In works of Western literature ranging from Homer's "Odyssey" to Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" The giving and taking of hospitality are sometimes pleasurable, but more often perilous. Heffernan traces this leitmotiv through the history of...

For about three thousand years comedy has applied a welcome humanist perspective to the world's religious beliefs and practices. From the ancient Greek comedies of Aristophanes, the famous poem by Lucretius and dialogues of Cicero to early modern and...

James Boswell (1740-1795), best known as the biographer of Samuel Johnson, was also a lawyer, journalist, diarist and an insightful chronicler of a pivotal epoch in Western history. This fascinating collection, edited by Paul Tankard, presents a gene...

In the summer of 1927, Walter Benjamin wrote about a possible future project on what he called French Trauerspiel, or mourning drama. In this volume of Yale French Studies, an international team of leading scholars of early modern Europe takes its cu...

A towering figure in world literature, Dante wrote his great epic poem the Commedia in the early fourteenth century. The work gained universal acclaim and came to be known as "La Divina Commedia", or "The Divine Comedy". Guiseppe Mazzotta brings Dant...

Charles Dickens was regarded as a pillar of respectability in Victorian Britain, but in 1858 this image was nearly shattered. With the break-up of his marriage that year, rumours about a scandalous relationship he may have conducted with young actres...

In 1943, twenty-four-year-old Primo Levi had just begun a career in chemistry when, after joining a partisan group, he was captured by the Italian Fascist Militia and deported to Auschwitz. Of the 650 Italian Jews in his transport, he was one of only...

In this fascinating and erudite book, Bryan Cheyette throws new light on a wide range of modern and contemporary writers – some at the heart of the canon, others more marginal – to explore the power and limitations of the diasporic imagination after...

In celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, one of the world's great treasure houses for rare books, comes this sumptuously illustrated curators' choice of fifty of the Library's most pri...

Dream is a central image for Shakespeare, encompassing at once the terrors of the irrational and the creative powers of the imagination – one's deepest fears and highest aspirations. Used in the early plays as a verbal or structural device, dream bec...