We have become used to looking at art from a stance of detachment. In order to be objective, we create a "mental space" between ourselves and the objects of our investigation, separating internal and external worlds. This detachment dates back to the...

Hans Magnus Enzensberger takes the title for this collection of daring short essays on topical themes – politics, economics, religion, society – not from Jeremy Bentham's famous prison but from a mid-1930s Cabinet of Curiosities opened in Germany by...

Literary scholars often avoid the category of the aesthetic in discussions of ethics, believing that purely aesthetic judgments can vitiate analyses of a literary work's sociopolitical heft and meaning. In "Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ag...

John Haines arrived in Alaska, fresh out of the Navy, in 1947, and established a homestead seventy miles southeast of Fairbanks. He stayed there nearly twenty-five years, learning to live off the country: hunting, trapping, fishing, gathering berries...

An arresting new study of the life, times, and achievement of one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. Taylor's endeavor is not to explain the life by the novel or the novel by the life but to show how different events, different...

For decades, Roger Grenier has been charming readers with compact, erudite books that draw elegant connections between our lives and our love of the arts. Whether he's turning to literature and philosophy to help us see our canine companions anew in...

An arresting new study of the life, times, and achievement of one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. Taylor's endeavor is not to explain the life by the novel or the novel by the life but to show how different events, different...

Samuel Steward (1909-1993) was an English professor, a tattoo artist for the Hells Angels, a sexual adventurer who shared his considerable range of experiences with Alfred Kinsey, and a prolific writer of everything from scholarly articles to gay ero...

At the close of the Second World War, modernist poets found themselves in an increasingly scientific world, where natural and social sciences claimed exclusive rights to knowledge of both matter and mind. Following the overthrow of the Newtonian worl...

Within Shakespeare's lifetime there was already some curiosity about what the writer of such brilliant poems, sonnets and plays looked like. Yet like so much else about him, Shakespeare's appearance is mysterious. Why is it so difficult to find imag...