Rarely does a European or American child grow up without an introduction to Hans Christian Andersen's "The Ugly Duckling", "The Princess and the Pea", or "Thumbelina". Andersen began publishing his fairy tales in 1835, and they brought him almost imm...

William Shakespeare's Hamlet is probably the best-known and most commented upon work of literature in Western culture. The paradox is that it is at once utterly familiar and strangely elusive-very like our own selves, argues Gabriel Josipovici in thi...

In this unique and finely-wrought collection, award-winning poet and scholar Peter McDonald gives us the first contemporary translation of the Homeric Hymns; a collection of 33 anonymous Ancient Greek hymns celebrating individual gods. From Zeus to A...

At the turn of the fifteenth century, private devotionals became a speciality of the renowned Ghent-Bruges illuminators. Wealthy patrons who commissioned work from these artists often spared no expense in the presentation of their personal prayer boo...

To write or read a poem is often to think in distinctively poetic ways – guided by metaphors, sound, rhythms, associative movement, and more. Poetry's stance toward language creates a particular intelligence of thought and feeling, a compressed artic...

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...

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...

"Homer in Print" traces the print transmission and literary reception of the Iliad and the Odyssey from the fifteenth through the twentieth century. Over 175 mini essays provide new details of each included edition's textual, intellectual, and publis...