Explores how China’s oldest poetry collection was interpreted in a Confucian exegetical text—the Mao Commentary—in the mid-second century BCE.

Reconsiders the figure of synaesthesia, understood as the combination of the senses and of the arts, in philosophy and literature.

Examines twentieth-century Mexican literature and philosophy within the broad panorama of Latin American and European existentialisms.

Addresses the question of how language affects the subject of speech through readings of confessional, philosophical, and fictional writings.

Challenges and reimagines transnational feminism by analyzing the concept of ummah, or community, in Muslim women's writing.

An original reading of Blanchot's thought with far-reaching philosophical and literary implications.

A comparative study of breath and breathing as a core poetic and compositional principle in modern literature.

Examines the place of book-to-film adaptations by one of Italy's most famous postwar film directors.

Examines the place of Paris in French Jewish literary memory, a memory that, of necessity, grapples with the aftermath of the Holocaust.

A close study of one of the most prolific commentary writers in Islamic history.

A major contribution to the study of South Asian literature, offering a landmark view of Mahābhārata studies.

Revisits, reassesses, and reclaims the legacy of May '68 in light of our present cultural and historical emergency.

Explores the role of travel and translation in Brazilian literature and culture from the 1870s to the present.

Charts the vicissitudes of a distinctly modern and peculiarly human vulnerability—our intimate dependence on the fragile, time-bound cultural framework that we inhabit—in the history of the realist novel.

Argues that we need to reinvent sovereignty as a motive for democratic political action while remaining alert to its dangers, specifically its relationship to violence.

Explores the relationship between literature and philosophy in classical and contemporary Buddhist texts.

A study of Hu Feng as a literary critic and case study on how intellectual work can respond to political pressure.

Examines experimental art and literature by women alongside psychoanalysis and philosophy to develop a new understanding of sublimation and aesthetic experience.

A systematic study of testimony rooted in contemporary continental philosophy and drawing on literary case studies.

Proposes "the extraordinary" as a defining characteristic of modernity.

Proposes a theoretically rich treatment of temporality within exile as "gerundive" time.

Examines themes of loss and mourning in the late work of Derrida.

Argues that symbolism is an important and unique element of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology.

Explores how writers across five continents and four centuries have debated ideas about what it means to be an individual, and shows that the modern self is an ongoing project of global history.

Focuses on how nuances of poetic form alter how we have come to understand cultural aspects of time.

Essays explore the significance of Julia Kristeva’s concept of intimate revolt for social and political philosophy.

Draws on theology and queer theory to argue for the power of humiliating pleasures in a culture oriented very strongly to denying any enjoyment that is not about success.

Assesses the limits and possibilities of humanism for engaging with issues of pressing political and cultural concern.

Reframes philosophical understanding of, and engagement with, tragedy.

Discusses the work of a central, but poorly understood, figure in the development of Persian Sufism, Aḥmad al-Ghazālī.

A poetic, philosophical, and political account of Nietzsche’s importance to Bataille, and of Bataille’s experience in Nazi-occupied France.

Describes how religious tradition is established as available within a text, free from ritual and observance, in Buddhism and Christianity.

First English translation of these important works by two of Spain’s most gifted writers and intellectuals.

Reintroduces the concept of “world literature” in a truly global context, transcending past Eurocentrism.

Provocative reading of the role masochism plays in structuring the aesthetics and political philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

A selection of poems by one of Islam’s greatest poetic voices.

A major new interpretation of the philosophical significance of the oeuvre of Denis Diderot.

All of Derrida’s texts on Joyce together under one cover in fresh, new translations, along with key essays covering the range of Derrida’s engagement with Joyce’s works.

Intriguing, updated portraits of classic fairy tale authors.

Explores the work of beloved Sufi poet Umar Ibn al-Farid and its context. Provides many translations of Ibn al-Farid’s poetry.

Explores the transformation of Hindi poetry as it reflects a changing society during the period from 1885 to 1925.

Explores the conceptualization of the Freudian uncanny in various late-twentieth-century theoretical and critical discourses (literary studies, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, art history, trauma studies, architecture, etc.).

A fascinating comparison of the work of Heinrich von Kleist and Herman Melville.

Explores why American Romantic writers and contemporary continental thinkers turn to art when writing about ethics.

Looks at literary works from outside the Judeo-Christian tradition to test Levinas's notion of "the Other. "

A searing personal record of spiritual and communal crisis, wherein the death of god announces the beginning of friendship.

Examines images of horror in Victorian fiction, criticism, and philosophy.

First English translation of Paola Masino’s Nascita e morte della massaia, her most controversial novel that provoked Fascist censorship for its critical portrayal of marriage and motherhood.

Explores the rhetorical functions of torture and the witnessing of torture in both classical texts and contemporary contexts.

Takes Heidegger’s later thought as a point of departure for exploring the boundaries of post-conceptual thinking.

Considers Bataille’s work from an explicitly philosophical perspective.

Looks at the connections between Thoreau’s Walden and the work that influenced it, the Bhagavad-Gita.

A spirited reading of Derrida’s view of ethics as transcendental and performative.

Questions whether current theories and pedagogies of alterity have allowed us truly to engage the Other.

Explores the relationship between disciplinarity and contemporary ethics of scholarship about the Holocaust.

Explores the continuities and discontinuities in the work of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze.

Overturns traditional views of the origins of fairy tales and documents their actual origins and transmission.

Introduces Paramānand, one of India’s poet-saints, his work, and this work’s use in ritual.

First English translation of Nikos Kazantzakis’s 1909 doctoral dissertation on Nietzsche.

Explores the unique and volatile relationship of these two nations and cultures over the past two centuries, as expressed in literature, film, and philosophy.

A groundbreaking work that uncovers an implicit system of hermeneutics in traditional Chinese thought and aesthetics.

Examines the influence of the Pre-Raphaelite movement on art and literature around the world.

Explores postcolonial discourse from the standpoint of feminism and writers in minority languages.

Argues for a new kind of criticism, one that mediates between literal and allegorical modes of interpretation.

Extends the boundaries of Romantic culture from its pre-Kantian past to contemporary theory and beyond.

Traces portrayals of psychosomatic disorders in medical and imaginative literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Collected essays by noted scholars covering the breadth and influence of Kurt Vonnegut's literature.

Examines the manifestations of racism, sexism, and homophobia in the literary works of Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, Joseph Conrad, and Toni Morrison.

Investigates the politics and poetics of women's gendered identity in West Africa.

Award-winning essays in the field of rhetoric and composition.

Explores the wounded body in literature from Homer to Toni Morrison, examining how it functions archetypally as both a cultural metaphor and a poetic image.

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.

Combines Western theories of the sublime (from Longinus to Lyotard) with indigenous Indian modes of reading in order to construct a comprehensive theory of both the Indian sublime and Indian devotional verse.

Using Bakhtinian theory, this study reveals how and why readers routinely refer to the words and ideas of others to interpret the meanings and implications of the books they read.

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.

Examines Gombrowicz’s modernist aesthetics in the context of his critique of nationalism, his exploration of queer eroticism, and his interest in hybrid and subaltern identities.

Defines postmodern writing and distinguishes it from modern writing by citing examples from two modern and three postmodern writers: Italo Calvino, John Barth, Toni Morrison, E. L. Doctorow, and Antonio Tabucchi.

Focuses on authorial representations of contested reality in qualitative research.

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.

This wide-ranging, interdisciplinary study of suffering and literature examines how literature can give expression to the essentially wordless reality of suffering.

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 ...

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.

This untraditional text is a series of parables, allegories, and prose poems that reflect on the problem of the fragment. Studying the fragment lays the theoretical ground for the basic question of where a text begins and ends.

In this collection of essays, Lacan's early work is first discussed systematically by focusing on his two earliest seminars: Freud's Papers on Technique and The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique ...

This is a collection of essays focusing on conventions of change in the arts, philosophy, and literature.

Essays on the French writer and critic Georges Bataille, that examine his thought in relation to Hegel, Nietzsche, and Derrida.

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 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 provides the first truly sustained commentary to appear in either French or English on Lacan's most important seminar, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. The 16 contributors unpack ...

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 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 ...

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 ...

Sussman here explores the relevance and value of object-relations theory to literature and literary studies. His study of character treats literature as a medium in which important relationships to conceptualized ...

This book studies the rich repository of Latin American Jewish literature, exploring the issues of vanishing traditions along with the subject of assimilation and acculturation. It places in sharp relief ...

This book explains the conflicting feelings of anxiety and empowerment that women, historically excluded from masculine discourse, feel when they read and write, and it analyzes narrative strategies that ...

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 ...

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 ...