Rarely does a European or American child grow up without an introduction to Hans Christian Andersen's "The Ugly Duckling", "The Princess and the Pea", or "Thumbelina". Andersen began publishing his fairy tales in 1835, and they brought him almost imm...

William Shakespeare's Hamlet is probably the best-known and most commented upon work of literature in Western culture. The paradox is that it is at once utterly familiar and strangely elusive-very like our own selves, argues Gabriel Josipovici in thi...

Son of the famous Thomas Mann, homosexual, drug-addicted, and forced to flee from his fatherland, the gifted writer Klaus Mann's comparatively short life was as artistically productive as it was devastatingly dislocated. Best-known today as the autho...

This issue considers the oeuvre of Haitian writer Marie Vieux-Chauvet (1916-1973) as a prism through which to examine individual and collective subject formation in the postcolonial French-writing Caribbean, the wider Afro-Americas, and beyond. While...

This new selection of Thoreau's essays traces his trajectory as a writer for the outlets of his day – the periodical press, newspapers, and compendiums – and as a frequent presenter on the local lecture circuit. By arranging the writings chronologica...

An arresting new study of the life, times, and achievement of one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. Taylor's endeavor is not to explain the life by the novel or the novel by the life but to show how different events, different...

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...

This book explores Oscar Wilde's fascination with the eighteenth-century forger Thomas Chatterton, who tragically took his life at the age of seventeen. This innovative study combines a scholarly monograph with a textual edition of the extensive note...

Shakespeare's plays abound with kings and leaders who crave a public stage and seize every opportunity to make their lives a performance: Antony, Cleopatra, Richard III, Othello, and many others. Such self-dramatizing characters appear in the work of...

Novelist, poet, playwright, and short story writer Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908) is widely regarded as Brazil's greatest writer, although his work is still too little read outside his native country. In this first comprehensive English-l...