Just as today's embrace of the digital has sparked interest in the history of print culture, so in eighteenth-century Britain the dramatic proliferation of print gave rise to urgent efforts to historicize different media forms and to understand their...

What is a hostile environment? How exactly can feelings be mixed? What on earth might it mean when someone writes that he was "happily situated" as a slave? The answers, of course, depend upon whom you ask. Science and the humanities typically offe...

Today we do not expect poems to carry scientifically valid information. But it was not always so. In "Sweet Science", Amanda Jo Goldstein returns to the beginnings of the division of labor between literature and science to recover a tradition of Roma...

This radically original book argues for the power of ordinary language philosophy – a tradition inaugurated by Ludwig Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin, and extended by Stanley Cavell – to transform literary studies. In engaging and lucid prose, Toril Mo...

Though underexplored in contemporary scholarship, the Victorian attempts to turn aesthetics into a science remain one of the most fascinating aspects of that era. In "The Outward Mind", Benjamin Morgan approaches this period of innovation as an impor...

In medieval literature, when humans and animals meet – whether as friends or foes – issues of mastery and submission are often at stake".In the Skin of a Beast" shows how the concept of sovereignty comes to the fore in such narratives, reflecting lar...

N. Katherine Hayles is known for breaking new ground at the intersection of the sciences and the humanities. In "Unthought", she once again bridges disciplines by revealing how we think without thinking – how we use cognitive processes that are inacc...

In the French filmmaker Robert Bresson's cinematography, the linkage of fragmented, dissimilar images challenges our assumption that we know either what things are in themselves or the infinite ways in which they are entangled.  The "bond" of Sharon...

This book focuses on six brilliant women who are often seen as particularly tough-minded: Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Diane Arbus, and Joan Didion. Aligned with no single tradition, they escape straightforward categories....

According to traditional accounts, the history of tragedy is itself tragic: following a miraculous birth in fifth-century Athens and a brilliant resurgence in the early modern period, tragic drama then falls into a marked decline. While disputing the...