In Coming To, Timothy M. Harrison uncovers the forgotten role of poetry in the history of the idea of consciousness. Drawing our attention to a sea change in the English seventeenth century, when, over the course of a half century, "conscience" made...

"Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking-Glass" are two of the most famous, translated, and quoted books in the world. But how did a casual tale told by Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll), an eccentric Oxford mathematician, to Ali...

We tend to think of rhetoric as a solely human art. After all, only humans can use language artfully to make a point, the very definition of rhetoric. Yet when you look at ancient and early modern treatises on rhetoric, what you find is surprising: t...

"Novel Houses" visits unforgettable dwellings in twenty legendary works of English and American fiction. Each chapter stars a famous novel in which a dwelling is pivotal to the plot, and reveals how personally significant that place was to the writer...

In the 200 years since its first publication, the story of "Frankenstein's" creation during stormy days and nights at Byron's Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva has become literary legend. In this book, Daisy Hay returns to the objects and manuscripts of t...

As the Christian doctrine of Incarnation asserts, "the Word became Flesh". Yet, while this metaphor is grounded in Christian tradition, its varied functions far exceed any purely theological import. It speaks to the nature of God just as much as to t...

Talking lions, philosophical bears, very hungry caterpillars, wise spiders, altruistic trees, companionable moles, urbane elephants: this is the magnificent menagerie that delights our children at bedtime. Within the entertaining pages of many childr...

"The Wind in the Willows" has its origins in the bedtime stories that Kenneth Grahame told to his son Alastair and then continued in letters (now held in the Bodleian Library) while he was on holiday. But the book developed into something much more s...

"In our imaginations, war is the name we give to the extremes of violence in our lives, the dark dividing opposite of the connecting myth, which we call love. War enacts the great antagonisms of history, the agonies of nations; but it also offers met...

Described as an answer to or at least an echo of Samuel Beckett's "Krapp's Last Tape?", "Till Day You Do Part Or A Question of Light", by esteemed Austrian playwright and novelist Peter Handke, is a monologue delivered by the "she" in Beckett's play....