Every devoted reader feels that, in some way, they know Jane Austen. But how can we make sense of her extraordinary achievements? At a time when most women received so little formal education and none could obtain a place at university, how did Auste...

This collection of essays offers an intimate history of Austen's art and life told through objects associated with her personally and with the era in which she lived. Her teenage notebooks, music albums, pelisse-coat, letters, the homemade booklets i...

"Here I am once more in this Scene of Dissipation and vice, and I begin to find already my Morals corrupted". Much loved for the romantic plot lines of her novels and witty observations on relationships, Jane Austen was also a prolific letter writer...

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...

Max Frisch (1911-1991) was a giant of twentieth-century German literature. When Frisch moved into a new apartment in Berlin's Sarrazinstrasse, he began keeping a journal, which he came to call the Berlin Journal. A few years later, he emphasized in a...

This radically original book argues for the power of ordinary language philosophy – a tradition inaugurated by Ludwig Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin, and extended by Stanley Cavell – to transform literary studies. In engaging and lucid prose, Toril Mo...

Though underexplored in contemporary scholarship, the Victorian attempts to turn aesthetics into a science remain one of the most fascinating aspects of that era. In "The Outward Mind", Benjamin Morgan approaches this period of innovation as an impor...

In medieval literature, when humans and animals meet – whether as friends or foes – issues of mastery and submission are often at stake".In the Skin of a Beast" shows how the concept of sovereignty comes to the fore in such narratives, reflecting lar...

The art and craft of playwriting as explored in candid conversations with some of the most important contemporary dramatists. Edward Albee, Lanford Wilson, Lynn Nottage, A. R. Gurney, and a host of other major creative voices of the theater discuss...

Now reissued in an updated paperback edition, this groundbreaking account of the Medieval Revival movement examines the ways in which the style of the medieval period was re-established in post-Enlightenment England – from Walpole and Scott, Pugin, R...