By Gordon Teskey (NHC Fellow, 1990–91; 2014–15) John Milton is regarded as the greatest English poet after Shakespeare. Yet for sublimity and philosophical grandeur, Milton stands almost alone in world literature. His peers are Homer, Virgil, Dante, Wordsworth, and Goethe: poets who achieve a total ethical and spiritual vision of the world. In this panoramic … Continued
Edited by Frances Ferguson (Trustee; NHC Fellow, 2003–04) and Helen Regueiro Elam Over the past four decades, Geoffrey Hartman's voice has been one of the most important and profound in contemporary literary theory. Most noted for his scholarship on Wordsworth and Romanticism, Hartman developed throughout his work an original conception of the relationship between literary … Continued
By Marcel Gutwirth (NHC Fellow, 1985–86) La Fontaine's victory is both striking and discreet. Everyone knows his fables, but often knows only that. By restoring to this work all its force, by respecting all its voices, Marcel Gutwirth shows us its singular coherence.
Edited by Ezra Greenspan (NHC Fellow, 2011–12) Born a slave and kept functionally illiterate until he escaped at age nineteen, William Wells Brown refashioned himself first as an agent of the Underground Railroad and then as an antislavery activist and self-taught orator and author, eventually becoming a foundational figure of African American literature. The Library … Continued
Edited by A. James Arnold (NHC Fellow, 1989–90), Julio Rodríguez-Luis, and Michael Dash This history for the first time charts the literature of the entire Caribbean, the islands as well as continental littoral, as one cultural region. It breaks new ground in establishing a common grid for reading literatures that have been kept separate by … Continued
Edited by Emory Elliott (NHC Fellow, 1979–80) The earliest of the American writers, the colonials, were truly voices in the wilderness-authors of a literary heritage largely overlooked until early in the 20th century. It was then that the literary merits of sermons, autobiographies, histories, diaries, poems and elegies from the 1600s and early 1700s were … Continued
By Marlene L. Daut (NHC Fellow, 2016–17) Focusing on the influential life and works of the Haitian political writer and statesman, Baron de Vastey (1781-1820), in this book Marlene L. Daut examines the legacy of Vastey’s extensive writings as a form of what she calls black Atlantic humanism, a discourse devoted to attacking the enlightenment … Continued
By Edward H. Friedman (NHC Fellow, 1998–99)
By Sahar Amer (NHC Fellow, 2005–06) Given Christianity's valuation of celibacy and its persistent association of sexuality with the Fall and of women with sin, Western medieval attitudes toward the erotic could not help but be vexed. In contrast, eroticism is explicitly celebrated in a large number of theological, scientific, and literary texts of the … Continued
By Morris Dickstein (NHC Fellow, 1989–90) Double Agent is a watershed in the recent revival of interest in the role of the public critic and intellectual who writes about culture, politics, and the arts for an intelligent general audience. Offering acute portraits of critics both famous and neglected, Dickstein traces the evolution of cultural criticism … Continued