In the summer of 1927, Walter Benjamin wrote about a possible future project on what he called French Trauerspiel, or mourning drama. In this volume of Yale French Studies, an international team of leading scholars of early modern Europe takes its cu...

How did slavery and race impact American literature in the nineteenth century? In this ambitious book, Michael T. Gilmore argues that they were the carriers of linguistic restriction, and writers from Frederick Douglass to Stephen Crane wrestled with...

This lively book tells a story never told before: the complete history of women readers and the controversies their reading has inspired since the beginning of the written word. Belinda Jack's groundbreaking volume travels from the Cro-Magnon cave to...

Spanning nearly 500 years of cultural and social history, this book examines the ways that literature and surveillance have developed together, as kindred modern practices. As ideas about personhood – what constitutes a self – have changed over time,...

Lionel Trilling, regarded at the time of his death in 1975 as America's preeminent literary critic, is today often seen as a relic of a vanished era. His was an age when literary criticism and ideas seemed to matter profoundly in the intellectual lif...

Seven decades after his death, German Jewish writer, philosopher, and literary critic Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) continues to fascinate and influence. Here Uwe Steiner offers a comprehensive and sophisticated introduction to the oeuvre of this intri...

From July 1741 to March 1744, Samuel Johnson composed speeches based on the actual debates in Parliament for publication in the "Gentleman's Magazine". Because it was then illegal to print any account of parliamentary activities, the magazine publish...

In this lively gambol through the history of quotations and quotation books, Gary Saul Morson traces our enduring fascination with the words of others. Ranging from the remote past to the present, he explores the formation, development, and significa...

Taking its title from Howard Carter's famous description of his first glimpse of the treasures of Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922, this book offers a timeless portrait of highlights representing the range of the Bodleian Library's unique collections. The...