Challenging the common perception of poets as standing apart from the mainstream of American culture, Robert von Hallberg gives us a fresh and unpredictable assessment of the poetry that has come directly out of the American experience since 1945.

“Be always converting, and be always converted; turn us again, O Lord,” Thomas Shepard urged his Cambridge congregation in the 1640s. Rob Wilson’s reconceptualization of the American project of conversion begins with the story of Henry ‘Opukaha‘ia, the first Hawaiian convert to Christianity, “torn from the stomach” of his Native Pacific homeland and transplanted to New England. Wilson argues that ‘Opukaha‘ia’s conversion is both remarkable and prototypically American, because he dared to redefine himself via this drive to rebirth.

Bede's theological works were chiefly commentaries, mostly allegorical in method, based with acknowledgment on Jerome, Augustine, Ambrose, Gregory, and others, but bearing his own personality. In another class were works on grammar and one on natural phenomena; special interest in the vexed question of Easter led him to write about the calendar and chronology. But his most admired production is his Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation. Here a clear and simple style united with descriptive powers to produce an elegant work, and the facts diligently collected from good sources make it a valuable account. The Loeb Classical Library edition of Bede's historical works is in two volumes.

Historical also are his Lives of the Abbots of his monastery, the less successful accounts (in verse and prose) of Cuthbert, and the Letter (November 734) to Egbert his pupil, so important for our knowledge about the Church in Northumbria.

Charles Olson is often described as one of the most influential American poets of the last quarter century; some would rather describe him as a cult figure, prophet of the Black Mountain poets and their descendants. Both judgments refer to an influence exerted as much through theories as through poems. Here is an examination of Olson's understanding of poetry that is cogent and a pleasure to read. It provides the framework needed for understanding Olson's work.

Marco Girolamo Vida (1485–1566), humanist and bishop, came to prominence as a Latin poet in the Rome of Leo X and Clement VII. It was Leo who commissioned his famous epic, the Christiad, a retelling of the life of Christ in the style of Vergil, which was eventually published in 1535. This translation, accompanied by extensive notes, is based on a new edition of the Latin text.

This richly suggestive book examines the common bonds of thought and shared manner of expression that unite Jewish writers working in America, Eastern Europe, and Israel. Murray Baumgarten shows how Jewish traditions are reflected in the themes and narrative style of a diverse group of writers, including Saul Bellow, Henry Roth, Sholom Aleichen, Isaac Babel, and S.Y. Agnon.

This study revolves around the career of Kobayashi Hideo (1902–1983), one of the seminal figures in the history of modern Japanese literary criticism, whose interpretive vision was forged amidst the cultural and ideological crises that dominated intellectual discourse between the 1920s and the 1940s. Although his interweaving of aesthetics and ideology exhibited elements of both resistance and complicity, his critical ethos served ultimately to undergird his wartime fascist stance by encouraging acquiescence to authority, championing patriotism, and calling for more vigorous thought control.

The greatest of the Greek orators, Demosthenes has been admired since antiquity for his dynamic style and variety of persuasive techniques, for his "force and effectiveness" and "majesty of utterance" (in Plutarch's words). Especially notable is the way he brings life to speeches by use of vivid detail.

The first of the seven volumes of the Demosthenes edition contains nine famous speeches in which he attempted to rouse athenian alarm about Macedonian ambitions: the three Olynthiacs, the four Philippics, On the Peace, and On the Chersonese. Here too are Philip of Macedon's letter to Athens declaring war and the Answer to Philip's letter.

From the Iliad to Aristophanes, from the gospel of Matthew to Augustine, Greek and Latin texts are constellated with descriptive images of dreams. This cultural history of dreams in antiquity draws on both contemporary post-Freudian science and careful critiques of the ancient texts. Harris takes an elusive subject and writes about it with rigor and precision, reminding us of specificities, contexts, and changing attitudes through history.

Contemporary Afro–American theatre is an exciting spectacle of an emerging black identity during a period when blacks have come to the forefront of political activity in the United States. Geneviève Fabre brings us the vast and rich production of black drama since 1945, placing it in historical and cultural context as a platform for political statement. Two strains emerge: the militant theatre of protest, and the ethnic theatre of black experience.

One of antiquity's greatest poets, Euripides (ca. 485-406 BCE) has been prized in every age for the pathos, terror, surprising plot twists, and intellectual probing of his dramatic creations. He wrote nearly ninety plays, of which eighteen have come down to us (plus a play of unknown authorship long included with his works). In this new Loeb Classical Library edition of Euripides, David Kovacs presents a freshly edited Greek text and an accurate and graceful translation with explanatory notes.

Cyclops is a satyr play, the only complete example of this genre to survive. Alcestis tells the story of a woman who agrees--in order to save her husband's life--to die in his place. Medea is the quintessential tragedy of revenge: Medea kills her own children, as well as their father's new wife, to punish him for desertion.

In a masterful study Carl Richard explores how the Greek and Roman classics became enshrined in American antebellum culture. For the first time, knowledge of the classics extended beyond aristocratic males to the middle class, women, African Americans, and frontier settlers. The Civil War led to a radical alteration of the educational system in a way that steadily eroded the preeminence of the classics. 

This book is about the Homeric figure Nestor. This study is important because it reveals a level of deliberate irony in the Homeric poems that has hitherto not been suspected, and because Nestor’s role in the poems, which is built on this irony, is a key to the circumstances of the poems’ composition. Interpreted in the context of the Indo-European twin myth, Nestor’s role clearly points beyond itself to the key question in Homeric studies: the circumstances of the poems’ composition.

Homer the Classic is about the reception of Homeric poetry from the fifth through the first century BCE. The aim of this book, which centers on ancient concepts of Homer as the author of a body of poetry that we know as the Iliad and the Odyssey, is not to reassess the oral poetic heritage of Homeric poetry but to show how it became a classic in the days of the Athenian empire and later. This volume is one of two books stemming from six Sather Classical Lectures given in the spring semester of 2002 at the University of California at Berkeley while the author was teaching there as the Sather Professor.

This book offers a groundbreaking account of the surprising interaction between trauma and justice. Moving from texts by Arendt, Benjamin, Freud, Zola, and Tolstoy to the Dreyfus and Nuremberg trials, as well as the trials of O. J. Simpson and Adolf Eichmann, Shoshana Felman argues that the adjudication of collective traumas in the twentieth century transformed both culture and law. This transformation took place through legal cases that put history itself on trial, and that provided a stage for the expression of the persecuted--the historically "expressionless."

Jacopo Sannazaro (1456–1530) is most famous for having written, in Italian, the first pastoral romance in European literature, the Arcadia (1504). But after this early work, Sannazaro devoted himself entirely to Latin poetry modeled on his beloved Vergil. In addition to his epic The Virgin Birth (1526), which earned him the title of “the Christian Vergil,” he also composed Piscatory Eclogues, an innovative adaption of the eclogue form. This volume contains the first complete English translation of all of Sannazaro’s poetry in Latin, accompanied by extensive notes.

This volume is a bilingual collection of shaman oral texts from the Bhuji Valley of Western Nepal, in the original Nepali and with line-by-line English translation. Accompanying the book is a DVD of audio recordings of the shaman oral texts, supplementary texts not included in the published volume, videos of shaman performances, and additional video and photographic documentation of the social context in which these shamans are found.

The world has long wished for more of Sappho’s poetry, which exists mostly in tantalizing fragments. This volume is the first collection of essays in English devoted to discussion of a newly recovered Sappho poem and two other incomplete texts on the same papyri. Using different approaches, the contributions demonstrate how the “New Sappho” can be appreciated as a complete, gracefully spare poetic statement regarding the painful inevitability of death and aging.

Brian Boyd explains why we tell stories and how our minds are shaped to understand them. After considering art as adaptation, Boyd examines Homer’s Odyssey and Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who! demonstrating how an evolutionary lens can offer new understanding and appreciation of specific works. Published for the bicentenary of Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of Origin of Species, Boyd’s study embraces a Darwinian view of human nature and art, and offers a credo for a new humanism.

In The Program Era, Mark McGurl offers a fundamental reinterpretation of postwar American fiction, asserting that it can be properly understood only in relation to the rise of mass higher education and the creative writing program. An engaging and stylishly written examination of an era we thought we knew, The Program Era will be at the center of debates about postwar literature and culture for years to come.

In this enlightening book, with a new preface and postscript for the Anglophone audience, Maurice Olender investigates the unsuspected links between erudition and race, showing the affinities between the social sciences and the concept of “race.” The book provides an accessible and lucid pathway through the labyrinth of race and erudition and examines how to deal with diversity without the problematic heritage of racial stereotypes.

The more than two dozen Rai languages in eastern Nepal, which make up the larger part of the Kiranti language family, are linguistically highly varied. This volume, which includes introductory chapters to Rai mythology and Rai grammar, for the first time brings together different variants of myths from various Rai languages, presenting them with linguistic glossings in interlinear translations. The book is of special interest to linguists, anthropologists, and folklorists with a focus on the Himalayas.

A Socratic dialogue set in the court of King Mattias Corvinus of Hungary (ca. 1490), Aurelio Lippo Brandolini’s Republics and Kingdoms Compared depicts a debate between the king himself and a Florentine merchant at his court on the relative merits of republics and kingdoms. This is the first critical edition and the first translation into any language.