Harvard University Press - LITERARY CRITICISM

King of Sacrifice

Mon, 1 Jun 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 June 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

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

Daphnis and Chloe. Anthia and Habrocomes

Fri, 15 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

The Learned Banqueters, V, Books 10.420e-11

Fri, 15 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. Athenaeus also preserves 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. S. Douglas Olson has produced a complete new edition of the work, replacing the previous Loeb Athenaeus (published under the title Deipnosophists).
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

Poetic and Performative Memory in Ancient Greece

Thu, 30 Apr 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 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

Divagations

Wed, 15 Apr 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 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

The Consolation of Philosophy

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Boethius
Translated by David R. Slavitt
Introduction by Seth Lerer
Composed while its author was imprisoned, this book remains one of Western literature’s most eloquent meditations on the transitory nature of earthly belongings, and the superiority of things of the mind. Slavitt’s translation captures the energy and passion of the original. And in an introduction intended for the general reader, Seth Lerer places Boethius’s life and achievement in context.
Hardcover September 2008

Humanist Educational Treatises

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Translated by Craig W. Kallendorf
This volume provides new translations, commissioned for the I Tatti Renaissance Library, of four of the most important theoretical statements that emerged from the early humanists’ efforts to reform medieval education.
Paperback September 2008

Invectives

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Francesco Petrarca
Translated by David Marsh
Petrarca, one of the greatest of Italian poets, was also the leading spirit in the Renaissance movement to revive ancient Roman language and literature. Petrarch’s four Invectives, written in Latin, were inspired by the eloquence of the great Roman orator Cicero. The new translations in this volume include the first English translation of three of the four invectives.
Paperback September 2008

PHCC, 22, 2002

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Edited by Kathryn Izzo
Edited by Katharine Olson
Among other articles, this volume includes Toward a Breton Musical Patrimony, Paul-Andre Bempéchat; Celts and Hyperboerans, Timothy Bridgman; The Sea as an Emotional Landscape, Mairi Sine Chaimbeul.
Hardcover September 2008

Reading Tao Yuanming

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Wendy Swartz
Tao Yuanming (365?–427), although dismissed as a poet following his death, is now considered one of China’s greatest writers. This study of the posthumous reputation of a central figure in Chinese literary history, the mechanisms at work in the reception of his works, and the canonization of Tao himself and of particular readings of his works sheds light on the transformation of literature and culture in premodern China.
Hardcover September 2008

Dreaming Across Boundaries

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Edited by Louise Marlow
This volume explores the context of theological speculations and political aspirations through the medium of dreams to present fascinating insights into the social history of the pre-modern Islamic world in all its cultural diversity. Wider cultural exchanges are discussed through concrete examples such as the Arabic version of the Aristotelian treatise De divinatione per somnum, and some of the current scholarly assumptions about dreams are challenged by personal reports that express individual personalities, self-awareness, and spiritual development.
Hardcover / Paperback July 2008

Benjamin's -abilities

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Samuel Weber
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 June 2008

Euripides, VII, Fragments

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EDT

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 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

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Rebecca Suter
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

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Athenaeus
Edited and translated by S. Douglas Olson
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