Harvard University Press - LITERARY CRITICISM

Delirious Milton

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Gordon Teskey
The argument of Delirious Milton is that Milton's creative power is drawn from a rift at the center of his consciousness over the question of creation itself. This rift forces the poet to oscillate deliriously between two incompatible perspectives, at once affirming and denying the presence of spirit in what he creates. From one perspective, the act of creation is centered in God and the purpose of art is to imitate and praise the Creator. From the other perspective, the act of creation is centered in the human, in the built environment of the modern world.
Paperback September 2009

Ecology without Nature

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Timothy Morton
Morton argues that the chief stumbling block to environmental thinking is the image of nature that most writers promote: they propose a new world view, but their very zeal to preserve the natural world leads them away from the "nature" they revere. The problem is a symptom of a far deeper situation: of accepting the idea of "ecology without nature." To have a properly ecological view, we must relinquish, once and for all, the idea of nature.
Paperback September 2009

Empire of Texts in Motion

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Karen Laura Thornber
By the turn of the twentieth century, Japan’s military and economic successes made it the dominant power in East Asia, drawing hundreds of thousands of Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese students to the metropole and sending thousands of Japanese to other parts of East Asia. Drawing extensively on vernacular sources in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, this book analyzes the most active of these contact nebulae: semicolonial Chinese, occupied Manchurian, and colonial Korean and Taiwanese transculturations of Japanese literature.
Hardcover September 2009

Race and Erudition

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Maurice Olender
Translated by Jane Marie Todd
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.
Hardcover September 2009

A New Literary History of America

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Edited by Greil Marcus
Edited by Werner Sollors
America is a nation making itself up as it goes along—a story of discovery and invention unfolding in speeches and images, letters and poetry, unprecedented feats of scholarship and imagination. In more than two hundred original essays, A New Literary History of America brings together the nation’s many voices. Please visit www.newliteraryhistory.com for more information.
Hardcover September 2009

Critical Aesthetics

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 00:00:00 EDT

James Dorsey
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.
Hardcover September 2009

Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 24/25, 2004 and 2005

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Edited by Samuel Jones
Edited by Aled Jones
Edited by Jennifer Dukes Knight
Hardcover September 2009

Samuel Johnson: Selected Writings

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 00:00:00 EDT

A Tercentenary Celebration
Samuel Johnson
Edited by Peter Martin
Thanks to Boswell’s monumental biography of Samuel Johnson, we remember Dr. Johnson today as a great wit and conversationalist, the rationalist epitome and the sage of the Enlightenment. But in Johnson’s own day, he was best known as an essayist, critic, and lexicographer. At the center of this collection are the periodical essays from the Rambler, Adventurer, and Idler. Together, these works—allied in their literary, social, and moral concerns—are the ones that continue to speak urgently to readers today.
Hardcover September 2009

Recapturing a Homeric Legacy

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Edited by Casey Due
Marcianus Graecus Z. 454 [= 822], known to Homeric scholars as the Venetus A, is the oldest complete text of the Iliad in existence, meticulously crafted during the tenth century ce. Two thousand years later, technology offers a new opportunity to rediscover this scholarship and better understand the epic that is the foundation of Western literature.
Hardcover August 2009

Hippota Nestor

Sat, 1 Aug 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Douglas G. Frame
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.
Paperback August 2009

Homer the Classic

Sat, 1 Aug 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Gregory Nagy
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.
Paperback August 2009

The New Sappho on Old Age

Sat, 1 Aug 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Edited by Ellen Greene
Edited by Marilyn Skinner
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.
Paperback August 2009

Poetic and Performative Memory in Ancient Greece

Sat, 1 Aug 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Claude Calame
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 August 2009

Paradise Earned

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Yannis Tzifopoulos
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 July 2009

The Power of Thetis and Selected Essays

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Laura Slatkin
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 July 2009

An Early Tibetan Survey of Buddhist Literature

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Edited by Kurtis R. Schaeffer
Edited by Leonard W. J. van der Kuijp
This volume is a study and edition of Bcom Idan ral gri's (1227-1305) Bstan pa rgyas pa rgyan gyi nyi 'od. Likely composed in the last decades of the thirteenth century, this systematic list of Buddhist Sutras, Tantras, Shastras, and related genres translated primarily from Sanskrit and other Indic languages holds an important place in the history of Buddhist literature in Tibet.
Hardcover July 2009

The Culture of Kitharoidia

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Timothy Power
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 2009

Genos Dikanikon

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Victor Bers
Under the Athenian democracy, litigants were expected to speak for themselves, though they could memorize a speech written for them. These amateur performances often manifested an unmanly yielding to emotions of anger or fear; professional speech, Bers seeks to demonstrate, was to a large degree crafted in reaction to amateur stumbling.
Paperback July 2009

Ritual and Performativity

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Anton Bierl
Translated by Alexander Hollmann
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 July 2009

King of Sacrifice

Wed, 1 Jul 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Sarah Hitch
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 2009

Divagations

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Stéphane Mallarmé
Translated by Barbara Johnson
The salmagundi of prose poems, prose-poetic musings, criticism, and reflections that is Divagations has long been considered a treasure trove by students of aesthetics and modern poetry. This was the only book of prose that Mallarmé published in his lifetime and, in a new translation by Johnson, it is now available for the first time in English just as he arranged it, in all of its languor and musicality.
Paperback June 2009

Dreams and Experience in Classical Antiquity

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 00:00:00 EDT

William V. Harris
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.
Hardcover June 2009

Sublime Voices

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Christopher Bolton
Since the 1950s, Abe Kobo (1924–1993) has achieved an international reputation for his surreal or grotesque brand of avant-garde literature. Christopher Bolton explores how this reconciliation of ideas and dialects is for Abe part of the process whereby texts and individuals form themselves—a search for identity that must take place at the level of the self and society at large.
Hardcover June 2009

Be Always Converting, Be Always Converted

Mon, 1 Jun 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Rob Wilson
“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.
Hardcover June 2009

Christiad

Sun, 31 May 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Marco Girolamo Vida
Translated by James Gardner
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.
Hardcover May 2009

Daphnis and Chloe. Anthia and Habrocomes

Sun, 31 May 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Longus
Xenophon of Ephesus
Edited and translated by Jeffrey Henderson
In Longus’s ravishing Daphnis and Chloe (second or early third century CE), one of the great works of world literature, an innocent boy and girl gradually discover their sexuality in an idealized pastoral environment. This new edition offers fresh translations and texts by Jeffrey Henderson, based on the recent critical editions of Longus by M. D. Reeve and Xenophon by J. N. O’Sullivan.
Hardcover May 2009

Latin Poetry

Sun, 31 May 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Jacopo Sannazaro
Translated by Michael C. J. Putnam
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.
Hardcover May 2009

The Learned Banqueters, V, Books 10.420e-11

Sun, 31 May 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Athenaeus
Edited and translated by S. Douglas Olson
In The Learned Banqueters, Athenaeus describes a series of dinner parties at which the guests quote extensively from Greek literature, preserving a wide range of information about different cuisines and foodstuffs; the music and entertainments that ornamented banquets; and the intellectual talk that was the heart of Greek conviviality.
Hardcover May 2009

Republics and Kingdoms Compared

Sun, 31 May 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Aurelio Lippo Brandolini
Edited and translated by James Hankins
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.
Hardcover May 2009

On the Origin of Stories

Sat, 30 May 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Brian Boyd
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.
Hardcover May 2009

Law and Literature

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Richard A. Posner
Paperback April 2009

PHCC, 23, 2003

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Edited by Bettina Kimpton
Edited by Matthew Knight
Amont other articles, this volume includes The Alans in the Iberian Peninsula and the Identification by Littleton and Malcor as the Milesians of the Lebor Gabála, Manuel Alberro; The ‘Gallic Disaster’: Did Dionysius I of Syracuse Order It?, Timothy Bridgman;.
Hardcover April 2009

The Program Era

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Mark McGurl
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.
Hardcover April 2009

Comeuppance

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 00:00:00 EDT

William Flesch
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.
Paperback March 2009

Feeling Backward

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Heather Love
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.
Paperback March 2009

The Late Tang

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Stephen Owen
In this continuation of the literary history of the Tang, Stephen Owen analyzes the redirection of poetry that followed the deaths of the major poets of the High and Mid-Tang and the rejection of their poetic styles. Poets had always drawn on past poetry, but in the Late Tang, the poetic past was beginning to assume the form it would have for the next millennium; it was becoming a repertoire of styles, genres, and the voices of past poets--a repertoire that would endure.
Paperback March 2009

Stri

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Kevin McGrath
This book is a study of heroic femininity as it appears in the epic Mahabharata, and focuses particularly on the roles of wife, daughter-in-law, and mother, on how these women speak, and on the kinship groups and varying marital systems that surround them.
Paperback March 2009

Worlds Made by Words

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Anthony Grafton
Grafton reveals the microdynamics of the scholarly life through a series of essays on institutions and on scholars ranging from early modern polymaths to modern intellectual historians to American thinkers and writers. When many of our fellow citizens seem to have forgotten why we collect books in the buildings we call libraries, Grafton’s engaging, erudite essays could be a rallying cry for the revival of the liberal arts.
Hardcover March 2009

Worrying about China

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Gloria Davies
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.
Paperback March 2009

The Golden Age of the Classics in America

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Carl J. Richard
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.
Hardcover March 2009

Nepalese Shaman Oral Texts II

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Edited and translated by Gregory G. Maskarinec
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.
Hardcover March 2009

Rai Mythology

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Karen H. Ebert
Martin Gaenzle
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.
Hardcover March 2009

The Teleology of Poetics in Medieval Kashmir

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Lawrence J. McCrea
This book examines the revolution in Sanskrit poetics initiated by the ninth-century Kashmiri Anandavardhana. Anandavardhana replaced the formalist aesthetic of earlier poeticians with one stressing the unifunctionality of literary texts, arguing that all components of a work should subserve a single purpose—the communication of a single emotional mood (rasa). Attention was redirected from formal elements toward specific poems, viewed as aesthetically integrated wholes, thereby creating new literary critical possibilities.
Hardcover March 2009

Strangers in the Land

Sat, 28 Feb 2009 00:00:00 EST

Eric J. Sundquist
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 February 2009

Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, Volume 104,

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 00:00:00 EST

Edited by Nino Luraghi
Among other articles, This volume includes Iliad 4.384 Tudê, Iliad 15.339 Mêkistê, and Odyssey 19.136 Odysê by Jeremy Rau; “Craft Similes and the Construction of Heroes in the Iliad” by Naomi Rood.
Hardcover February 2009

Accidental Incest, Filial Cannibalism, and Other Peculiar Encounters in Late Imperial Chinese Literature

Sat, 31 Jan 2009 00:00:00 EST

Tina Lu
Writers of late imperial fiction and drama were, Lu argues, deeply engaged with questions about the nature of the Chinese empire and of the human community. This book traces how these political questions were addressed in fiction through extreme situations: husbands and wives torn apart in periods of political upheaval, families so disrupted that incestuous encounters become inevitable, times so desperate that people have to sell themselves to be eaten.
Hardcover January 2009

Aeschylus, I, Persians. Seven against Thebes. Suppliants. Prometheus Bound

Sat, 31 Jan 2009 00:00:00 EST

Aeschylus
Edited and translated by Alan H. Sommerstein
Aeschylus (ca. 525–456 BCE) is the dramatist who made Athenian tragedy one of the world’s great art forms. Seven of his eighty or so plays survive complete. The first volume of this new Loeb Classical Library edition offers fresh texts and translations by Alan H. Sommerstein of Persians, the only surviving Greek historical drama.
Hardcover January 2009

Aeschylus, II, Oresteia: Agamemnon. Libation-Bearers. Eumenides

Sat, 31 Jan 2009 00:00:00 EST

Aeschylus
Edited and translated by Alan H. Sommerstein
Aeschylus (ca. 525–456 BCE) is the dramatist who made Athenian tragedy one of the world’s great art forms. Seven of his eighty or so plays survive complete. The second volume contains the complete Oresteia trilogy.
Hardcover January 2009

Aeschylus, III, Fragments

Sat, 31 Jan 2009 00:00:00 EST

Aeschylus
Edited and translated by Alan H. Sommerstein
Aeschylus (ca. 525–456 BCE) is the dramatist who made Athenian tragedy one of the world’s great art forms. Seven of his eighty or so plays survive complete. The third volume of this edition collects all the major fragments of lost Aeschylean plays.
Hardcover January 2009

Argonautica

Sat, 31 Jan 2009 00:00:00 EST

Apollonius Rhodius
Edited and translated by William H. Race
Argonautica, composed in the 3rd century BCE, is the epic retelling of Jason’s quest for the golden fleece. It greatly influenced Roman authors such as Catullus, Virgil, and Ovid, and was imitated by Valerius Flaccus. This new edition of the first volume in the Loeb Classical Library offers a fresh translation and improved text.
Hardcover January 2009

Euripides, VIII, Fragments

Sat, 31 Jan 2009 00:00:00 EST

Euripides
Edited and translated by Christopher Collard
Edited and translated by Martin Cropp
The extant plays and the fragments together make Euripides by far the best known of the classic Greek tragedians. This edition of the fragments, concluded in this second volume, offers the first complete English translation together with a selection of testimonia bearing on the content of the plays. The texts are based on the recent comprehensive edition of R. Kannicht.
Hardcover January 2009

The Naked Gaze

Sat, 31 Jan 2009 00:00:00 EST

Carlos Rojas
This volume focuses on tropes of visuality and gender to reflect on shifting understandings of the significance of Chineseness, modernity, and Chinese modernity. Through detailed readings of narrative works by eight authors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the study identifies three distinct constellations of visual concerns corresponding to the late imperial, mid-twentieth century, and contemporary periods, respectively.
Hardcover January 2009

Arguing the Modern Jewish Canon

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 00:00:00 EST

Edited by Justin Daniel Cammy
Edited by Dara Horn
Edited by Alyssa Quint
Edited by Rachel Rubinstein
Ruth Wisse is a leading scholar of Yiddish and Jewish literary studies and one of our most fearless public intellectuals on issues relating to Jewish society and culture. In this celebratory volume, Wisse's colleagues pay tribute to her with a collection of critical essays whose subjects break new ground in Yiddish, Hebrew, Israeli, American, European, and Holocaust literature.
Hardcover January 2009

Baldo, Volume 2, Books XIII-XXV

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 00:00:00 EST

Teofilo Folengo
Translated by Ann E. Mullaney
Folengo (1491–1544) was born in Mantua and joined the Benedictine order, but became a runaway monk and a satirist of monasticism. In 1517 he published, under the pseudonym Merlin Cocaio, the first version of his macaronic narrative poem Baldo. This edition provides the first English translation of this hilarious send-up of ancient epic and Renaissance chivalric romance.
Hardcover December 2008

Christianity and the Transformation of the Book

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 00:00:00 EST

Anthony Grafton
Megan Williams
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 December 2008

The Peculiar Life of Sundays

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 00:00:00 EST

Stephen Miller
From Augustine to Caesarius, through the Reformation and the Puritan flight from England, down through the ages to contemporary debates about Sunday worship, Miller explores the fascinating history of the Sabbath.
Hardcover December 2008

Poems

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 00:00:00 EST

Cristoforo Landino
Edited and translated by Mary P. Chatfield
Cristoforo Landino (1424–1498) was one of the great scholar-poets of the Renaissance. His most substantial work of poetry was his Three Books on Xandra. Also included in this volume is the Carmina Varia, a collection whose centerpiece is a group of elegies directed to the Venetian humanist Bernardo Bembo.
Hardcover December 2008

Weaving Truth

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 00:00:00 EST

Ann Bergren
"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 December 2008

Ethnic Modernism

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 00:00:00 EST

Werner Sollors
In the first half of the twentieth century, the United States moved from the periphery to the center of global cultural production. How did African American, European immigrant, and other minority writers take part in these developments that also transformed the United States, giving it an increasingly multicultural self-awareness? This book attempts to address this question in a series of innovative and engaging close readings of major texts from this period.
Paperback November 2008

Leaves from Paradise

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 00:00:00 EST

Edited by Jeffrey F. Hamburger
A pair of leaves recently acquired by Houghton Library presents an opportunity to examine the illuminated sequence composed in honor of John the Evangelist. The richly decorated fragments promise to transform our understanding of the special place of Christ’s “beloved disciple” in 14th-century art, liturgy, theology, and mysticism.
Paperback November 2008

Neo-Confucianism in History

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 00:00:00 EST

Peter K. Bol
The book argues that as Neo-Confucians put their philosophy of learning into practice in local society, they justified a new social ideal in which society at the local level was led by the literati with state recognition and support.
Hardcover November 2008

Solomon and Marcolf

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 00:00:00 EST

Translated with commentary by Jan Ziolkowski
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 / Paperback November 2008

Uchida Hyakken

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 00:00:00 EST

Rachel DiNitto
The literary career of Uchida Hyakken (1889–1971) encompassed a wide variety of styles and genres. This book takes up Hyakken’s fiction and essays written during Japan’s prewar years to investigate the intersection of his literature with the material and discursive surroundings of the time.
Hardcover November 2008

Zeus in the Odyssey

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 00:00:00 EST

J. Marks
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 November 2008

Affective Mapping

Fri, 28 Nov 2008 00:00:00 EST

Jonathan Flatley
The surprising claim of this book is that dwelling on loss is not necessarily depressing. Instead, embracing melancholy can be a road back to contact with others and can lead people to productively remap their relationship to the world around them. Flatley demonstrates that a seemingly disparate set of modernist writers and thinkers showed how aesthetic activity can give us the means to comprehend and change our relation to loss.
Hardcover November 2008