In the decades before the rise of the Third Reich, "Secret Germany" was a phrase used by the circle of writers around the poet Stefan George to describe a collective political and poetic project: the introduction of the highest values of art into eve...

One of the foremost thinkers of his generation, Furio Jesi began to publish scholarly essays in academic journals at the age of fifteen. By the time of his early death in 1980, he had accumulated a body of work that astonishes with its abundance and...

Not for sale in the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic! Sometimes called the Czech Bukowski, and more widely known by the epithet "Magor" (which translates roughly to "fool" or "madman"), Ivan Jirous was one of the most significant figures in t...

This engaging book provides an essential introduction to the manuscript in early modern England. From birth to death, parish record to probate inventory, writing framed the lives of the early modern English. The book offers a detailed technical intro...

The English critic, biographer, and poet Samuel Johnson was among the most influential figures of the eighteenth century. This twentieth and final volume of the Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson presents the author's occasional writing, inc...

What does it mean to contemplate? In the Middle Ages, more than merely thinking with intensity, it was a religious practice entailing utter receptiveness to the divine presence. Contemplation is widely considered by scholars today to have been the hi...

Literary scholars often avoid the category of the aesthetic in discussions of ethics, believing that purely aesthetic judgments can vitiate analyses of a literary work's sociopolitical heft and meaning. In "Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ag...

While largely unknown today, Danish writer and Darwin translator Jens Peter Jacobsen was the leading prose writer in Scandinavia in the late nineteenth century and part of a generation that included Henrik Ibsen, Knut Hamsun, and August Strindberg. H...

Today we do not expect poems to carry scientifically valid information. But it was not always so. In "Sweet Science", Amanda Jo Goldstein returns to the beginnings of the division of labor between literature and science to recover a tradition of Roma...

"I do not say you are it, but you look it, and you pose at it, which is just as bad", Lord Queensbury challenged Oscar Wilde in the courtroom – which erupted in laughter – accusing Wilde of posing as a sodomite. What was so terrible about posing as a...