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LITERARY CRITICISM
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- LITERARY CRITICISM: Caribbean & Latin American
- LITERARY CRITICISM: European
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- LITERARY CRITICISM: General
- LITERARY CRITICISM: Jewish
- LITERARY CRITICISM: Medieval
- LITERARY CRITICISM: Poetry
- LITERARY CRITICISM: Reference
- LITERARY CRITICISM: Semiotics & Theory
- LITERARY CRITICISM: Shakespeare
- LITERARY CRITICISM: Women Authors
- Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 23, 2003
- Hardcover February 2009
- Aeschylus, I, Persians. Seven against Thebes. Suppliants. Prometheus Bound
- Hardcover January 2009
- Aeschylus, II, The Oresteia: Agamemnon. Libation-Bearers. Eumenides
- Hardcover January 2009
- Argonautica
- Hardcover January 2009
- Baldo, Volume 2, Books XIII-XXV
- Hardcover November 2008
- Fragments of Sappho
- Paperback November 2008
- Genos Dikanikon
- Paperback November 2008
- Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, Volume 104,
- Hardcover November 2008
- The Naked Gaze
- Hardcover November 2008
- Neo-Confucianism in History
- Hardcover November 2008
- The Peculiar Life of Sundays
- Hardcover November 2008
- Poems
- Hardcover November 2008
- Recapturing a Homeric Legacy
- Hardcover November 2008
- Stri
- Paperback November 2008
- Uchida Hyakken
- Hardcover November 2008
- Affective Mapping
- Hardcover November 2008
- Ethnic Modernism
- Paperback November 2008
- Accidental Incest, Filial Cannibalism, and Other Peculiar Encounters in Late Imperial Chinese Literature
- Hardcover October 2008
- Reading Tao Yuanming
- Hardcover October 2008
- Christianity and the Transformation of the Book
- Christianity and the Transformation of the Book combines broad-gauged synthesis and close textual analysis to reconstruct the kinds of books and the ways of organizing scholarly inquiry and collaboration among the Christians of Caesarea, on the coast of Roman Palestine. The book explores the dialectical relationship between intellectual history and the history of the book, even as it expands our understanding of early Christian scholarship.
- Paperback September 2008
- The Consolation of Philosophy
- Hardcover September 2008
- Humanist Educational Treatises
- Paperback September 2008
- Invectives
- Paperback September 2008
- Leaves from Paradise
- Paperback September 2008
- Paradise Earned
- This is a study of the twelve small gold lamellae from Crete that were tokens for entrance into a golden afterlife. The lamellae are placed within the context of a small corpus of similar texts, and published with extensive commentary on their topography, lettering and engraving, dialect and orthography, meter, chronology, and usage. This work adduces parallels to the texts on the lamellae from the Byzantine period and modern Greece to illuminate the everlasting and persistent human quest for "earning Paradise."
- Paperback September 2008
- Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 22, 2002
- Hardcover September 2008
- Strangers in the Land
- The importance of blacks for Jews and Jews for blacks in conceiving of themselves as Americans, when both remained outsiders to the privileges of full citizenship, is a matter of voluminous but perplexing record. A monumental work of literary criticism and cultural history, Strangers in the Land draws upon politics, sociology, law, religion, and popular culture to illuminate a vital, highly conflicted interethnic partnership over the course of a century.
- Paperback September 2008
- The Culture of Kitharoidia
- The Culture of Kitharoidia is the first study dedicated exclusively to the art, practice, and charismatic persona of the citharode. Traversing a wide range of discourse and imagery about kitharoidia--poetic and prose texts, iconography, inscriptions--the book offers a nuanced account of the aesthetic and sociocultural complexities of citharodic song and examines the iconic role of the songmakers in the popular imagination.
- Paperback July 2008
- King of Sacrifice
- Descriptions of animal sacrifice in Homer offer us some of the most detailed accounts of this attempt at communication between man and gods. This book explores the structural and thematic importance of animal sacrifice as an expression of the quarrel between Akhilleus and Agamemnon through the differing perspectives of the primary narrative and character speech.
- Paperback July 2008
- Euripides, VII, Fragments
- The extant plays and the fragments together make Euripides by far the best known of the classic Greek tragedians. This edition offers the first complete English translation of the fragments together with a selection of testimonia bearing on the content of the plays. Each play is prefaced by a select bibliography and an introductory discussion of its mythical background, plot, and location of the fragments, general character, chronology, and impact on subsequent literary and artistic traditions.
- Hardcover June 2008
- The Japanization of Modernity
- Murakami Haruki is perhaps the best-known and most widely translated Japanese author of his generation. Bringing a comparative perspective to the study of Murakami’s fiction, Suter complicates our understanding of the author’s oeuvre and highlights his contributions not only as a popular writer but also as a cultural critic on both sides of the Pacific.
- Hardcover June 2008
- The Learned Banqueters, IV, Books 8-10.420e
- Athenaeus describes a series of dinner parties at which the guests quote extensively from Greek literature. The work (which dates to the very end of the second century CE) is amusing and of extraordinary value as a treasury of quotations from works now lost.
- Hardcover June 2008
- Poetic and Performative Memory in Ancient Greece
- The Ancient Greeks not only spoke of time unfolding in a specific space, but also projected the past upon the future in order to make it active in the social practice of the present. Poetic and Performative Memory in Ancient Greece shows how the Ancient Greeks' collective memory was based on a remarkable faculty for the creation of ritual and narrative symbols.
- Paperback June 2008
- The Power of Thetis and Selected Essays
- Laura Slatkin's influential and widely admired book explores the superficially minor role of Thetis in the Iliad. Slatkin uncovers alternative traditions about the power of Thetis and shows how an awareness of those myths brings a far greater understanding of Thetis's place in the thematic structure of the Iliad. This second edition also includes six additional essays, which cover a broad range of topics in the study of the Greek Epic.
- Paperback June 2008
- Ritual and Performativity
- In this groundbreaking study, Anton Bierl uses recent approaches in literary and cultural studies to investigate the chorus of Old Comedy. After an extensive theoretical introduction that also serves as a general introduction to the dramatic chorus from the comic vantage point, a close reading of Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazusae shows that ritual is indeed present in both the micro- and macrostructure of Attic comedy, not as a fossilized remnant of the origins of the genre but as part of a still existing performative choral culture.
- Paperback June 2008
- Solomon and Marcolf
- Solomon and Marcolf pits wise Solomon, famous from the Bible, against a wily peasant named Marcolf. Cited by Bakhtin in Rabelais and His World, Solomon and Marcolf is widely known by name. But until now it has not been translated into any modern language. The present volume offers an introduction, followed by the Latin and English, detailed commentary, and reproductions of woodcut illustrations from the 1514 edition.
- Hardcover June 2008 / Paperback June 2008
- Weaving Truth
- "What if truth were a woman?" asked Nietzsche. In ancient Greek thought, truth in language has a special relation to the female by virtue of her pre-eminent art-form--the one Freud believed was even invented by women--weaving. The essays in this book explore the implications of this nexus: language, the female, weaving, and the construction of truth.
- Paperback June 2008
- Benjamin's -abilities
- In this book, Weber, a leading theorist on literature and media, reveals a new and productive aspect of Benjamin’s thought by focusing the critical suffix “-ability” that Benjamin so tellingly deploys in his work. The result is an illuminating perspective on Benjamin’s thought by way of his language—and one of the most penetrating and comprehensive accounts of Benjamin’s work ever written.
- Hardcover May 2008
- Is Milton Better than Shakespeare?
- Smith makes a compelling case for Milton’s relevance to our present situation. In direct and accessible terms, he shows how the seventeenth-century poet, while working to write the greatest heroic poem in the English language, also managed to theorize about religious, political, and civil liberty in ways that matter as much today as they did in Puritanical times.
- Hardcover May 2008
- Wellsprings
- Hardcover May 2008
- The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media
- Benjamin’s famous “Work of Art” essay sets out his boldest thoughts—on media and on culture in general. This book contains the second, and most daring, of the four versions of the “Work of Art” essay—the one that addresses the utopian developments of the modern media. The collection tracks Benjamin’s observations on the media as they are revealed in essays on the production and reception of art; on film, radio, and photography; and on the modern transformations of literature and painting.
- Paperback May 2008
- Zeus in the Odyssey
- This book makes the case that the plot of the Odyssey is represented within the narrative as a plan of Zeus, Dios boulê, that serves as a guide for the performing poet and as a hermeneutic for the audience. The “Zeus-centric” reading proposed here offers fresh perspectives on the tenor of interactions among the Odyssey’s characters.
- Paperback May 2008
- Essays and Dialogues
- From humble beginnings, Scala (1430–1497) trained in the law and rose to prominence serving as secretary and treasurer to the Medicis and chancellor of the Guelf party before becoming first chancellor of Florence. This volume collects works from throughout his career that show his acquaintance with recently rediscovered ancient writers, and the influence of fellow humanists such as Marsilio Ficino, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (Pope Pius II), and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola.
- Hardcover May 2008
- How To Do Biography
- Following his recent Biography: A Brief History (from Harvard), award-winning biographer and teacher Nigel Hamilton tackles the practicalities of doing biography in the first succinct primer to elucidate the tools of the biographer’s craft.
- Hardcover April 2008
- American Protest Literature
- With a Foreword by John Stauffer and an Afterword by Howard Zinn
- "I like a little rebellion now and then," wrote Thomas Jefferson to Abigail Adams, enlisting in a tradition that throughout American history has led writers to rage and reason, prophesy and provoke. American Protest Literature presents sources from eleven protest movements--political, social, and cultural--from the Revolution to abolition to gay rights to antiwar protest. In this impressive work, Trodd provides an enlightening and inspiring survey of this most American form of literature.
- Paperback April 2008
- Persons and Things
- In Persons and Things, Johnson begins with the most elementary thing we know: deconstruction calls attention to gaps and reveals that their claims upon us are fraudulent. Johnson revolutionizes the method by showing that the inanimate thing exposed as a delusion is central to fantasy life, that fantasy life, however deluded, should be taken seriously, and that although a work of art “is formed around something missing,” this “void is its vanishing point, not its essence. The new aesthetics should restore fluidities between persons and things. In pursuing it, Johnson calls upon Ovid, Keats, Poe, Plath, and others who have inhabited this in-between space.
- Hardcover April 2008
- The Oral Palimpsest
- Oral intertextuality is an innate feature of the web of myth, whose interrelated fabrics allow the audience of epic songs access to an entire horizon of story variations. The Oral Palimpsest argues that just as the discarded text of a palimpsest still carries traces of its previous writing, so the Homeric tradition unfolds its awareness of alternate versions as it reveals signs of their erasure.
- Paperback March 2008
- Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture
- Andrew and Ungar apply an evocative "poetics of culture" to capture the complex atmospherics of Paris in the 1930s. Rather than a straight story of the Popular Front, they have produced something closer to the format of an illustrated newspaper whose multiple columns represent the breadth of urban life during this critical decade at the end of the Third French Republic.
- Paperback March 2008
- Sappho in the Making
- This book offers the first interdisciplinary and in-depth study of the cultural practices and ideological paradigms that conditioned the politics of the "reading" of Sappho's songs in the early and most pivotal stages of her reception. Yatromanolakis investigates visual representations and ancient texts in their synchronic and diachronic multilayeredness to trace the discursive nexuses that defined the making of "Sappho" in the late archaic, classical, and early Hellenistic periods.
- Paperback March 2008
- When Our Eyes No Longer See
- As industrial and scientific developments in early-twentieth-century Japan transformed the meaning of “objective observation,” modern writers and poets struggled to capture what they had come to see as an evolving network of invisible relations joining people to the larger material universe. For these artists, literary modernism was a crisis of perception before it was a crisis of representation. When Our Eyes No Longer See portrays an extraordinary moment in the history of this perceptual crisis and in Japanese literature during the 1920s and 1930s.
- Hardcover March 2008
- Concordia Discors
- Writing to a friend, Horace describes him as fascinated by "the discordant harmony of the cosmos, its purpose and power." Scholtz takes this notion of "discordant harmony" and argues for it as an aesthetic principle where classical Athenian literature addresses politics in the idiom of sexual desire. Drawing on theorists of the sociality of language, his approach is an untried one for this kind of topic.
- Paperback February 2008
- Transpacific Imaginations
- Transpacific Imaginations is a study of how American literature is enmeshed with the literatures of Asia. The book begins with Western encounters with the Pacific, with Huang discussing such titles as Moby Dick as Pacific works. Huang then turns to Asian American encounters with the Pacific, concentrating on the "Angel Island" poems and works by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Araki Yasusada.
- Hardcover February 2008
- Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, Volume 103,
- Hardcover February 2008
- Aristophanes, V, Fragments
- Over forty plays by Aristophanes were read in antiquity, of which nearly a thousand fragments survive. These provide a fuller picture of the poet's ever astonishing comic vitality and a wealth of information and insights about his world. Henderson's latest volume contains what survives from, and about, his lost plays. Each fragmentary play is prefaced by a summary. Also included in this edition are ancient reports about Aristophanes' life, works, and influence on the later comic tradition.
- Hardcover February 2008
- The Learned Banqueters, III, Books 6-7
- In The Learned Banqueters (late-2nd century CE), Athenaeus describes a series of dinner parties at which the guests quote extensively from Greek literature. Olson has undertaken to produce a complete new edition of the work, replacing the previous seven-volume Loeb Athenaeus (published under the title Deipnosophists).
- Hardcover February 2008
- The Collected Prose of Robert Frost
- During his lifetime, Robert Frost notoriously resisted collecting his prose--going so far as to halt the publication of one prepared compilation and to "lose" the transcripts of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures he delivered at Harvard in 1936. This volume allows readers and scholars to discover in the prose that he did make public--in newspapers, magazines, journals, speeches, and books--the wit, force, and grace that made his poetry famous.
- Hardcover January 2008
- Comeuppance
- With Comeuppance, Flesch delivers the freshest, most generous thinking about the novel since Walter Benjamin wrote on the storyteller and Wayne C. Booth on the rhetoric of fiction. In clear and engaging prose, Flesch integrates evolutionary psychology into literary studies, creating a new theory of fiction in which form and content flawlessly intermesh.
- Hardcover January 2008
- Out of the Alleyway
- In this critical study of Nakagami's life and oeuvre, Zimmerman delves into the writer's literary world, exploring the genres, forms, and themes with which Nakagami worked and experimented. These chapters trace the biographical thread running through his works while foregrounding such diverse facets of his writing as his interest in the modern possibilities of traditional myths and forms of storytelling, his deployment of shocking tropes and images, and his crafting of a unique poetic language.
- Hardcover January 2008
- The Readability of the Past in Early Chinese Historiography
- The past becomes readable when we can tell stories and make arguments about it. When we can tell more than one story or make divergent arguments, the readability of the past then becomes an issue. Therein lies the beginning of history, the sense of inquiry that heightens our awareness of interpretation. What are the possibilities and limits of historical knowledge? This book explores these issues through a study of the Zuozhuan, a foundational text in the Chinese tradition, whose rhetorical and analytical self-consciousness reveals much about the contending ways of thought unfolding during the period of the text's formation.
- Hardcover January 2008
- Aeschylus, III, Fragments
- Hardcover January 2008
- The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume VII, Society and Solitude
- Society and Solitude, published in 1870, was the first collection of essays Emerson had put into press since The Conduct of Life ten years earlier. This edition is based on Emerson's holograph manuscripts and published sources. The text incorporates corrections and revisions he recorded in both sources, and thus restores for the reader the text he actually wrote. Although he is still visibly the insistent optimist of his early and middle career, here Emerson assumes a more pragmatic attitude than formerly toward the life of the mind and the imagination.
- Hardcover January 2008
- Beacon Fire and Shooting Star
- The Liang dynasty (502-557) was one of the most brilliant and creative periods in Chinese history and is one of the most underestimated and misunderstood. This book is devoted to contextualizing the literary culture of this era, exploring not only the literary works themselves but also the processes of literary production and the intricate interactions of religion and literature.
- Hardcover December 2007
- The Canon
- This volume of 154 poems by Constantine Cavafy is the entire body of work by the artist widely considered a master of modern Greek poetry. Published here in the original Greek, with a new English translation by the noted poet Stratis Haviaris on each facing page, and with a foreword by Seamus Heaney, The Canon is Cavafy, familiar and fresh, seen through new eyes, yet instantly recognized.
- Paperback November 2007
- Our Secret Discipline
- The fundamental difference between rhetoric and poetry, according to Yeats, is that rhetoric is the expression of one's quarrels with others while poetry is the expression (and sometimes the resolution) of one's quarrel with oneself. This is where Vendler's Our Secret Discipline begins. Through exquisite attention to outer and inner forms, Vendler explores the most inventive reaches of the poet's mind.
- Hardcover November 2007
- Feeling Backward
- Feeling Backward weighs the costs of the contemporary move to the mainstream in lesbian and gay culture. While the widening tolerance for same-sex marriage and for gay-themed media brings clear benefits, gay assimilation entails other losses--losses that have been hard to identify or mourn, since many aspects of historical gay culture are so closely associated with the pain and shame of the closet.
- Hardcover October 2007
- Worrying about China
- What can we do about China? Davies pursues this inquiry through a wide range of contemporary topics, including the changing fortunes of radicalism, the peculiarities of Chinese postmodernism, shifts within official discourse, attempts to revive Confucianism for present-day China, and the historically problematic engagement of Chinese intellectuals with Western ideas.
- Hardcover October 2007
- The Death of Socrates
- Socrates's death in 399 BCE has figured largely in our world ever since, shaping how we think about heroism and celebrity, religion and family life, state control and individual freedom, the distance of intellectual life from daily activity--many of the key coordinates of Western culture. In this book, Wilson analyzes the enormous and enduring power the trial and death of Socrates has exerted over the Western imagination.
- Hardcover October 2007
- Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 20/21, 2000 and 2001
- The Harvard Celtic Colloquium was established in 1980 by two graduate students in the Harvard University Department of Celtic Languages and Literatures as a forum in which graduate students could share their work and gain experience in academia. Since then, it has been organized annually by students in the department and gained an international reputation which annually draws a diverse mix of scholars from around the world to present papers on all facets of Celtic Studies.
- Hardcover September 2007
- Affecting Fictions
- What happens when the cerebral encounters the corporeal? In this study, what emerges is an important vision of late-nineteenth-century American realist literature and the role of emotion and physiology in literary criticism. Thrailkill offers a new understanding of American literary realism that draws on neuroscience and cognitive psychology, positioning her argument against the emotionless interpretations of the New Critics.
- Hardcover June 2007
See also: All Books in LITERARY CRITICISM.