Edited by Paul E. Szarmach (NHC Fellow, 1981–82) Old English prose before the late tenth century is examined in this collection of hitherto unpublished essays. Using a variety of techniques, the authors explore well-known and lesser-known texts in search of a better understanding of why, how, and by whom the manuscripts were produced. Part I … Continued
By Andrew H. Miller (NHC Fellow, 2004–05) Literary criticism has, in recent decades, rather fled from discussions of moral psychology, and for good reasons, too. Who would not want to flee the hectoring moralism with which it is so easily associated-portentous, pious, humorless? But in protecting us from such fates, our flight has had its … Continued
By Helena Goscilo (NHC Fellow, 1990–91) This study of the work of Tatyana N. Tolstaya initiates the reader into the paradoxes of her fictional universe: a poetic realm ruled by language, to which the mysteries of life, imagination, memory and death are subject.
By AthenaeusEdited and translated by S. Douglas Olson (NHC Fellow, 2008–09) In The Learned Banqueters, Athenaeus describes a series of dinner parties at which the guests quote extensively from Greek literature. The work (which dates to the very end of the second century CE) is amusing reading and of extraordinary value as a treasury of quotations from works … Continued
Edited by John McGowan (NHC Fellow, 2017–18), William E. Cain, Laurie A. Finke, Vincent B. Leitch, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, and Jeffrey J. Williams The gold standard anthology for anyone who wants to understand the development and current state of literary theory. Offering 191 pieces by 157 authors, The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, Third Edition, … Continued
By Jonathan Lamb (NHC Fellow, 1991–92) The Rhetoric of Suffering draws on the book of Job as a touchstone for the contradictions and polemics that infect various C18th works – poetry, philosophy, political oratory, accounts of exploration, commentaries on criminal law – which tried to account for the relations between human suffering and systems of … Continued
By Ralph W. V. Elliott (NHC Fellow, 1980–81)
By Sanjay Krishnan (NHC Fellow, 2012–13) The author of more than thirty books of fiction and nonfiction and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, V. S. Naipaul (1932–2018) is one of the most acclaimed authors of the twentieth century. He is also one of the most controversial. Before settling in England, Naipaul grew up … Continued
By David Simpson (NHC Fellow, 1984–85) Traditionally, Wordsworth’s greatness is founded on his identity as the poet of nature and solitude. The Wordsworthian imagination is seen as an essentially private faculty, its very existence premised on the absence of other people. In this title, first published in 1987, David Simpson challenges this established view of … Continued
By Sean McCann (NHC Fellow, 2001–02) There is no more powerful symbol in American political life than the presidency, and the image of presidential power has had no less profound an impact on American fiction. A Pinnacle of Feeling is the first book to examine twentieth-century literature’s deep fascination with the modern presidency and with the ideas … Continued