A Russian émigré living in New York travels to Paris to try to reconstruct the secret life of another Russian woman who was murdered there on the eve of World War II.

Explores the construction of the Aryan myth and its uses in both India and Europe.

Offers an interdisciplinary approach to narrative perspective, with essays by leading scholars of literary studies, cognitive psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and film and media criticism.

Examines eighteenth-century French and English landscape gardens as representations of nationalist expression.

An anthology of nineteenth-century literature about medicine and medical issues.

These nine short stories explore love and loss in contemporary Damascus, as well as the possibilities of writing ethnography as fiction.

These "narralogues" combine story and argument, moving from Socratic dialogue to outright narrative, and ultimately making the case that fiction is a medium for telling the truth.

Concludes that the closest thing in Western culture to the Middle Way of Buddhism is not any sort of theory or philosophy, but the practice of literature.

Explores the concept of time in the work of Michel Serres, demonstrating close analogies in his work to the discourses of science, literature, and philosophy.

An entertainingly satirical vision of today's academy, in which a woman academic lands, with her cat, in a university, largely populated by males.

Scholars in the exact and social sciences join literary critics to consider the work of French author Michel Rio and to reflect on literature's place in intellectual discourse in an age dominated by science.

An essential guide for those who seek to reconsider the theoretical problems of (trans-civilizational) comparative literature, those who are interested in the literary and cultural history of modern East Asian countries, and those with a general interest in issues of sexuality.

A major reassessment of the work of Jean Paulhan within the context of his own times as well as in the light of contemporary debates in literary theory.

Charts the interactive contours of European culture of the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, extending the chronological limits of Romanticism by identifying fresh links among works, authors, contexts, and institutions across national and linguistic borders.

Traces the history of chivalric fiction in Western Europe, from the earliest Celtic tales to the conflict between romance and realism in Don Quixote.

Presents a powerful thesis on the nature and significance of violence and its mythos in Western culture, and offers an alternative interactive mythos that bridges the mind/body split inherent to most theories of violence.

Combines literary theory and history with detailed textual analysis in order to consider a question that involves both literature and philosophy, namely, the foundation of the human subject.

Focuses on a very significant psycho-cultural concept (that of "agonistics" or "contestatory creativity") with ramifications in several areas of the postmodern debate: cultural philosophy, psychologies of race, gender and the body, and narratology.

Explores the way seven women writers of the eighteenth century responded to Rousseau, and traces his crucial influence on their literary careers.

Explores the way that four major works of Russian literature--Gogol's Dead Souls, Goncharov's Oblomov, Zamiatin's We, and Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita--define a cultural "self" for the Russian people. Focusing on the deep cultural currents that pull Russian society in contradictory ways, Noplace Like Home also explores the writer's struggle to overcome these tensions through the creation of a literary utopia.

Approaches English Romanticism through sociological theory, arguing that Wordsworth and Coleridge tested hypotheses about social organization and action in their poetry. Offers a timely reevaluation of the Romantic poets as socially engaged thinkers.

A comprehensive reexamination of the question of realism in literature, reviewing major critical approaches in Spanish, French, German, and Anglo-American literary tradition, and offering original reader-response-based theory and readings.

Examines the influence of Nietzsche on Russian Formalists, Russian Modernism, and Mikhail Bakhtin, reinforcing the importance of the modernist theoreticians by reading them in the contemporary theoretical context.

This literary history examines Guillaume Apollinaire's reception and influence in the Western hemisphere during the early twentieth century. It identifies and reconstructs major literary and art historical ...

This first full-length study investigates the profound implications of the peculiarly original sense of humor found in Elias Canetti's single novel--a facetiousness, understood in a Nietzschean sense, as a revolutionary aesthetic.