Why must critics unmask and demystify literary works? Why do they believe that language is always withholding some truth, that the critic's task is to reveal the unsaid or repressed? In this book, Rita Felski examines critique, the dominant form of i...

This provocative book shows how the mass abandonment of rural vernaculars (such as the Irish language, Italian dialects, and French patois) shaped European literary modernism. Sean O Riordain in Ireland and Pier Paolo Pasolini in Italy reshaped minor...

In "Literary Spinoffs", Birgit Spengler explores the literary strategies, theoretical dimensions, and cultural implications of contemporary rewritings of nineteenth-century American literary classics. By tapping into powerful, ingrained literary and...

In "Lost Cities Go to Paradise", poetry breaks into song and poetic prose becomes lively storytelling as Alicia Borinsky raises intimate questions about the fragility of contemporary life. Composed of many layered scenes, unforgettable characters, sn...

Little magazines have often showcased the best new writing in America. Historically, these idiosyncratic, small-circulation outlets have served the dual functions of representing the avant-garde of literary expression while also helping many emerging...

"Christian laughter is a maze: you could easily get snarled up within it". So says Michael A. Screech in his note to readers preceding this collection of fifty-three elegant and pithy essays. As Screech reveals, the question of whether laughter is ac...

Of all the writings on theory and aesthetics – ancient, medieval, or modern – the most important is indisputably Aristotle's "Poetics", the first philosophical treatise to propound a theory of literature. In the "Poetics", Aristotle writes that he wi...

Whether watching men releasing caged birds at dawn in New York City or a ladder of cranes rising from a field in Manitoba, Tom Sexton is a keen observer of the interconnectedness of the natural and human worlds. The former Alaska poet laureate takes...

Michael Kruger is a major figure in modern German poetry, one of its great editors and leading practitioners. In 1993 Carcanet published "Diderot's Cat", Michael Kruger's original "Selected Poems", which drew on thirteen collections. This new edition...

Could a tiny mouse actually help the king of the jungle? That's what a trapped mouse promises to do if his lion captor sets him free. The lion laughs-and lets him go. But when hunters trap the scared and desperate lion, the mouse proves that even the...