Alexander Pope: A Life
By Maynard Mack (NHC Fellow, 1984–85; 1986–87) In the first complete biography of Alexander Pope since 1900, the most eminent Pope scholar of our day brings to life the man and his times.
Literature
Approaches to Teaching Cervantes’ Don Quixote
Edited by Richard Bjornson (NHC Fellow, 1982–83) “All prose fiction is a variation on the theme of Don Quixote,“ remarked Lionel Trilling about the novel that influenced writers ranging from Fielding to Faulkner. Approaches to Teaching Cervantes’ Don Quixote brings together resources and strategies for teaching the novel to undergraduates. Although beginning instructors and nonspecialists might be expected … Continued
Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind
By Patricia Meyer Spacks (Trustee; NHC Fellow, 1982–83; 1988–89) This book offers a witty explanation of why boredom both haunts and motivates the literary imagination. Moving from Samuel Johnson to Donald Barthelme, from Jane Austen to Anita Brookner, Spacks shows us at last how we arrived in a postmodern world where boredom is the all-encompassing … Continued
Columbia Literary History of the United States
Edited by Emory Elliott (NHC Fellow, 1979–80) For the first time in four decades, there exists an authoritative and up-to-date survey of the literature of the United States, from prehistoric cave narratives to the radical movements of the sixties and the experimentation of the eighties. This comprehensive volume—one of the century's most important books in … Continued
Dickens: A Biography
By Fred Kaplan (NHC Fellow, 1985–86) From a bitter childhood mired in poverty and hard work to a career as the most acclaimed and best-loved writer in the English-speaking world, Charles Dickens had a life as tumultuous as any he created in his teeming novels of life in Victorian England. And no one has captured … Continued
Essays in Paper Analysis
Edited by Stephen Spector (NHC Fellow, 1985–86) A resource for students in any field who are working with paper documents, this book offers exemplary studies by leading scholars on a variety of topics, ranging from medieval music manuscripts to Beethoven, and from Shakespeare forgeries to the most recent bibliographical applications of nuclear physics.
Four Wycliffite Dialogues: Dialogue between Jon and Richard, Dialogue between a Friar and a Secular, Dialogue between Reson and Gabbyng, Dialogue between a Clerk and a Knight
Edited by Fiona Somerset (NHC Fellow, 2006–07) An edition of four previously unpublished heretical dialogues in Middle English, translated or adapted from Wycliffite sources composed circa 1380-1420. These previously unpublished prose treatises, cast as fictional dialogues, all survive in the form of single manuscripts, probably by different authors, but they cohere in their ideological outlook, … Continued
Hearts of Darkness: Wellsprings of a Southern Literary Tradition
By Bertram Wyatt-Brown (NHC Fellow, 1989–90; 1998–99) From Edgar Allan Poe’s “dark forebodings” to Kate Chopin’s lifelong struggle with sorrow and loss, depression has shadowed southern letters. This beautifully realized study explores the defining role of melancholy in southern literature from the early nineteenth century to the early twentieth, when it evolved into modernist alienation. … Continued
Is Milton Better Than Shakespeare?
By Nigel Smith (NHC Fellow, 2007–08) With literature waning in the interest of so many, is Shakespeare the only poet the public can still appreciate? John Milton, as this book makes clear, speaks more powerfully to the eternal questions and to the important concerns of our time. The Milton of this volume is an author … Continued
Literary Lives: Biography and the Search for Understanding
By David Ellis (NHC Fellow, 1991–92) Popular though biography is, it has as yet received very little critical attention. What nearly all biographies offer is an understanding of their subjects and an explanation of their behaviour. In this book David Ellis, author of the acclaimed third volume of the Cambridge biography of D H Lawrence, … Continued