"The next day Wordsworth arrived from Bristol at Coleridge's cottage", William Hazlitt recalled, "He answered in some degree to his friend's description of him, but was more quaint and Don Quixote-like... there was a convulsive inclination to laughte...

Universal equality is a treasured political concept in France, but recent anxiety over the country's Muslim minority has led to an emphasis on a new form of universalism, one promoting loyalty to the nation at the expense of all ethnic and religious...

Jane Austen's readers continue to find delight in the justness of her moral and psychological discriminations. But for most readers, her values have been a phenomenon more felt than fully apprehended. In this book, Stuart M. Tave identifies and expla...

There are few forms in which so much authority has been invested with so little reflection as the sentence. Though a fundamental unit of discourse, it has rarely been an explicit object of inquiry, often taking a back seat to concepts such as the wor...

Just as a traveler crossing a continent won't sense the curvature of the earth, one lifetime of reading can't grasp the largest patterns organizing literary history. This is the guiding premise behind "Distant Horizons", which uses the scope of data...

Not for sale in the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic! Much of what we now consider the canon of twentieth-century Czech literature – the work of authors like Bohumil Hrabal, Ludvik Vaculik, and Jachym Topol, among many others – has, in fact,...

Imagine trying to tell someone something about yourself and your desires for which there are no words. What if the mere attempt at expression was bound to misfire, to efface the truth of that ineluctable something? In "Someone", Michael Lucey conside...

How have we come to depend so greatly on the words terror and terrorism to describe broad categories of violence? David Simpson offers here a philology of terror, tracking the concept's long, complicated history across literature, philosophy, politic...

The uncontested center of the black pulp fiction universe for more than four decades was the Los Angeles publisher Holloway House. From the late 1960s until it closed in 2008, Holloway House specialized in cheap paperbacks with page-turning narrative...

In "Grammars of Approach", Cynthia Wall offers a close look at changes in perspective in spatial design, language, and narrative across the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that involve, literally and psychologically, the concept of "ap...