In today's academe, the fields of science and literature are considered unconnected, one relying on raw data and fact, the other focusing on fiction. During the period between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, however, the two fields were not so...

Three decades of controversy in Shakespeare studies can be summed up in a single question: Was Shakespeare one of a kind? On one side of the debate are the Shakespeare lovers, the bardolatrists, who insist on Shakespeare's timeless preeminence as an...

Conservative thinkers of the early Middle Ages conceived of sensual gratification as a demonic snare contrived to debase the higher faculties of humanity, and they identified pagan writing as one of the primary conduits of decadence. Two aspects of t...

Together Max Frisch and Friedrich Durrenmatt are not only two of the most esteemed Swiss writers of the twentieth century, but arguably two of the most important European writers since World War II. The remarkable letters gathered here document their...

Annemarie Schwarzenbach – journalist, novelist, antifascist, archaeologist, and traveler – has become a European cult figure for bohemian free spirits since the rediscovery of her works in the late 1980s. "Lyric Novella" is her story of a young man's...

This book explores the historical insights of Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837), Russia's most celebrated poet and arguably its greatest thinker. Svetlana Evdokimova examines for the first time the full range of Pushkin's fictional and nonfictional writi...

Sir Frank Kermode, the British scholar, instructor, and author, was an inspired critic".Forms of Attention" is based on a series of three lectures he gave on canon formation, or how we choose what art to value. The essay on Botticelli traces the arti...

"After Auschwitz to write even a single poem is barbaric".The Conflagration of Community" challenges Theodor Adorno's famous statement about aesthetic production after the Holocaust, arguing for the possibility of literature to bear witness to extrem...

Leopold Sedar Senghor (1906-2001) was a Senegalese poet and philosopher who in 1960 also became the first president of the Republic of Senegal. In "African Art as Philosophy", Souleymane Bachir Diagne takes a unique approach to reading Senghor's infl...

From Shakespeare to Beckett, the contradictory figure of the fool who possesses unexpected wisdom has been a popular and effective literary trope and rhetorical figure for centuries. Philosophy needs idiots too, argues Keson Sutherland in "Stupefacti...