Lope de Vega "single-handedly created the Spanish national theatre", writes Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria in the introduction to this new translation of "Fuenteovejuna". Often compared to Shakespeare, Moliere, and Racine, Lope is widely considered the...

"The Milton Encyclopedia" offers easy and immediate access to a wealth of information about Milton. It will serve as a general and comprehensive reference tool for general readers, students, and scholars alike, enhancing the experience of reading Mil...

Just before the outbreak of World War II, young Witold Gombrowicz left his home in Poland and set sail for South America. In 1953, still living as an expatriate in Argentina, he began his "Diary" with one of literature's most memorable openings: Mond...

Published to mark the 200th anniversary of Dickens's birth, this book celebrates the greatest of English novelists by illustrating some of his abiding preoccupations. Prompted by quotations from the novels and other writings, each themed chapter expl...

Seven decades after his death, German Jewish writer, philosopher, and literary critic Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) continues to fascinate and influence. Here Uwe Steiner offers a comprehensive and sophisticated introduction to the oeuvre of this intri...

The thirteenth century saw such a proliferation of new encyclopedic texts that more than one scholar has called it the "century of the encyclopedias". Variously referred to as a "speculum", "thesaurus", or "imago mundi" – the term encyclopedia was no...

Bringing his perennially popular course to the page, Yale University Professor Paul H. Fry offers in this welcome book a guided tour of the main trends in twentieth-century literary theory. At the core of the book's discussion is a series of underlyi...

Deported to a concentration camp from 1941 until the end of the war, Norman Manea again left his native Romania in 1986 to escape the Ceausescu regime. He now lives in New York. In this selection of essays on the subject of exile, he explores the lan...

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...

It is a common belief that scripture has no place in modern, secular politics. Graham Hammill challenges this notion in "The Mosaic Constitution", arguing that Moses's constitution of Israel, which created people bound by the rule of law, was central...