The Sonderkommando of Auschwitz-Birkenau consisted primarily of Jewish prisoners forced by the Germans to facilitate the mass extermination. Though never involved in the killing itself, they were compelled to be "members of staff" of the Nazi death-f...

This pioneering book is the first full-length study of the matha, or Hindu monastery, which developed in India at the turn of the first millennium. Rendered monumentally in stone, the matha represented more than just an architectural innovation: it s...

"Walpurgis Night", by acclaimed Russian writer Venedikt Erofeev, is considered a classic in the playwright's homeland. Erofeev's dark and funny five-act satire of Soviet repression has been called the comic high-water maker of the Brezhnev era. "Walp...

Roderick Nash's classic study of changing attitudes toward wilderness during American history, as well as the origins of the environmental and conservation movements, has received wide acclaim since its initial publication in 1967. "The Los Angeles T...

What is it to be a work of art? Renowned author and critic Arthur C. Danto addresses this fundamental, complex question. Part philosophical monograph and part memoiristic meditation, "What Art Is challenges" the popular interpretation that art is an...

As president of Stanford University, Gerhard Casper established a reputation as a tireless, forward-thinking advocate for higher education. His speeches, renowned for their intelligence, humanity, wit and courage, confront head-on the most pressing c...

This welcome volume brings to English-language readers two beautifully crafted novellas by internationally acclaimed French author Pierre Michon. "Winter Mythologies and Abbots" are both set in the Middle Ages – Mythologies among the monks of tenth-c...

This highly original book focuses on the aesthetic concerns of the two most important sculptors of the early 19th century, the great Italian sculptor Antonio Canova (1757-1822) and his illustrious Danish rival Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770-1844). Rather t...

In the summer of 1927, Walter Benjamin wrote about a possible future project on what he called French Trauerspiel, or mourning drama. In this volume of Yale French Studies, an international team of leading scholars of early modern Europe takes its cu...

The Jewish German philosopher Ernst Cassirer was one of the leading proponents of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism. The essays in this volume provide a window into Cassirer's discovery of the symbolic nature of human existence – the fact that our...