For more than a century, American poets have heeded the siren song of Ezra Pound's make it new, staking a claim for the next poem on the supposed obsolescence of the last. But great poems are forever rehearsing their own present, inviting readers int...

Conspiracies and revolts simmered beneath the surface of Queen Elizabeth's reign. England was riven with tensions created by religious conflict and the prospect of dynastic crisis and regime change. In this rich, incisive account, Peter Lake reveal...

While presenting the Nobel Prize in Literature to J. M. G. Le Clezio in 2008, the Nobel Committee called him the "author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization". In M...

Imagine trying to tell someone something about yourself and your desires for which there are no words. What if the mere attempt at expression was bound to misfire, to efface the truth of that ineluctable something? In "Someone", Michael Lucey conside...

How, in 1930, did Alfred Wegener, the son of minister from Berlin, find himself in the most isolated spot on earth, attempting to survive an unthinkably cold winter in the middle of Greenland? In "All the Land", Jo Lendle sets out to chronicle Wegene...

What does it mean to have an emotional response to poetry and music? And, just as important but considered less often, what does it mean not to have such a response? What happens when lyric utterances – which should invite consolation, revelation, an...

Of the many charges laid against contemporary literary scholars, one of the most common – and perhaps the most wounding – is that they simply don't love books. And while the most obvious response is that, no, actually the profession of literary studi...

Philosophy's relation to the act of writing is John T. Lysaker's main concern in "Philosophy, Writing, and the Character of Thought". Whether in Plato, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, or Derrida, philosophy has come in many forms, and those forms...

"The Great William" is the first book to explore how seven renowned writers – Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Virginia Woolf, Charles Olson, John Berryman, Allen Ginsberg, and Ted Hughes – wrestled with Shakespeare in the very moments when they...

For decades, James Joyce's modernism has overshadowed his Irishness, as his self-imposed exile and association with the high modernism of Europe's urban centers has led critics to see him almost exclusively as a cosmopolitan figure. In "Joyce's Ghost...