...

This collection of prefaces, originally written for the 1909 multi-volume New York Edition of Henry James's fiction, first appeared in book form in 1934 with an introduction by poet and critic R. P. Blackmur. In his prefaces, James tackles the great...

Robert Burton's "The Anatomy of Melancholy" (1621) has cast a long, shimmering shadow, on Milton ("L'Allegro and Il Penseroso" in particular), on the wits of Queen Anne's reign and the beginning of George I's, and on Swift. Doctor Johnson praised it...

Charles Tomlinson's "Some Americans" was an unusual book, combining memoir and the detailed and intimate critical reading of poets he admires. He writes as a poet reading poets and learns less by analysis than by empathy. Thus William Carlos Williams...

Annals of the Five Senses (1923) was the first book to be published by C. M. Grieve, the man who became known as Hugh MacDiarmid. It is a collection of intense psychological studies which put us in mind of Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground. Written...

Substantial pieces on Scottish themes are assembled in this volume, from "Albyn" (1927) to "A Political Speech" delivered at Glasgow University in 1972. The editor has focused on MacDiarmid's view of powerful figures in Scottish culture, notably Davi...