This landmark biography of celebrated Romantic poet John Keats explodes entrenched conceptions of him as a delicate, overly sensitive, tragic figure. Instead, Nicholas Roe reveals the real flesh-and-blood poet: a passionate man driven by ambition but...

"Just then, Rahul saw a spot of yellow far away... The yellow glowed beautifully in the morning light. There was something different about this particular yellow and was totally unlike all others. This one entered through his eyes, dissolved in his b...

A young soldier dons Napoleon's hat. An out-of-work man wanders Berlin, dreaming he is Peter the Great. The famous exile Dante finally returns to his native city to "hang his crown of laurels up". Familial and historical apparitions haunt this dazzli...

Though branded as pornography for its graphic language and explicit sexuality, Henry Miller's "Tropic of Cancer" is far more than a work that tested American censorship laws. In this riveting book, published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary...

<p>In this characteristically concise, witty, and lucid book, Terry Eagleton turns his attention to the questions we should ask about literature, but rarely do. What is literature? Can we even speak of "literature" at all? What do different...

The publication of "Portnoy's Complaint" in 1969 provoked instant, powerful reactions. It blasted Philip Roth into international fame, subjected him to unrelenting personal scrutiny and conjecture, and shocked legions of readers – some delighted, oth...

Lionel Trilling, regarded at the time of his death in 1975 as America's preeminent literary critic, is today often seen as a relic of a vanished era. His was an age when literary criticism and ideas seemed to matter profoundly in the intellectual lif...

Contemporaries in imagination as in fact, James Joyce and Sigmund Freud pondered the complexities and depths of human consciousness and found distinct ways to represent it-the one as a great novelist, the other as the first psychoanalyst. In this boo...

In this illuminating book, Joseph Pucci contends that the key to grasping the meaning of an allusive text is in the hands of an active and engaged reader. Pucci considers an array of texts from Homer to Pound, showing that the reader has become empow...

Renaissance plays and poetry in England were saturated with the formal rhetorical twists that a Latin education made familiar to audiences and readers. Yet a formally educated man like Ben Jonson was unable to make these ornaments come to life in his...