In 1948, Yale French Studies devoted its inaugural issue to existentialism. This anniversary issue responds seventy years later. In recent years, new critical and theoretical approaches have reconfigured existentialism and refreshed perspectives on t...

There is more adventure in "The Faerie Queene" than in any other major English poem. But the epic of Arthurian knights, ladies, and dragons in Faerie Land, beloved by C. S. Lewis, is often regarded as quaint and obscure, and few critics have analyzed...

Literary scholars have explained the rise of the Anglophone novel using a range of tools, from Ian Watt's theories to James Watt's inventions. Contrary to established narratives, "When Novels Were Books" reveals that the genre beloved of so many read...

Agamemnon led a ten-year-long struggle at Troy only to return home and die a pathetic death at his wife's hands. Yet while Agamemnon's story exerts an outsize influence – rivalled by few epic personalities – on the poetic narratives of the Iliad and...

Oedipus's major handicap in life is not knowing who he is – and both parricide and incest result from his ignorance of his identity. With two questions – "Who am I?" and "Who is my father?" – on his mind (and on his lips), the obsessed Oedipus arrive...

The ancient Greeks' concept of "the hero" was very different from what we understand by the term today, Gregory Nagy argues – and it is only through analyzing their historical contexts that we can truly understand Achilles, Odysseus, Oedipus, and Her...

Livy (Titus Livius), the great Roman historian, was born at Patavium (Padua) in 64 or 59 BC where after years in Rome he died in AD 12 or 17. Livy's history, composed as the imperial autocracy of Augustus was replacing the republican system that had...

This volume of "Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium" collects papers ranging widely on topics of the literary and material culture of the Celtic regions of Ireland, Wales, and Breton in the medieval and modern periods. Several articles conce...

"Regional Literature and the Transmission of Culture" provides a richly textured picture of cultural transmission in the Qing and early Republican eras. Drum ballad texts (guci) evoke one of the most popular performance traditions of their day, a pra...

"In Her Own Words: The Life and Poetry of Aelia Eudocia" is the first full-length study to examine Eudocia's writings as a unified whole and to situate them within their wider fifth-century literary, social, and religious contexts. Responsible for ov...