By Linda Gregerson (NHC Fellow, 1991–92) The Reformation of the Subject is a study of the cultural contradictions that gave birth to the English Protestant epic. In lucid and theoretically sophisticated language, Linda Gregerson examines the fraught ideological, political and gender conflicts that are woven into the texture of The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost. … Continued
By Janet Beizer (NHC Fellow, 1998–99) If questions of subjectivity and identification are at stake in all biographical writing, they are particularly trenchant for contemporary women biographers of women. Often, their efforts to exhume buried lives in hope of finding spiritual foremothers awaken maternal phantoms that must be embraced or confronted. Do women writing in … Continued
By Edith Sarra (NHC Fellow, 2016–17) The Tale of Genji (ca. 1008), by noblewoman Murasaki Shikibu, is known for its sophisticated renderings of fictional characters’ minds and its critical perspectives on the lives of the aristocracy of eleventh-century Japan. Unreal Houses radically rethinks the Genji by focusing on the figure of the house. Edith Sarra examines the narrative’s fictionalized images of aristocratic … Continued
By Denis Donoghue (Trustee; NHC Fellow, 1991–92; 1995–96; 1997–1998) When Denis Donoghue left Warrenpoint and went to Dublin in September 1946, he entered University College as a student of Latin and English. A few months later he also started as a student of lieder at the Royal Irish Academy of Music. These studies have informed … Continued
By Saint Anselm, Archbishop of CanterburyTranslated by Jasper Hopkins (NHC Fellow, 1983–84) Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109), often called the Father of Scholasticism, was born in Aosta, in the Kingdom of Burgundy. Today Aosta belongs to Italy, specifically to the region of Val d'Aosta. Anselm later became prior (1063), and then abbot (1078), of the Monastery of Bec-Hellouin in Normandy, … Continued
By Peter Lurie (NHC Fellow, 2009–10)
By J. Paul Hunter (NHC Fellow, 1985–86; 1995–96) What did people read before there were novels? Not necessarily just other “literary” works, according to this fascinating study of the beginnings of the English novel. To understand the origins of the novel as a species and to read individual novels well, we must know several pasts and traditions―even … Continued
By George Kane (NHC Fellow, 1987–88) Professor Kane is widely regarded as the leading middle English textual and literary scholar of our time and this collection of his essays will be widely welcomed. They focus largely upon the texts of Chaucer and Langland and demonstrate in an exemplary way how critical issues can arise from … Continued
By R. W. B. Lewis (NHC Fellow, 1989–90) Acclaimed biographer R.W.B. Lewis traces the life and complex development–emotional, artistic, philosophical–of this supreme poet-historian. Here we meet the boy who first encounters the mythic Beatrice, the lyric poet obsessed with love and death, the grand master of dramatic narrative and allegory, and his monumental search for … Continued
By Mario Klarer (NHC Fellow, 1995–96; 2000–01) This volume examines instances of ecphrasis (literary descriptions of pictures) in the works of English Renaissance authors against the background of Elizabethan theory formation on the problem of representation. References to (usually fictional) works of art in the works of Sidney, Spenser, Lyly and Shakespeare serve as a … Continued