How did slavery and race impact American literature in the nineteenth century? In this ambitious book, Michael T. Gilmore argues that they were the carriers of linguistic restriction, and writers from Frederick Douglass to Stephen Crane wrestled with...

This lively book tells a story never told before: the complete history of women readers and the controversies their reading has inspired since the beginning of the written word. Belinda Jack's groundbreaking volume travels from the Cro-Magnon cave to...

Spanning nearly 500 years of cultural and social history, this book examines the ways that literature and surveillance have developed together, as kindred modern practices. As ideas about personhood – what constitutes a self – have changed over time,...

A young soldier dons Napoleon's hat. An out-of-work man wanders Berlin, dreaming he is Peter the Great. The famous exile Dante finally returns to his native city to "hang his crown of laurels up". Familial and historical apparitions haunt this dazzli...

Lionel Trilling, regarded at the time of his death in 1975 as America's preeminent literary critic, is today often seen as a relic of a vanished era. His was an age when literary criticism and ideas seemed to matter profoundly in the intellectual lif...

"Pure and beautiful, she glows like the moon behind clouds". The time is the 12th Century, the place Cambodia, birthplace of the lost Angkor civilisation. In a village behind a towering stone temple lives a young woman named Sray, whom neighbours lik...

Henry David Thoreau was a sturdy individualist and a lover of nature. In March, 1845, he built himself a wooden hut on the edge of Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts, where he lived until September 1847. Walden is Thoreaus autobiograophical acc...

In Martin Rowson's "The Waste Land", private detective Chris Marlowe is tasked with getting to the bottom of the most impenetrable of all modernist mysteries: namely T. S. Eliot's "The Wasteland". Cunningly contrived, this irreverent graphic parody i...

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...

"We Look Like This" anatomizes how history, violence, power, lust and mortality work on us. Burt's formal, muscular language evokes a world of war, want, cruelty and hope, as well as childhood among "tough Jews" in Philadelphia, dominated by his fath...