By Jonathan Levin (NHC Fellow, 1998–99) The Poetics of Transition examines the connection between American pragmatism and literary modernism by focusing on the concept of transition as a theme common to both movements. Jonathan Levin begins with the Emersonian notion that transition—the movement from one state or condition to another or, alternately, the figural enactment of … Continued
Edited by Helena Goscilo (NHC Fellow, 1990–91) and Byron Lindsey This collection of Russian short stories is meant as a companion volume to the well-received anthology by the same editors, Glasnost, An Anthology of Literature under Gorbachev (1990). The abolition of censorship in Russia in the mid-1980s led to an outpouring of fiction which for the first … Continued
By Ding Xiang Warner (NHC Fellow, 2004–05) Transmitting Authority investigates the rise and fall of the cultural currency of the Confucian teacher Wang Tong (ca. 584–617), a.k.a. Master Wenzhong, in the five centuries following his death, by examining the textual and social history of theZhongshuo, which purports to record Wang Tong’s teachings. Incorporating theories and methodologies … Continued
Edited by Howard Erskine-Hill (NHC Fellow, 1988–89) and Alexander Lindsay The Critical Heritage gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling student and researcher to read the material themselves.
By Kathryn Starkey (NHC Fellow, 2008–09) A Courtier's Mirror establishes the unique importance of Thomasin von Zerclaere's Welscher Gast as a document of social practices and concerns in medieval German-speaking court society. This epic-length illustrated didactic poem enjoyed immense popularity in the Middle Ages, resulting in twenty-five redactions produced over two hundred and fifty years. Through a detailed … Continued
By Gordon Teskey (NHC Fellow, 1990–91; 2014–15) The only form of monumental artistic expression practiced from antiquity to the Enlightenment, allegory evolved to its fullest complexity in Dante's Commedia and Spenser's Faerie Queene. Drawing on a wide range of literary, visual, and critical works in the European tradition, Gordon Teskey provides both a literary history … Continued
By Primo Levi, and Leonardo De BenedettiEdited by Robert S. C. Gordon (NHC Fellow, 2005–06) While in a Russian-administered holding camp in Katowice, Poland, in 1945, Primo Levi was asked to provide a report on living conditions in Auschwitz. Published the following year, it was subsequently forgotten and remained unknown to a wider public. Dating … Continued
Edited by Trudier Harris (NHC Fellow, 1996–97; NHC Fellow, 2018–19), Patricia Liggins Hill, and Bernard W. Bell More than a decade in the making, Call and Response is a ground-breaking anthology of African American literature, unique in its placing equal emphasis on the written and the oral dimensions of the black aesthetic. It traces the … Continued
By ErasmusEdited by Nelson H. Minnich (NHC Fellow, 2004–05) This new volume of the CWE presents three of Erasmus' polemic works against Alberto Pio, Prince of Carpi. A leading diplomat of the period, patron of artists and humanists, and conservative Catholic, Pio continually angered Erasmus by criticizing him for his denunciations of church practices and … Continued
By James Buzard (NHC Fellow, 1997–98) This book gives an ambitious revisionist account of the nineteenth-century British novel and its role in the complex historical process that ultimately gave rise to modern anthropology’s concept of culture and its accredited researcher, the Participant Observer. Buzard reads the great nineteenth-century novels of Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, George … Continued