In this lively gambol through the history of quotations and quotation books, Gary Saul Morson traces our enduring fascination with the words of others. Ranging from the remote past to the present, he explores the formation, development, and significa...

In this wide-ranging and original account of Modernism, Michael Levenson draws on more than twenty years of research and a career-long fascination with the movement, its participants, and the period during which it thrived. Seeking a more subtle unde...

Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) ranks with Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, and Boris Pasternak as one of Russia's greatest twentieth-century poets. Her suicide at the age of forty-eight was the tragic culmination of a life beset by loss and hardship. T...

The consolidation of law and the development of legal writing during Spain's Golden Age not only helped that country become a modern state but also affected its great literature. In this fascinating book, Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria explores the work...

A study that looks at a variety of early modern Yiddish masterworks – and their writers and readers – focusing on their treatment of supernatural themes and beings.

Focuses on postwar approaches to the past, the nature of collective memory, and issues of cultural memory in a transnational age. This title includes essays that probe points of contact between memories and legacies of genocide, colonialism, and slav...

One hundred years after his death, Tolstoy still inspires controversy with his notoriously complex narrative strategies. This book explores how and why Tolstoy has mystified interpreters and offers a look at his most famous works of fiction.

Many famous antique texts are misunderstood and many others have been completely dismissed, all because the literary style in which they were written is unfamiliar today. So argues Mary Douglas in this controversial study of ring composition, a techn...

What does a library say about the mind of its owner? How do books map the intellectual interests, curiosities, tastes, and personalities of their readers? What does the collecting of books have in common with the practice of architecture? "Unpacking...

Fyodor Dostoevsky completed his final novel, "The Brothers Karamazov", in 1880. A work of universal appeal and significance, his exploration of good and evil immediately gained an international readership and today "remains harrowingly alive in the f...