This volume presents the first printed edition of a late sixteenth-century poetic miscellany and provides invaluable insight into understanding the literature of the period. Its owner and principal scribe, Humfrey Coningsby, drew on texts circulating...

In her Letters on Natural Philosophy, published originally in Krakow in 1584, Camilla Erculiani proposed her new theory of the natural causes of the universal flood in the biblical book of Genesis. Erculiani weaves together her understanding of Arist...

What is sleep? How can this most unproductive of human states – metaphorically called death's shadow or considered the very pinnacle of indolence – be envisioned as action and agency? And what do we become in sleep? What happens to the waking selves...

A literary master's entertaining guide to reading with deeper insight, better understanding, and greater pleasure What makes a work of literature good or bad? How freely can the reader interpret it? Could a nursery rhyme like Baa Baa Black Sheep be f...

Shakespeare was an astute observer of contemporary life, culture, and politics. The emerging practice of territory as a political concept and technology did not elude his attention. In "Shakespearean Territories", Stuart Elden reveals just how much S...

Literature departments are staffed by, and tend to be focused on turning out, "good" readers – attentive to nuance, aware of history, interested in literary texts as self-contained works. But the vast majority of readers are, to use Merve Emre's tong...

We have become used to looking at art from a stance of detachment. In order to be objective, we create a "mental space" between ourselves and the objects of our investigation, separating internal and external worlds. This detachment dates back to the...

Hans Magnus Enzensberger takes the title for this collection of daring short essays on topical themes – politics, economics, religion, society – not from Jeremy Bentham's famous prison but from a mid-1930s Cabinet of Curiosities opened in Germany by...

In 1345, when Petrarch recovered a lost collection of letters from Cicero to his best friend Atticus, he discovered an intimate Cicero, a man very different from either the well-known orator of the Roman forum or the measured spokesman for the ancien...

"Bergeners" is a love letter to a writer's hometown. The book opens in New York City at the swanky Standard Hotel and closes in Berlin at Askanischer Hof, a hotel that has seen better days. But between these two global metropolises we find Bergen, No...