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...

"The Stranger" is a rite of passage for readers around the world. Since its publication in France in 1942, Camus's novel has been translated into sixty languages and sold more than six million copies. It's the rare novel that's as at likely to be fou...

What can be found in the Vatican's Secret Archive? How many books did Charles Darwin's library aboard the Beagle hold? Which library is home to a colony of bats? Bursting with potted histories, quirky facts and enlightening lists, this book explores...

George Steiner is one of the preeminent intellectuals of our time. The Washington Post has declared that no one else "writing on literature can match him as polymath and polyglot, and few can equal the verve and eloquence of his writing", while the N...

The seventeenth century saw some of the most important jurisprudential changes in England's history, yet the period has been largely overlooked in the rich field of literature and law. Helping to fill this gap, "The Legal Epic" is the first book to s...

Acclaimed novelist and critic Tim Parks has long been fascinated by the complicated relationship between an author's life and work. Dissatisfied with the dominant modes of reading he encountered, he began exploring the underlying values and patterns...

James Joyce's Ulysses first appeared in print in the pages of an American avant-garde magazine, The Little Review, between 1918 and 1920. The novel many consider to be the most important literary work of the twentieth century was, at the time, deemed...

Long before Citizens United and modern debates over corporations as people, such organizations already stood between the public and private as both vehicles for commerce and imaginative constructs based on groups of individuals. In this book, John O'...

Why must critics unmask and demystify literary works? Why do they believe that language is always withholding some truth, that the critic's task is to reveal the unsaid or repressed? In this book, Rita Felski examines critique, the dominant form of i...

This provocative book shows how the mass abandonment of rural vernaculars (such as the Irish language, Italian dialects, and French patois) shaped European literary modernism. Sean O Riordain in Ireland and Pier Paolo Pasolini in Italy reshaped minor...