In the 200 years since its first publication, the story of "Frankenstein's" creation during stormy days and nights at Byron's Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva has become literary legend. In this book, Daisy Hay returns to the objects and manuscripts of t...

The Bodleian Library is one of the few libraries outside Germany with a substantial number of medieval manuscripts from the German-speaking lands. These manuscripts, most of which were acquired by Archbishop Laud in the 1630s, during the Thirty Years...

Of the many charges laid against contemporary literary scholars, one of the most common – and perhaps the most wounding – is that they simply don't love books. And while the most obvious response is that, no, actually the profession of literary studi...

Not for sale in the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic! Compassion, levity, and laughter can be found in the darkest of places – and even in the smallest of creatures. Set in 1943 Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, J. R. Pick's novella "Society for...

Per Sidenius seemingly has it all. As the twentieth century dawns, this son of a poor minister has put his sad childhood behind him: he's quickly becoming famous as a forward and freethinking man of the "New Age" and is about to marry a wealthy Jewis...

Philosophy's relation to the act of writing is John T. Lysaker's main concern in "Philosophy, Writing, and the Character of Thought". Whether in Plato, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, or Derrida, philosophy has come in many forms, and those forms...

"The earth near our place/ was cradle, / it rocked us – /became our skin. / House doors opened, / spilled us out, /we disappeared into trees – /they clothed usin delirious green. /... We knew the song/ of this place, made it up, / sang it –" Homeste...

How do poems and novels create a sense of mind? What does literary criticism say in conversation with other disciplines that address problems of consciousness? In "Paper Minds", Jonathan Kramnick takes up these vital questions, exploring the relation...

Not for sale in Estonia! The French poet Stephane Mallarme (1842-1898) was modernism's great champion of the book as both a conceptual and material entity: perhaps his most famous pronouncement is "everything in the world exists in order to end up...

Worlds of enchantment await in this beautiful treasury, which contains the most popular fairy and folk tales from the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, Charles Perrault, and other classic sources. In addition to such well-known stories as Slee...