To the extent that she is popularly known, Katherine Parr (1512-1548) is the woman who survived King Henry VIII as his sixth and last wife. She merits far greater recognition, however, on several other fronts. Fluent in French, Italian, and Latin, Pa...

Though modern readers no longer believe in the four humors of Galenic naturalism – blood, choler, melancholy, and phlegm – early modern thought found in these bodily fluids key to explaining human emotions and behavior. In "Humoring the Body", Gail K...

In works of Western literature ranging from Homer's "Odyssey" to Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" The giving and taking of hospitality are sometimes pleasurable, but more often perilous. Heffernan traces this leitmotiv through the history of...

For about three thousand years comedy has applied a welcome humanist perspective to the world's religious beliefs and practices. From the ancient Greek comedies of Aristophanes, the famous poem by Lucretius and dialogues of Cicero to early modern and...

In this study, David Seale argues that Sophocles's use of stagecraft, which has thus far received little attention, was as sophisticated as that of Aeschylus or Euripides. His discussions of the physical and visual elements of Sophocles's seven plays...

First published in 1899, "The Symbolist Movement in Literature" was a highly influential work of criticism, and served to introduce the French Symbolists to an Anglophone readership. Symons' interest in writers such as Paul Verlaine and Stephane Mall...

James Boswell (1740-1795), best known as the biographer of Samuel Johnson, was also a lawyer, journalist, diarist and an insightful chronicler of a pivotal epoch in Western history. This fascinating collection, edited by Paul Tankard, presents a gene...

From its beginnings in "Twilight" fan-fiction to its record-breaking sales as an e-book and paperback, the story of the erotic romance novel "Fifty Shades of Grey" and its two sequels is both unusual and fascinating. Having sold over seventy million...

Modern theory needs a history lesson. Neither Marx nor Nietzsche first gave us theory – Hegel did. To support this contention, Andrew Cole's "The Birth of Theory" presents a refreshingly clear and lively account of the origins and legacy of Hegel's d...

Eighteenth-century British culture is often seen as polite and sentimental – the product of an emerging middle class. Simon Dickie contests these assumptions in "Cruelty and Laughter", a wildly enjoyable but shocking plunge into the forgotten comic l...