In Machines of the Mind, Katharine Breen proposes that medieval personifications should be understood neither as failed novelistic characters nor as instruments of heavy-handed didacticism. She argues that personifications are instead powerful tools...

Myths are usually seen as stories from the depths of time – fun and fantastical, but no longer believed by anyone. Yet, as Philip Ball shows, we are still writing them – and still living them – today. From Robinson Crusoe and Frankenstein to Batman,...

Jurek Becker (1937-1997) is best known for his novel "Jacob the Liar", which follows the life of a man, who, like Becker, lived in the Lodz ghetto during the German occupation of Poland in World War II. Throughout his career, Becker also wrote nonfic...

Not for sale in the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic! In this book-length study, Ewa Szary-Matywiecka examines Maria Wirtemberska's Malvina, or the Heart's Intuition, an international success upon its publication in 1816 that is now widely co...

"Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking-Glass" are two of the most famous, translated, and quoted books in the world. But how did a casual tale told by Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll), an eccentric Oxford mathematician, to Ali...

Called "a feminist classic" by Judith Shulevitz in the New York Times Book Review, this pathbreaking book of literary criticism is now reissued with a new introduction by Lisa Appignanesi that speaks to how The Madwoman in the Attic set the groundwor...

In "Mood and Trope", John Brenkman introduces two provocative propositions to affect theory: that human emotion is intimately connected to persuasion and figurative language; and that literature, especially poetry, lends precision to studying affect...

Moses Maimonides's "Guide of the Perplexed" is the greatest philosophical text in the history of Jewish thought and a major work of the Middle Ages. For almost all of its history, however, the Guide has been read and commented upon in translation – i...

While presenting the Nobel Prize in Literature to J. M. G. Le Clezio in 2008, the Nobel Committee called him the "author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization". In M...

In the nineteenth century, richly-drawn social fiction became one of England's major cultural exports. At the same time, a surprising companion came to stand alongside the novel as a key embodiment of British identity: the domesticated pet. In works...