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LITERARY CRITICISM

Race and Erudition
Maurice Olender
Translated by Jane Marie Todd
Hardcover June 2009
Be Always Converting, Be Always Converted
Rob Wilson
Hardcover June 2009
Critical Aesthetics
James Dorsey
Hardcover June 2009
Dreaming and Experience in Classical Antiquity
William V. Harris
Hardcover June 2009
Hippota Nestor
Douglas G. Frame
Paperback June 2009
The New Sappho on Old Age
Edited by Ellen Greene
Edited by Marilyn Skinner
Paperback June 2009
Sublime Voices
Christopher Bolton
Hardcover June 2009
Through a Forest of Chancellors
Anne Burkus-Chasson
Hardcover June 2009
Daphnis and Chloe. Anthia and Habrocomes
Longus
Xenophon of Ephesus
Edited and translated by Jeffrey Henderson
Hardcover May 2009
Latin Poetry
Jacopo Sannazaro
Translated by Michael C. J. Putnam
Hardcover May 2009
The Learned Banqueters, V, Books 10.420e-11
Athenaeus
Edited and translated by S. Douglas Olson
Hardcover May 2009
On the Origin of Stories
Brian Boyd
Hardcover May 2009
Divagations
Stéphane Mallarmé
Translated by Barbara Johnson
The salmagundi of prose poems, prose-poetic musings, criticism, and reflections that is Divagations has long been considered a treasure trove by students of aesthetics and modern poetry. This was the only book of prose that Mallarmé published in his lifetime and, in a new translation by Johnson, it is now available for the first time in English just as he arranged it, in all of its languor and musicality.
Paperback April 2009
Law and Literature
Richard A. Posner
Paperback April 2009
The Power of Thetis and Selected Essays
Laura Slatkin
Laura Slatkin's influential and widely admired book explores the superficially minor role of Thetis in the Iliad. Slatkin uncovers alternative traditions about the power of Thetis and shows how an awareness of those myths brings a far greater understanding of Thetis's place in the thematic structure of the Iliad. This second edition also includes six additional essays, which cover a broad range of topics in the study of the Greek Epic.
Paperback April 2009
The Program Era
Mark McGurl
Hardcover April 2009
Comeuppance
William Flesch
With Comeuppance, Flesch delivers the freshest, most generous thinking about the novel since Walter Benjamin wrote on the storyteller and Wayne C. Booth on the rhetoric of fiction. In clear and engaging prose, Flesch integrates evolutionary psychology into literary studies, creating a new theory of fiction in which form and content flawlessly intermesh.
Paperback March 2009
Feeling Backward
Heather Love
Feeling Backward weighs the costs of the contemporary move to the mainstream in lesbian and gay culture. While the widening tolerance for same-sex marriage and for gay-themed media brings clear benefits, gay assimilation entails other losses--losses that have been hard to identify or mourn, since many aspects of historical gay culture are so closely associated with the pain and shame of the closet.
Paperback March 2009
Worrying about China
Gloria Davies
What can we do about China? Davies pursues this inquiry through a wide range of contemporary topics, including the changing fortunes of radicalism, the peculiarities of Chinese postmodernism, shifts within official discourse, attempts to revive Confucianism for present-day China, and the historically problematic engagement of Chinese intellectuals with Western ideas.
Paperback March 2009
The Golden Age of the Classics in America
Carl J. Richard
Hardcover March 2009
The Late Tang
Stephen Owen
In this continuation of the literary history of the Tang, Stephen Owen analyzes the redirection of poetry that followed the deaths of the major poets of the High and Mid-Tang and the rejection of their poetic styles. Poets had always drawn on past poetry, but in the Late Tang, the poetic past was beginning to assume the form it would have for the next millennium; it was becoming a repertoire of styles, genres, and the voices of past poets--a repertoire that would endure.
Paperback March 2009
Nepalese Shaman Oral Texts II
Edited and translated by Gregory G. Maskarinec
Hardcover March 2009
Paradise Earned
Yannis Tzifopoulos
This is a study of the twelve small gold lamellae from Crete that were tokens for entrance into a golden afterlife. The lamellae are placed within the context of a small corpus of similar texts, and published with extensive commentary on their topography, lettering and engraving, dialect and orthography, meter, chronology, and usage. This work adduces parallels to the texts on the lamellae from the Byzantine period and modern Greece to illuminate the everlasting and persistent human quest for "earning Paradise."
Paperback March 2009
Rai Mythology
Karen H. Ebert
Martin Gaenzle
Hardcover March 2009
Recapturing a Homeric Legacy
Edited by Casey Due
Marcianus Graecus Z. 454 [= 822], known to Homeric scholars as the Venetus A, is the oldest complete text of the Iliad in existence, meticulously crafted during the tenth century ce. Two thousand years later, technology offers a new opportunity to rediscover this scholarship and better understand the epic that is the foundation of Western literature.
Hardcover March 2009
The Teleology of Poetics in Medieval Kashmir
Lawrence J. McCrea
Hardcover March 2009
Worlds Made by Words
Anthony Grafton
Hardcover March 2009
PHCC, 23, 2003
Edited by Bettina Kimpton
Edited by Matthew Knight
Amont other articles, this volume includes The Alans in the Iberian Peninsula and the Identification by Littleton and Malcor as the Milesians of the Lebor Gabála, Manuel Alberro; The ‘Gallic Disaster’: Did Dionysius I of Syracuse Order It?, Timothy Bridgman;.
Hardcover February 2009
Ritual and Performativity
Anton Bierl
Translated by Alexander Hollmann
In this groundbreaking study, Anton Bierl uses recent approaches in literary and cultural studies to investigate the chorus of Old Comedy. After an extensive theoretical introduction that also serves as a general introduction to the dramatic chorus from the comic vantage point, a close reading of Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazusae shows that ritual is indeed present in both the micro- and macrostructure of Attic comedy, not as a fossilized remnant of the origins of the genre but as part of a still existing performative choral culture.
Paperback February 2009
The Culture of Kitharoidia
Timothy Power
The Culture of Kitharoidia is the first study dedicated exclusively to the art, practice, and charismatic persona of the citharode. Traversing a wide range of discourse and imagery about kitharoidia--poetic and prose texts, iconography, inscriptions--the book offers a nuanced account of the aesthetic and sociocultural complexities of citharodic song and examines the iconic role of the songmakers in the popular imagination.
Paperback January 2009
Accidental Incest, Filial Cannibalism, and Other Peculiar Encounters in Late Imperial Chinese Literature
Tina Lu
Writers of late imperial fiction and drama were, Lu argues, deeply engaged with questions about the nature of the Chinese empire and of the human community. This book traces how these political questions were addressed in fiction through extreme situations: husbands and wives torn apart in periods of political upheaval, families so disrupted that incestuous encounters become inevitable, times so desperate that people have to sell themselves to be eaten.
Hardcover January 2009
Aeschylus, I, Persians. Seven against Thebes. Suppliants. Prometheus Bound
Aeschylus
Edited and translated by Alan H. Sommerstein
Aeschylus (ca. 525–456 BCE) is the dramatist who made Athenian tragedy one of the world’s great art forms. Seven of his eighty or so plays survive complete. The first volume of this new Loeb Classical Library edition offers fresh texts and translations by Alan H. Sommerstein of Persians, the only surviving Greek historical drama.
Hardcover January 2009
Aeschylus, II, Oresteia: Agamemnon. Libation-Bearers. Eumenides
Aeschylus
Edited and translated by Alan H. Sommerstein
Aeschylus (ca. 525–456 BCE) is the dramatist who made Athenian tragedy one of the world’s great art forms. Seven of his eighty or so plays survive complete. The second volume contains the complete Oresteia trilogy.
Hardcover January 2009
Argonautica
Apollonius Rhodius
Edited and translated by William H. Race
Argonautica, composed in the 3rd century BCE, is the epic retelling of Jason’s quest for the golden fleece. It greatly influenced Roman authors such as Catullus, Virgil, and Ovid, and was imitated by Valerius Flaccus. This new edition of the first volume in the Loeb Classical Library offers a fresh translation and improved text.
Hardcover January 2009
Euripides, VIII, Fragments
Euripides
Edited and translated by Christopher Collard
Edited and translated by Martin Cropp
The extant plays and the fragments together make Euripides by far the best known of the classic Greek tragedians. This edition of the fragments, concluded in this second volume, offers the first complete English translation together with a selection of testimonia bearing on the content of the plays. The texts are based on the recent comprehensive edition of R. Kannicht.
Hardcover January 2009
Genos Dikanikon
Victor Bers
Under the Athenian democracy, litigants were expected to speak for themselves, though they could memorize a speech written for them. These amateur performances often manifested an unmanly yielding to emotions of anger or fear; professional speech, Bers seeks to demonstrate, was to a large degree crafted in reaction to amateur stumbling.
Paperback January 2009
King of Sacrifice
Sarah Hitch
Descriptions of animal sacrifice in Homer offer us some of the most detailed accounts of this attempt at communication between man and gods. This book explores the structural and thematic importance of animal sacrifice as an expression of the quarrel between Akhilleus and Agamemnon through the differing perspectives of the primary narrative and character speech.
Paperback January 2009
The Naked Gaze
Carlos Rojas
This volume focuses on tropes of visuality and gender to reflect on shifting understandings of the significance of Chineseness, modernity, and Chinese modernity. Through detailed readings of narrative works by eight authors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the study identifies three distinct constellations of visual concerns corresponding to the late imperial, mid-twentieth century, and contemporary periods, respectively.
Hardcover January 2009
Poetic and Performative Memory in Ancient Greece
Claude Calame
The Ancient Greeks not only spoke of time unfolding in a specific space, but also projected the past upon the future in order to make it active in the social practice of the present. Poetic and Performative Memory in Ancient Greece shows how the Ancient Greeks' collective memory was based on a remarkable faculty for the creation of ritual and narrative symbols.
Paperback January 2009
Stri
Kevin McGrath
This book is a study of heroic femininity as it appears in the epic Mahabharata, and focuses particularly on the roles of wife, daughter-in-law, and mother, on how these women speak, and on the kinship groups and varying marital systems that surround them.
Paperback January 2009
Arguing the Modern Jewish Canon
Edited by Justin Daniel Cammy
Edited by Dara Horn
Edited by Alyssa Quint
Edited by Rachel Rubinstein
Ruth Wisse is a leading scholar of Yiddish and Jewish literary studies and one of our most fearless public intellectuals on issues relating to Jewish society and culture. In this celebratory volume, Wisse's colleagues pay tribute to her with a collection of critical essays whose subjects break new ground in Yiddish, Hebrew, Israeli, American, European, and Holocaust literature.
Hardcover January 2009
Fragments of Sappho
Dimitrios Yatromanolakis
Representing the beginnings of women’s poetry in European cultures, Sappho’s songs have become an influential and complex sociopolitical paradigm related to female same-sex intimacy in modern eras. The first large-scale commentary in English in the last fifty years, this book fills a major gap in research on archaic Greece and provides interdisciplinary introductory studies and comprehensive commentary on major fragments of Sappho.
Paperback December 2008
Poems
Cristoforo Landino
Edited and translated by Mary P. Chatfield
Cristoforo Landino (1424–1498) was one of the great scholar-poets of the Renaissance. His most substantial work of poetry was his Three Books on Xandra. Also included in this volume is the Carmina Varia, a collection whose centerpiece is a group of elegies directed to the Venetian humanist Bernardo Bembo.
Hardcover December 2008
Baldo, Volume 2, Books XIII-XXV
Teofilo Folengo
Translated by Ann E. Mullaney
Folengo (1491–1544) was born in Mantua and joined the Benedictine order, but became a runaway monk and a satirist of monasticism. In 1517 he published, under the pseudonym Merlin Cocaio, the first version of his macaronic narrative poem Baldo. This edition provides the first English translation of this hilarious send-up of ancient epic and Renaissance chivalric romance.
Hardcover December 2008
Ethnic Modernism
Werner Sollors
In the first half of the twentieth century, the United States moved from the periphery to the center of global cultural production. How did African American, European immigrant, and other minority writers take part in these developments that also transformed the United States, giving it an increasingly multicultural self-awareness? This book attempts to address this question in a series of innovative and engaging close readings of major texts from this period.
Paperback November 2008
Leaves from Paradise
Edited by Jeffrey F. Hamburger
A pair of leaves recently acquired by Houghton Library presents an opportunity to examine the illuminated sequence composed in honor of John the Evangelist. The richly decorated fragments promise to transform our understanding of the special place of Christ’s “beloved disciple” in 14th-century art, liturgy, theology, and mysticism.
Paperback November 2008
Neo-Confucianism in History
Peter K. Bol
The book argues that as Neo-Confucians put their philosophy of learning into practice in local society, they justified a new social ideal in which society at the local level was led by the literati with state recognition and support.
Hardcover November 2008
Weaving Truth
Ann Bergren
"What if truth were a woman?" asked Nietzsche. In ancient Greek thought, truth in language has a special relation to the female by virtue of her pre-eminent art-form--the one Freud believed was even invented by women--weaving. The essays in this book explore the implications of this nexus: language, the female, weaving, and the construction of truth.
Paperback November 2008
Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, Volume 104,
Edited by Nino Luraghi
Among other articles, This volume includes Iliad 4.384 Tudê, Iliad 15.339 Mêkistê, and Odyssey 19.136 Odysê by Jeremy Rau; “Craft Similes and the Construction of Heroes in the Iliad” by Naomi Rood.
Hardcover November 2008
The Peculiar Life of Sundays
Stephen Miller
From Augustine to Caesarius, through the Reformation and the Puritan flight from England, down through the ages to contemporary debates about Sunday worship, Miller explores the fascinating history of the Sabbath.
Hardcover November 2008
Uchida Hyakken
Rachel DiNitto
The literary career of Uchida Hyakken (1889–1971) encompassed a wide variety of styles and genres. This book takes up Hyakken’s fiction and essays written during Japan’s prewar years to investigate the intersection of his literature with the material and discursive surroundings of the time.
Hardcover November 2008
Zeus in the Odyssey
J. Marks
This book makes the case that the plot of the Odyssey is represented within the narrative as a plan of Zeus, Dios boulê, that serves as a guide for the performing poet and as a hermeneutic for the audience. The “Zeus-centric” reading proposed here offers fresh perspectives on the tenor of interactions among the Odyssey’s characters.
Paperback November 2008
Affective Mapping
Jonathan Flatley
The surprising claim of this book is that dwelling on loss is not necessarily depressing. Instead, embracing melancholy can be a road back to contact with others and can lead people to productively remap their relationship to the world around them. Flatley demonstrates that a seemingly disparate set of modernist writers and thinkers showed how aesthetic activity can give us the means to comprehend and change our relation to loss.
Hardcover November 2008
Solomon and Marcolf
Translated with commentary by Jan Ziolkowski
Solomon and Marcolf pits wise Solomon, famous from the Bible, against a wily peasant named Marcolf. Cited by Bakhtin in Rabelais and His World, Solomon and Marcolf is widely known by name. But until now it has not been translated into any modern language. The present volume offers an introduction, followed by the Latin and English, detailed commentary, and reproductions of woodcut illustrations from the 1514 edition.
Hardcover October 2008 / Paperback October 2008
The Consolation of Philosophy
Boethius
Translated by David R. Slavitt
Introduction by Seth Lerer
Composed while its author was imprisoned, this book remains one of Western literature’s most eloquent meditations on the transitory nature of earthly belongings, and the superiority of things of the mind. Slavitt’s translation captures the energy and passion of the original. And in an introduction intended for the general reader, Seth Lerer places Boethius’s life and achievement in context.
Hardcover September 2008
Humanist Educational Treatises
Translated by Craig W. Kallendorf
This volume provides new translations, commissioned for the I Tatti Renaissance Library, of four of the most important theoretical statements that emerged from the early humanists’ efforts to reform medieval education.
Paperback September 2008
Invectives
Francesco Petrarca
Translated by David Marsh
Petrarca, one of the greatest of Italian poets, was also the leading spirit in the Renaissance movement to revive ancient Roman language and literature. Petrarch’s four Invectives, written in Latin, were inspired by the eloquence of the great Roman orator Cicero. The new translations in this volume include the first English translation of three of the four invectives.
Paperback September 2008
PHCC, 22, 2002
Edited by Kathryn Izzo
Edited by Katharine Olson
Among other articles, this volume includes Toward a Breton Musical Patrimony, Paul-Andre Bempéchat; Celts and Hyperboerans, Timothy Bridgman; The Sea as an Emotional Landscape, Mairi Sine Chaimbeul.
Hardcover September 2008
Reading Tao Yuanming
Wendy Swartz
Tao Yuanming (365?–427), although dismissed as a poet following his death, is now considered one of China’s greatest writers. This study of the posthumous reputation of a central figure in Chinese literary history, the mechanisms at work in the reception of his works, and the canonization of Tao himself and of particular readings of his works sheds light on the transformation of literature and culture in premodern China.
Hardcover September 2008
Christianity and the Transformation of the Book
Anthony Grafton
Megan Williams
Christianity and the Transformation of the Book combines broad-gauged synthesis and close textual analysis to reconstruct the kinds of books and the ways of organizing scholarly inquiry and collaboration among the Christians of Caesarea, on the coast of Roman Palestine. The book explores the dialectical relationship between intellectual history and the history of the book, even as it expands our understanding of early Christian scholarship.
Paperback September 2008
Strangers in the Land
Eric J. Sundquist
The importance of blacks for Jews and Jews for blacks in conceiving of themselves as Americans, when both remained outsiders to the privileges of full citizenship, is a matter of voluminous but perplexing record. A monumental work of literary criticism and cultural history, Strangers in the Land draws upon politics, sociology, law, religion, and popular culture to illuminate a vital, highly conflicted interethnic partnership over the course of a century.
Paperback September 2008
Dreaming Across Boundaries
Edited by Louise Marlow
This volume explores the context of theological speculations and political aspirations through the medium of dreams to present fascinating insights into the social history of the pre-modern Islamic world in all its cultural diversity. Wider cultural exchanges are discussed through concrete examples such as the Arabic version of the Aristotelian treatise De divinatione per somnum, and some of the current scholarly assumptions about dreams are challenged by personal reports that express individual personalities, self-awareness, and spiritual development.
Hardcover July 2008
Dreaming Across Boundaries
Edited by Louise Marlow
This volume explores the context of theological speculations and political aspirations through the medium of dreams to present fascinating insights into the social history of the pre-modern Islamic world in all its cultural diversity. Wider cultural exchanges are discussed through concrete examples such as the Arabic version of the Aristotelian treatise De divinatione per somnum, and some of the current scholarly assumptions about dreams are challenged by personal reports that express individual personalities, self-awareness, and spiritual development.
Paperback July 2008
Benjamin's -abilities
Samuel Weber
In this book, Weber, a leading theorist on literature and media, reveals a new and productive aspect of Benjamin’s thought by focusing the critical suffix “-ability” that Benjamin so tellingly deploys in his work. The result is an illuminating perspective on Benjamin’s thought by way of his language—and one of the most penetrating and comprehensive accounts of Benjamin’s work ever written.
Hardcover June 2008
Euripides, VII, Fragments
Euripides
Edited and translated by Christopher Collard
Edited and translated by Martin Cropp
The extant plays and the fragments together make Euripides by far the best known of the classic Greek tragedians. This edition offers the first complete English translation of the fragments together with a selection of testimonia bearing on the content of the plays. Each play is prefaced by a select bibliography and an introductory discussion of its mythical background, plot, and location of the fragments, general character, chronology, and impact on subsequent literary and artistic traditions.
Hardcover June 2008
The Japanization of Modernity
Rebecca Suter
Murakami Haruki is perhaps the best-known and most widely translated Japanese author of his generation. Bringing a comparative perspective to the study of Murakami’s fiction, Suter complicates our understanding of the author’s oeuvre and highlights his contributions not only as a popular writer but also as a cultural critic on both sides of the Pacific.
Hardcover June 2008
The Learned Banqueters, IV, Books 8-10.420e
Athenaeus
Edited and translated by S. Douglas Olson
Athenaeus describes a series of dinner parties at which the guests quote extensively from Greek literature. The work (which dates to the very end of the second century CE) is amusing and of extraordinary value as a treasury of quotations from works now lost.
Hardcover June 2008
Is Milton Better than Shakespeare?
Nigel Smith
Smith makes a compelling case for Milton’s relevance to our present situation. In direct and accessible terms, he shows how the seventeenth-century poet, while working to write the greatest heroic poem in the English language, also managed to theorize about religious, political, and civil liberty in ways that matter as much today as they did in Puritanical times.
Hardcover May 2008
Wellsprings
Mario Vargas Llosa
Hardcover May 2008
The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media
Walter Benjamin
Edited by Michael W. Jennings
Edited by Brigid Doherty
Edited by Thomas Y. Levin
Benjamin’s famous “Work of Art” essay sets out his boldest thoughts—on media and on culture in general. This book contains the second, and most daring, of the four versions of the “Work of Art” essay—the one that addresses the utopian developments of the modern media. The collection tracks Benjamin’s observations on the media as they are revealed in essays on the production and reception of art; on film, radio, and photography; and on the modern transformations of literature and painting. 
Paperback May 2008
Essays and Dialogues
Bartolomeo Scala
Translated by Renée Neu Watkins
Introduction by Alison Brown
From humble beginnings, Scala (1430–1497) trained in the law and rose to prominence serving as secretary and treasurer to the Medicis and chancellor of the Guelf party before becoming first chancellor of Florence. This volume collects works from throughout his career that show his acquaintance with recently rediscovered ancient writers, and the influence of fellow humanists such as Marsilio Ficino, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (Pope Pius II), and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola.
Hardcover May 2008
American Protest Literature
With a Foreword by John Stauffer and an Afterword by Howard Zinn
Edited by Zoe Trodd
Foreword by John Stauffer
Afterword by Howard Zinn
"I like a little rebellion now and then," wrote Thomas Jefferson to Abigail Adams, enlisting in a tradition that throughout American history has led writers to rage and reason, prophesy and provoke. American Protest Literature presents sources from eleven protest movements--political, social, and cultural--from the Revolution to abolition to gay rights to antiwar protest. In this impressive work, Trodd provides an enlightening and inspiring survey of this most American form of literature.
Paperback April 2008
How To Do Biography
Nigel Hamilton
Following his recent Biography: A Brief History (from Harvard), award-winning biographer and teacher Nigel Hamilton tackles the practicalities of doing biography in the first succinct primer to elucidate the tools of the biographer’s craft.
Hardcover April 2008
Persons and Things
Barbara Johnson
In Persons and Things, Johnson begins with the most elementary thing we know: deconstruction calls attention to gaps and reveals that their claims upon us are fraudulent. Johnson revolutionizes the method by showing that the inanimate thing exposed as a delusion is central to fantasy life, that fantasy life, however deluded, should be taken seriously, and that although a work of art “is formed around something missing,” this “void is its vanishing point, not its essence. The new aesthetics should restore fluidities between persons and things. In pursuing it, Johnson calls upon Ovid, Keats, Poe, Plath, and others who have inhabited this in-between space.
Hardcover April 2008
The Oral Palimpsest
Christos Tsagalis
Oral intertextuality is an innate feature of the web of myth, whose interrelated fabrics allow the audience of epic songs access to an entire horizon of story variations. The Oral Palimpsest argues that just as the discarded text of a palimpsest still carries traces of its previous writing, so the Homeric tradition unfolds its awareness of alternate versions as it reveals signs of their erasure.
Paperback March 2008
Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture
Dudley Andrew
Steven Ungar
Andrew and Ungar apply an evocative "poetics of culture" to capture the complex atmospherics of Paris in the 1930s. Rather than a straight story of the Popular Front, they have produced something closer to the format of an illustrated newspaper whose multiple columns represent the breadth of urban life during this critical decade at the end of the Third French Republic.
Paperback March 2008
Sappho in the Making
Dimitrios Yatromanolakis
This book offers the first interdisciplinary and in-depth study of the cultural practices and ideological paradigms that conditioned the politics of the "reading" of Sappho's songs in the early and most pivotal stages of her reception. Yatromanolakis investigates visual representations and ancient texts in their synchronic and diachronic multilayeredness to trace the discursive nexuses that defined the making of "Sappho" in the late archaic, classical, and early Hellenistic periods.
Paperback March 2008
When Our Eyes No Longer See
Gregory Golley
As industrial and scientific developments in early-twentieth-century Japan transformed the meaning of “objective observation,” modern writers and poets struggled to capture what they had come to see as an evolving network of invisible relations joining people to the larger material universe. For these artists, literary modernism was a crisis of perception before it was a crisis of representation. When Our Eyes No Longer See portrays an extraordinary moment in the history of this perceptual crisis and in Japanese literature during the 1920s and 1930s.
Hardcover March 2008
Concordia Discors
Andrew Scholtz
Writing to a friend, Horace describes him as fascinated by "the discordant harmony of the cosmos, its purpose and power." Scholtz takes this notion of "discordant harmony" and argues for it as an aesthetic principle where classical Athenian literature addresses politics in the idiom of sexual desire. Drawing on theorists of the sociality of language, his approach is an untried one for this kind of topic.
Paperback February 2008
Transpacific Imaginations
Yunte Huang
Transpacific Imaginations is a study of how American literature is enmeshed with the literatures of Asia. The book begins with Western encounters with the Pacific, with Huang discussing such titles as Moby Dick as Pacific works. Huang then turns to Asian American encounters with the Pacific, concentrating on the "Angel Island" poems and works by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Araki Yasusada.
Hardcover February 2008
Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, Volume 103,
Edited by Albert Henrichs
Hardcover February 2008
Aristophanes, V, Fragments
Aristophanes
Edited and translated by Jeffrey Henderson
Over forty plays by Aristophanes were read in antiquity, of which nearly a thousand fragments survive. These provide a fuller picture of the poet's ever astonishing comic vitality and a wealth of information and insights about his world. Henderson's latest volume contains what survives from, and about, his lost plays. Each fragmentary play is prefaced by a summary. Also included in this edition are ancient reports about Aristophanes' life, works, and influence on the later comic tradition.
Hardcover February 2008
The Learned Banqueters, III, Books 6-7
Athenaeus
Edited and translated by S. Douglas Olson
In The Learned Banqueters (late-2nd century CE), Athenaeus describes a series of dinner parties at which the guests quote extensively from Greek literature. Olson has undertaken to produce a complete new edition of the work, replacing the previous seven-volume Loeb Athenaeus (published under the title Deipnosophists).
Hardcover February 2008
The Collected Prose of Robert Frost
Robert Frost
Edited by Mark Richardson
During his lifetime, Robert Frost notoriously resisted collecting his prose--going so far as to halt the publication of one prepared compilation and to "lose" the transcripts of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures he delivered at Harvard in 1936. This volume allows readers and scholars to discover in the prose that he did make public--in newspapers, magazines, journals, speeches, and books--the wit, force, and grace that made his poetry famous.
Hardcover January 2008
Comeuppance
William Flesch
With Comeuppance, Flesch delivers the freshest, most generous thinking about the novel since Walter Benjamin wrote on the storyteller and Wayne C. Booth on the rhetoric of fiction. In clear and engaging prose, Flesch integrates evolutionary psychology into literary studies, creating a new theory of fiction in which form and content flawlessly intermesh.
Hardcover January 2008
Out of the Alleyway
Eve Zimmerman
In this critical study of Nakagami's life and oeuvre, Zimmerman delves into the writer's literary world, exploring the genres, forms, and themes with which Nakagami worked and experimented. These chapters trace the biographical thread running through his works while foregrounding such diverse facets of his writing as his interest in the modern possibilities of traditional myths and forms of storytelling, his deployment of shocking tropes and images, and his crafting of a unique poetic language.
Hardcover January 2008
The Readability of the Past in Early Chinese Historiography
Wai-yee Li
The past becomes readable when we can tell stories and make arguments about it. When we can tell more than one story or make divergent arguments, the readability of the past then becomes an issue. Therein lies the beginning of history, the sense of inquiry that heightens our awareness of interpretation. What are the possibilities and limits of historical knowledge? This book explores these issues through a study of the Zuozhuan, a foundational text in the Chinese tradition, whose rhetorical and analytical self-consciousness reveals much about the contending ways of thought unfolding during the period of the text's formation.
Hardcover January 2008
An Early Tibetan Survey of Buddhist Literature
Edited by Kurtis R. Schaeffer
Edited by Leonard W. J. van der Kuijp
This volume is a study and edition of Bcom Idan ral gri's (1227-1305) Bstan pa rgyas pa rgyan gyi nyi 'od. Likely composed in the last decades of the thirteenth century, this systematic list of Buddhist Sutras, Tantras, Shastras, and related genres translated primarily from Sanskrit and other Indic languages holds an important place in the history of Buddhist literature in Tibet.
Hardcover January 2008
Aeschylus, III, Fragments
Aeschylus
Edited and translated by Alan H. Sommerstein
Aeschylus (ca. 525–456 BCE) is the dramatist who made Athenian tragedy one of the world’s great art forms. Seven of his eighty or so plays survive complete. The third volume of this edition collects all the major fragments of lost Aeschylean plays.
Hardcover January 2008
The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume VII, Society and Solitude
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Introduction and notes by Ronald A. Bosco
Text established by Douglas Emory Wilson
Society and Solitude, published in 1870, was the first collection of essays Emerson had put into press since The Conduct of Life ten years earlier. This edition is based on Emerson's holograph manuscripts and published sources. The text incorporates corrections and revisions he recorded in both sources, and thus restores for the reader the text he actually wrote. Although he is still visibly the insistent optimist of his early and middle career, here Emerson assumes a more pragmatic attitude than formerly toward the life of the mind and the imagination.
Hardcover January 2008
Beacon Fire and Shooting Star
Xiaofei Tian
The Liang dynasty (502-557) was one of the most brilliant and creative periods in Chinese history and is one of the most underestimated and misunderstood. This book is devoted to contextualizing the literary culture of this era, exploring not only the literary works themselves but also the processes of literary production and the intricate interactions of religion and literature.
Hardcover December 2007
The Canon
Constantine Cavafy
Translated by Stratis Haviaras
Foreword by Seamus Heaney
This volume of 154 poems by Constantine Cavafy is the entire body of work by the artist widely considered a master of modern Greek poetry. Published here in the original Greek, with a new English translation by the noted poet Stratis Haviaris on each facing page, and with a foreword by Seamus Heaney, The Canon is Cavafy, familiar and fresh, seen through new eyes, yet instantly recognized.
Paperback November 2007
Our Secret Discipline
Helen Vendler
The fundamental difference between rhetoric and poetry, according to Yeats, is that rhetoric is the expression of one's quarrels with others while poetry is the expression (and sometimes the resolution) of one's quarrel with oneself. This is where Vendler's Our Secret Discipline begins. Through exquisite attention to outer and inner forms, Vendler explores the most inventive reaches of the poet's mind.
Hardcover November 2007