In November 1919, newspapers around the world alerted readers to a sensational new theory of the universe: Albert Einstein's theory of relativity. Coming at a time of social, political, and economic upheaval, Einstein's theory quickly became a rich c...

In "Air's Appearance", Jayne Elizabeth Lewis enlists her readers in pursuit of the elusive concept of atmosphere in literary works. She shows how diverse conceptions of air in the eighteenth century converged in British fiction, producing the modern...

An actor's deepest desire is to be understood. But when asked to pronounce such words as "chanson", "phantasime", or "quaestor", many otherwise unflappable actors can be rendered speechless. "The Eloquent Shakespeare" aims to untie those tongues a...

"The King James Bible" stands at "the sublime summit of literature in English", sharing the honour only with Shakespeare, Harold Bloom contends in the opening pages of this illuminating literary tour. Distilling the insights acquired from a significa...

Gustave Flaubert, one of the key figures in literary modernism, is famous for his determined pursuit of stylistic perfection. This notably involved the attempt to eliminate from his prose all sorts of assonances, consonances, and repetitions, in larg...

Political theology is a distinctly modern problem, one that takes shape in some of the most important theoretical writings of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. But its origins stem from the early modern period, in medieval iconographies of sa...

Winner of the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and numerous other awards, C. K. Williams is one of the most distinguished poets of his generation. Known for the variety of his subject matter and the expressive intensity of his vers...

The French Revolution brings to mind violent mobs, the guillotine, and Madame Defarge, but it was also a publishing revolution: more than 1,200 novels were published between 1789 and 1804, when Napoleon declared the Revolution at an end. In this book...

In 1976, Trent Batson and Eugene Bergman released their classic Angels and Outcasts: An Anthology of Deaf Characters in Literature. In it, they featured works from the 19th and 20th centuries by well-known authors such as Charles Dickens and Eudora W...

Called "the most important critic of his time" by Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin has only become more influential over the years, as his work has assumed a crucial place in current debates over the interactions of art, culture, and meaning. A "natura...