Publications

Montaigne and the Quality of Mercy: Ethical and Political Themes in the Essais
David Quint
Publication Year: 2014
Description:

In a fresh reading of Montaigne’s Essais, David Quint portrays the great Renaissance writer as both a literary man and a deeply engaged political thinker concerned with the ethical basis of society and civil discourse. From the first essay, Montaigne places the reader in a world of violent political conflict reminiscent of the French Wars of Religion through which he lived and wrote. Quint shows how a group of interrelated essays, including the famous one on the cannibals of Brazil, explores the confrontation between warring adversaries: a clement or vindictive victor and his suppliant or defiant captive. How can the two be reconciled?

Inside Paradise Lost: Reading the Designs of Milton’s Epic
David Quint
Publication Year: 2014
Description:

The book uncovers patterns of allusion and verbal design that structure the meaning of Paradise Lost.  Arguing that the loss of Eden at the Fall of Adam and Eve is also the gain of Christian freedom, it describes the message of Milton’s great epic to be “make love, not war” or, as the poet puts it: “to create / Is greater than created to destroy.”

Awards:

The James Holly Hanford Award, The Milton Society of America

André Bazin’s New Media
Dudley Andrew
Publication Year: 2014
Description:

57 essays by André Bazin on Television, 3D, Cinerama and CinemaScope, collected, translated, annotated, and introduced.

With the power of God : theology and politics in modern Hebrew literature
Hannan Hever
Publication Year: 2013
Description:

המאוחד, תשע”ג 2013.
    232 עמ’.
    With the power of God : theology and politics in modern Hebrew literature / Hannan Hever

Sonallah Ibrahim's That Smell and Notes from Prison
Robyn Creswell
Publication Year: 2013
Description:

One of the most influential Arabic novels of recent times, That Smell is Sonallah Ibrahim’s modernist masterpiece. Composed in the wake of a five-year prison sentence, the semi-autobiographical story follows a recently released political prisoner as he wanders through Cairo, adrift in his native city. Published in 1966, the novel was immediately banned. For this edition, the translator Robyn Creswell has also included an annotated selection of Notes from Prison culled from Ibrahim’s prison diary — a personal archive comprising hundreds of handwritten notes scribbled on Bafra-brand cigarette papers. These writings shed unexpected light on Ibrahim’s groundbreaking novel.

A Companion to Francois Truffaut
Dudley Andrew
Publication Year: 2013
Description:

31 new essays on Francois Truffaut divided into sections on his biography, his critical status, and his films.

co-edited with Anne Gillain.

The Poetry of Kabbalah; Mystical Verse from the Jewish Tradition
Peter Cole
Publication Year: 2012
Description:

This groundbreaking collection presents for the first time in English a substantial body of poetry that emerges directly from the sublime and often startling world of Jewish mysticism. Taking up Gershom Scholem’s call to plumb the “tremendous poetic potential” concealed in the Kabbalistic tradition, Peter Cole provides dazzling renderings of work composed on three continents over a period of some fifteen hundred years.

Modern Latin American Literature: A Very Short Introduction
Roberto González Echevarría
Publication Year: 2012
Description:

In the 1960s, Latin American literature became known worldwide as never before. Writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, and Mario Vargas Llosa all became part of the general culture of educated readers of English, French, German, and Italian. But few know about the literary tradition from which these writers emerged. Modern Latin American Literature: A Very Short Introduction remedies this situation, providing an overview of Latin American literature from the late eighteenth century to the present.

Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov
Martin Hägglund
Publication Year: 2012
Description:

Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Vladimir Nabokov transformed the art of the novel in order to convey the experience of time. Nevertheless, their works have been read as expressions of a desire to transcend time—whether through an epiphany of memory, an immanent moment of being, or a transcendent afterlife. Martin Hägglund takes on these themes but gives them another reading entirely. The fear of time and death does not stem from a desire to transcend time, he argues. On the contrary, it is generated by the investment in temporal life. From this vantage point, Hägglund offers in-depth analyses of Proust’s Recherche, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and Nabokov’s Ada.

Cuban Fiestas
Roberto González Echevarría
Publication Year: 2012
Description:

Roberto González Echevarría masterfully exposes the distinctive elements of the fiesta cubana that give depth and coherence to more than two centuries of Cuban cultural life. Reaching back to nineteenth-century traditions of Cuban art and literature, and augmenting them, in the twentieth, with the arts of narrative, the esthetic performances of sport and entertainment in nightclubs, on the baseball diamond, and in movie theaters, Cuban Fiestas renders the lilting strains of the fiesta and drum beats of the passage of time as keys to understanding the dynamic quality of Cuban culture.

Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora
Jing Tsu
Publication Year: 2011
Description:

In Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora, Jing Tsu explores the new global language trade, arguing that it aims at more sophisticated ways of exerting influence besides simply wielding knuckles of power. Through an analysis of the different relationships between language standardization, technologies of writing, and modern Chinese literature around the world from the nineteenth century to the present, this study transforms how we understand the power of language in migration and how that is changing the terms of cultural dominance.

Opening Bazin
Dudley Andrew
Publication Year: 2011
Description:

An Anthology of new essays taking up Bazin’s biography, aesthetic, social position in culture, and influence around the world.

Translated into French as Ouvrir Bazin (2014).