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.

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.

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

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.

A comprehensive examination of the meaning, history, and evolution of the basic notion of "literature" from antiquity to the seventeenth century.

Examines both Western and Japanese epic traditions to argue for a new concept of the epic--an epic of peace, toward which the genre is evolving globally.

This is a haunting experimental novel about a daughter raped by her father, and the consequences of repressing this memory. In a parallel narrative, the father analyzes the posthumous writings of his daughter for clues to her thoughts and behavior.

Discusses literary representations of death to explore the relation between writing and death--death understood as both the death of the individual and the death of meaning.

Examines American and Middle Eastern texts in studies of Orientalism and Occidentalism, and argues for a new approach to cultural studies that incorporates a wider variety of materials.

This collection of essays addresses two major issues of contemporary culture: the problem of violence in relation to notions of "difference" and power; and the role of mediation in making possible non-conflictive play of cultural differences.

This is a theoretical study of human metamorphosis in Western literature.

This response to Derrida's critique of the spoken uses dozens of examples in four languages to explore the voice that is in writing.

In this detective novel set in a small, intense seminar, eight students study what their professor regards as the central mystery of human nature: the uniqueness of the individual. One morning a woman ...

This book addresses the question of human uniqueness at a time when academic discourse has all but abandoned its long-held commitment to the value of individuality. Through an appraisal of the works of ...

This anthology of mixed-genre writings on East European political culture examines the aesthetic character of Eastern Europe before and after 1989, the beginning of a "post-totalitarian age. "

This book explores how traditional relations among the arts have changed in our time, focusing on the radical transformation of Paul Cezanne.

This is a study of the relationship between postmodernism and post-enlightenment German thought reading the contemporary theoretical scene through its nineteenth-century counterpart and examining the intersections.

This book aims at refocusing critical reflection on thematics in the arts, a topic that has been neglected recently. The volume is divided into four sections: theoretical essays, applications to literature, ...

This book builds a new vision of the development of Russian revolutionary culture, bringing together fiction, criticism, utopian projects, manifestos, performance and film theory, religious philosophy, ...

This interdisciplinary study explores the relationship between play and mimesis in the constitution and dissolution of the individual and social self. The volume is divided into three sections, the first ...

This book studies the close connections between politics, culture, art, and philosophy in seventeenth-century Europe. As an emblem of this interrelationship, the author has chosen the phenomenon of the ...

This book shows how writers like James Joyce, James Merrill, and Doris Lessing; scientists like Gregory Bateson, Ilya Prigogine, and David Bohm; and theorists like Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and ...

This book surveys selected modern theories of myth from philosophy, religion, anthropology, sociology, and psychoanalysis to demonstrate a common commitment to a dualistic ontology and/or epistemology. ...

Genuinely interdisciplinary in approach, The Meaning of Irony brings together literary analysis and, from psychoanalysis, both theory and case studies. Its investigation ranges from everyday examples ...

Following the Nazi annexation of Austria in March of 1938, Desider Furst, his wife, and his daughter suddenly found themselves hunted outlaws, holders of a German passport branded with a red "J" for Jewish. ...

This book examines Orpheus as a figure who bridges the experience of the Greek tribal shaman and the modern poet Stéphane Mallarmé, the father of modernism. First mentioned in 600 B.C., Orpheus was ...

"Here comes a walking fire," the Fool says to Lear as he sees Gloucester walking across a heath carrying a torch. This novel opens in fall, 1988, as Cora, an anti-war activist, returns to the U.S. from ...

This is an American novel of formed chaos playfully enacting the centrality of language in late twentieth-century art and life through the voices of two women steeped in Western traditions, one telling ...

The Golden Mean reappraises the relationship among the three forms of good that exist in modern Western thought: the good of aesthetic beauty and performance, the good of right and wrong, and the forces ...

At a time when the study of literature and the literary canon itself are once again the focus of intense debate, Building a Profession offers a retrospective on the early days of Comparative Literature ...

This book is O'Rourke's first volume of nonfiction since his 1972 The Harrisburg 7 and the New Catholic Left, which Garry Wills hailed as "a clinical x-ray of our society's condition. " That book prompted ...

The Poetics of Common Knowledge focuses on Descartes, Hegel, Freud, and the information theorists, on the one hand, and the poets of the American avant-garde, on the other. This book is a call literally ...

The nineteenth century witnessed an unprecedented social restructuring that disrupted traditional notions of people and place, country and city, private and public spheres. The break with the old order ...

Complementing recent feminist studies of female self-representation, this book examines the dynamics of masculine self-representation in nineteenth-century British literature. Arguing that the category ...

Philosophy and literary theory have devoted a great deal of their analysis to the problem of the origin and modalities of argumentation, but there has been an almost total lack of interest in the question ...

This is the first sustained, critical examination of the work of Edward Hopper, a major twentieth-century American painter. It is a sequence of meditations on his painting "A Woman in the Sun." Each meditation, ...

This book is a study of the relation between cognitive linguistics and literary theory. Theory of literary interpretation is reinterpreted in terms of current debate in cognitive science. While research ...

This book studies the literary and cinematic functions of the pornographic as a development from a poetics of obscenity. It focuses on the developments of French, British, and American artistic pornography ...

In a comprehensive introduction and six tightly argued essays, the authors demonstrate how rich and suggestive the notion of contradiction in discourse can be.

Henry Johnstone on Hesiod, Charles Altieri ...

This book combines interdisciplinary and comparatist approaches (anthropology, philosophy, psychology, and language) in the investigation of the mythic mode of thought and language in the post-Symbolist ...

In their readings of texts, the authors address the topics of theory, narrative, aesthetics, the idea of the text, and of specific moments in cultural history. The chapters cover a range of authors: Plato, ...

By using the concept of play as a common denominator, this book outlines ways in which literary creativity can act as a free, open, and speculatively unburdened version of religious concerns. Contributors ...

This book explores the relationship between authority and context and attempts to establish the ways in which authority is a function of a particular agent or set of agents, and the degree to which it ...

Reading Old Friends includes essays, reviews, and poems on poetics. Matthias, who has spent much time in England, concentrates on British poetry ranging from late modernist figures such as David Jones ...

Through the Lens of the Reader is a sequence of ten essays exploring European narrative from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. It covers a wide spectrum of authors ranging from Goethe through Balzac, ...

This book is both an introductory overview of The Cantos and a detailed analysis advancing the knowledge of even the most sophisticated specialist. Sicari's analysis gives a clear orientation to the often ...

Based on Nietzsche's critique of religion and culture, and engaging the contemporary offshoots of that critique, this book assesses the myths of origins that have been used to articulate the fundamental ...

Borrowed Lives is a novel. It is an enactment of issues of literary philosophy and criticism, including the question of whether there can be originality, coherence, and authenticity in life and art. It ...

This book argues that play offered Hamlet, John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Robert Burton, and Sir Thomas Browne a way to live within the contradictions and conflicts of late Renaissance life ...