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...

How did slavery and race impact American literature in the nineteenth century? In this ambitious book, Michael T. Gilmore argues that they were the carriers of linguistic restriction, and writers from Frederick Douglass to Stephen Crane wrestled with...

Long celebrated as one of "the Three Crowns" of Florence, Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) experimented widely with the forms of literature. His prolific and innovative writings – which range beyond the novella, from lyric to epic, from biography to my...

When apartheid ended in 1994, a radiant optimism suggested a bright future for the new, unified South Africa. But today, even in the midst of a vibrant economy, the cumulative effect of the country's corrosive past – three hundred years of colonialis...

Peter Handke, a giant of Austrian literature, has produced decades of fiction, poetry, and drama informed by some of the most tumultuous events in modern history. But even as these events shaped his work, the presence of his mother – a woman whose li...

"New York... I HATE IT... I LOVE IT... I DON'T KNOW..." These are the reflections of Max Frisch (1911-1991) writing from his apartment in the Big Apple near the end of the twentieth century. Beginning in 1946 and continuing until his death at the age...

A plain, blank stationer's notebook from the 1780s in the Bodleian Library contains some of the most famous juvenilia in all of English literature. Copied out in Jane Austen's youthful hand, "Volume the First", which takes its name from the inscripti...

In "Trade and Romance", Michael Murrin examines the complex relations between the expansion of trade in Asia and the production of heroic romance in Europe from the second half of the thirteenth century through the late seventeenth century. He shows...

"The Mahabharata" tells a story of such violence and tragedy that many people in India refuse to keep the full text in their homes, fearing that if they do, they will invite a disastrous fate upon their house. Covering everything from creation to des...