- Between History and Literature
- Lionel Gossman
- Drawing on essays written over the course of a distinguished teaching career, Gossman illuminates the many facets of the problematic relationship between history and literature and shows how each discipline both challenges and undermines the other's absolutist pretensions. His detailed inquiries into the work of the Romantic historians and his thoughtful reflections on his own assumptions and practices as a scholar exemplify the highest ideals of humanistic scholarship.
- Hardcover 1990
- The Challenge of Comparative Literature
- Claudio Guillen
- Translated by Cola Franzen
- Hardcover 1993 / Paperback
- The Classic
- Frank Kermode
- Paperback
- 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 2008
- Colors of the Mind
- Angus Fletcher
- Recognizing that the field of formal philosophy is only one demonstration of the uses of thought, Fletcher looks for the ways other languages (and their framing forms) serve the purpose of certain thinking activities. In the end he gives us literature--not the content of thought, but its form, its shape, the fugitive colors taken on by the mind as represented in art.
- Hardcover 1991
- Doubling the Point
- J. M. Coetzee
- Edited by David Attwell
- Hardcover 1992 / Paperback
- Ecology without Nature
- Timothy Morton
- Morton argues that the chief stumbling block to environmental thinking is the image of nature that most writers promote: they propose a new world view, but their very zeal to preserve the natural world leads them away from the "nature" they revere. The problem is a symptom of a far deeper situation: of accepting the idea of "ecology without nature." To have a properly ecological view, we must relinquish, once and for all, the idea of nature.
- Hardcover 2007
- Fictional Worlds
- Thomas G. Pavel
- Created worlds may resemble the actual world, but they can just as easily be deemed incomplete, precarious, or irrelevant. Why, then, does fiction continue to pull us in and, more interesting perhaps, how? In this beautiful book Pavel provides a poetics of the imaginary worlds of fiction, their properties and their reason for being.
- Hardcover 1986 / Paperback
- The Genesis of Secrecy
- Frank Kermode
- Drawing on the venerable tradition of biblical interpretation, Kermode examines some enigmatic passages and episodes in the gospels. From his reading come ideas about what makes interpretation possible--and often impossible. He considers ways in which narratives acquire opacity, and he asks whether there are methods of distinguishing all possible meaning from a central meaning which gives the story its structure.
- Hardcover 1979 / Paperback
- 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 2008
- The Hunger Artists
- Maud Ellmann
- Hardcover
- Illustration
- J. Hillis Miller
- Hardcover 1992 / Paperback
- In a Dark Time
- Edited by Robert Jay Lifton
- Edited by Nicholas Humphrey
- This is an anthology for the nuclear age, created by two psychologists who have ordered their material so that the successive selections reflect and comment on one another, compelling the reader to think about the insanity of war. This book draws on thoughts and writings from more than two millennia: poets from Sappho to Robert Lowell, dreamers from Saint John the Divine to Martin Luther King, Jr., statesmen from Seneca to Winston Churchill, soldiers, churchmen, writers, leaders.
- Hardcover 1984 / Paperback
- Is There a Text in this Class?
- Stanley Fish
- Stanley Fish is one of America's most stimulating literary theorists. In this book, he undertakes a reexamination of some of criticism's most basic assumptions. He penetrates to the core of the modern debate about interpretation, explodes numerous misleading formulations, and offers a proposal for a new way of thinking about the way we read.
- Hardcover 1980 / Paperback
- Law and Literature
- Richard A. Posner
- Paperback 2009
- Lessons of the Masters
- George Steiner
- When we talk about education today, we tend to avoid the rhetoric of "mastery," with its erotic and inegalitarian overtones. But the charged personal encounter between master and disciple is precisely what interests Steiner in this book, a sustained reflection on the infinitely complex and subtle interplay of power, trust, and passions in the most profound sorts of pedagogy.
- Hardcover 2003 / Paperback 2005
- Literary Interest
- Steven Knapp
- Hardcover
- The Living Eye
- Jean Starobinski
- Translated by Arthur Goldhammer
- Hardcover 1989
- Making Stories
- Jerome Bruner
- Stories pervade our daily lives. We use them to make sense of the world. But how does this work? In Making Stories, the eminent psychologist Jerome Bruner examines this pervasive human habit and suggests new and deeper ways to think about how we use stories to make sense of lives and the great moral and psychological problems that animate them. Looking at legal cases and autobiography as well as literature, Bruner warns us not to be seduced by overly tidy stories and shows how doubt and double meaning can lie beneath the most seemingly simple case.
- Paperback 2003
- Metamorphosis
- Harold Skulsky
- Fusing the methods of comparative literature, intellectual history, and philosophical analysis, Skulsky explores a motif that has fascinated storytellers since antiquity: the miraculous transformation of a character into a plant, an animal, or a different human being. The thesis of the study is that the fantasy of metamorphosis challenges the narrator and his audience to confront certain basic anxieties about the human condition.
- Hardcover 1981
- Minor Prophecies
- Geoffrey Hartman
- Hardcover 1991
- Modernism Reconsidered
- Edited by Robert Kiely
- Hardcover 1983 / Paperback
- Mother Tongues
- Barbara Johnson
- The existence of sexual difference precludes an original or ultimate "one" who would represent all of mankind; the plurality of languages makes it impossible to think that one doesn't live in translation; and the plurality of the sexes means that every human being came from a woman's body, and some will reproduce this feat, while others won't. In her most personal and deeply considered book about difference, Johnson asks: Is the mother the guardian of a oneness we have never had? The relations that link mothers, bodies, words, and laws serve as the guiding puzzles as she searches for an answer.
- Hardcover 2003
- The Open Work
- Umberto Eco
- Translated by Anna Cancogni
- Introduction by David Robey
- This book remains significant for its powerful concept of "openness"--the artist's decision to leave arrangements of some constituents of a work to the public or to chance--and for its striking anticipation of two major themes of contemporary literary theory: the element of multiplicity and plurality in art, and the insistence on literary response as an interactive process between reader and text. The questions Eco raises, and the answers he suggests, are intertwined in the continuing debate on literature, art, and culture in general.
- Hardcover 1989 / Paperback
- 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 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 2008
- Race and Erudition
- Maurice Olender
- Translated by Jane Marie Todd
- Hardcover 2009
- Reading for the Plot
- Peter Brooks
- Paperback 1992
- Reflections on Exile and Other Essays
- Edward W. Said
- This long-awaited collection of literary and cultural essays, the first since Harvard University Press published The World, the Text, and the Critic in 1983, reconfirms that Edward Said is the most impressive, consequential, and elegant critic of our time. Taken together, these essays-- from the famous to those that will surprise even Said's most assiduous followers--afford rare insight into the formation of a critic and the development of an intellectual vocation.
- Hardcover 2001 / Paperback 2002
- Reverse Tradition
- Robert Kiely
- Hardcover
- Risking Who One Is
- Susan Rubin Suleiman
- Susan Suleiman sets forth in this insightful work an intimate and provocative exchange with contemporary writers and artists such as Simone de Beauvoir, Hélène Cixous, Elie Wiesel, Mary Gordon, Max Ernst and Angela Carter. Suleiman includes us in her voyages of self-discovery as she confronts the conflicts between the problematic and crucial relations between individual life-story and collective history.
- Paperback 1996 / Hardcover
- The Road of Excess
- Marcus Boon
- From the antiquity of Homer to yesterday's Naked Lunch, writers have found inspiration, and readers have lost themselves, in a world of the imagination tinged and oftentimes transformed by drugs. The age-old association of literature and drugs receives its first comprehensive treatment in this far-reaching work. Drawing on history, science, biography, literary analysis, and ethnography, Boon shows that the concept of drugs is fundamentally interdisciplinary, and reveals how different sets of connections between disciplines configure each drug's unique history.
- Hardcover 2002 / Paperback 2005
- Sincerity and Authenticity
- Lionel Trilling
- "Now and then," writes Triling "it is possible to observe the moral life in process of revising itself." In this new book he is concerned with such a mutation: the process by which the arduous enterprise of sincerity, of being true to one's self, came to occupy a place of supreme importance in the moral life--and the further shift which finds that place now usurped by the darker and still more strenuous modern ideal of authenticity.
- Hardcover 1972 / Paperback
- Social Values and Poetic Acts
- Jerome J. McGann
- Hardcover 1988
- The Strategy of Letters
- Mette Hjort
- Hardcover
- The Theory of the Avant-Garde
- Renato Poggioli
- Convinced that all aspects of modern culture have been affected by avant-garde art, Poggioli explores the relationship between the avant-garde and civilization. Historical parallels and modern examples from all the arts are used to show how the avant-garde is both symptom and cause of many major extra-aesthetic trends of our time, and that the contemporary avant-garde is the sole and authentic one.
- Hardcover 1965 / Paperback
- Venice Desired
- Tony Tanner
- Hardcover
- Versions of Pygmalion
- J. Hillis Miller
- Hardcover 1990
- When Evensong and Morrowsong Accord
- Bartlett Jere Whiting
- Edited by Joseph Harris
- Edited by Wolfgang Mieder
- Hardcover 1995