By Bart D. Ehrman (NHC Fellow, 2009–10; 2018–19) "Arguably the most distinctive feature of the early Christian literature," writes Bart Ehrman, "is the degree to which it was forged." The Homilies and Recognitions of Clement; Paul's letters to and from Seneca; Gospels by Peter, Thomas, and Philip; Jesus' correspondence with Abgar, letters by Peter and Paul in the New … Continued
By David Konstan (NHC Fellow, 1994–95) In comedy, happy endings resolve real-world conflicts. These conflicts, in turn, leave their mark on the texts in the form of gaps in plot and inconsistencies of characterization. Greek Comedy and Ideology analyzes how the structure of ancient Greek comedy betrays and responds to cultural tensions in the society of the … Continued
By Mary Ellis Gibson (NHC Fellow, 2007–08) In Indian Angles, Mary Ellis Gibson provides a new historical approach to Indian English literature. Gibson shows that poetry, not fiction, was the dominant literary genre of Indian writing in English until 1860 and that poetry written in colonial situations can tell us as much or even more about … Continued
By Marcel Gutwirth (NHC Fellow, 1985–86) Why do we laugh? Do we really want to know why? We are torn between desire to understand the joyous human response of laughter and reluctance to expose the secret of our spontaneity to the rigors of intellectualizing, the labors of analysis. Marcel Gutwirth here offers a fresh approach … Continued
By Nicholas Frankel (NHC Fellow, 2001–02)
Edited by Linda Dégh (NHC Fellow, 1990–91) Narratives in Society represents three decades of scholarship by distinguished folklorist Linda Dégh. The twenty essays—some new, the rest newly revised—present Dégh’s ideas, theories, and approaches to folktales: the people who tell them, listen to them, pass them on, and the communities that support them.
By Peter Lancelot Mallios (NHC Fellow, 2005–06; 2006–07) Our Conrad is about the American reception of Joseph Conrad and its crucial role in the formation of American modernism. Although Conrad did not visit the country until a year before his death, his fiction served as both foil and mirror to America's conception of itself and its … Continued
By John Plotz (NHC Fellow, 2001–02) What fueled the Victorian passion for hair-jewelry and memorial rings? When would an everyday object metamorphose from commodity to precious relic? In Portable Property, John Plotz examines the new role played by portable objects in persuading Victorian Britons that they could travel abroad with religious sentiments, family ties, and national … Continued
By John Monfasani (NHC Fellow, 2011–12) Starting with an essay on the Renaissance as the concluding phase of the Middle Ages and ending with appreciations of Paul Oskar Kristeller, the great twentieth-century scholar of the Renaissance, this new volume by John Monfasani brings together seventeen articles that focus both on individuals, such as Erasmus of … Continued
By Paula Blank (NHC Fellow, 2001–02; 2012–13) Shakespeare's poems and plays are rich in reference to "measure, number, and weight," which were the key terms of an early modern empirical and quantitative imagination. Shakespeare's investigation of Renaissance measures of reality centers on the consequences of applying principles of measurement to the appraisal of human value. … Continued