The adventures and challenges of Sir Gawain, King Arthur's nephew and a knight at the Round Table, including his duel with the mysterious Green Knight, are among the oldest and best known of Arthurian stories. Here the distinguished author and poet J...

In today's academe, the fields of science and literature are considered unconnected, one relying on raw data and fact, the other focusing on fiction. During the period between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, however, the two fields were not so...

Three decades of controversy in Shakespeare studies can be summed up in a single question: Was Shakespeare one of a kind? On one side of the debate are the Shakespeare lovers, the bardolatrists, who insist on Shakespeare's timeless preeminence as an...

Conservative thinkers of the early Middle Ages conceived of sensual gratification as a demonic snare contrived to debase the higher faculties of humanity, and they identified pagan writing as one of the primary conduits of decadence. Two aspects of t...

Sir Frank Kermode, the British scholar, instructor, and author, was an inspired critic".Forms of Attention" is based on a series of three lectures he gave on canon formation, or how we choose what art to value. The essay on Botticelli traces the arti...

"After Auschwitz to write even a single poem is barbaric".The Conflagration of Community" challenges Theodor Adorno's famous statement about aesthetic production after the Holocaust, arguing for the possibility of literature to bear witness to extrem...

A parable rich in imagery and meaning, "The Surprising Adventures of Balthazar" provides readers of all ages with profound insights into the nature of authority, power, and freedom. The tale begins when a polar bear named Balthazar is captured by hun...

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...

"One Kind of Everything" elucidates the uses of autobiography and constructions of personhood in American poetry since World War II, with helpful reference to American literature in general since Emerson. Taking on one of the most crucial issues in A...

In this bracing and original book, Geoffrey Galt Harpham argues that today's humanities are an invention of the American academy in the years following World War II, when they were first conceived as an expression of American culture and an instrumen...