Publications

By illuminating both the process of canon formation and the voices excluded from the canon this book offers a powerful alternative reading of twentieth century Hebrew fiction. A people’s literary texts can play a dramatic role in nation building, as the development of modern Hebrew literature powerfully illustrates. Since the end of the nineteenth century, Hebrew writers in Europe and Palestine/Israel have produced texts and consolidated moments in the shaping of national identity.

From the first amateur leagues of the 1860s to the exploits of Livan and Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez, here is the definitive history of baseball in Cuba. Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria expertly traces the arc of the game, intertwining its heroes and their stories with the politics, music, dance, and literature of the Cuban people. What emerges is more than a story of balls and strikes, but a richly detailed history of Cuba told from the unique cultural perch of the baseball diamond.

This book insists on Benjamin’s method of philosophical contemplation as performance, on a performance that demands precise immersion in the minute details of its subject matter. Readings of some of his key works: the autobiographical Berlin Chronicle, the apparently biographical study of Proust, the fictional autobiographical story “Myslowitz—Braunschweig—Marseille,” and those essays on the theory of language so crucial to an understanding of Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” “Doctrine of the Similar,” and “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man.”

Alexander the Great, according to Plutarch, carried on his campaigns a copy of the Iliad, kept alongside a dagger; on a more pronounced ideological level, ancient Romans looked to the Aeneid as an argument for imperialism. In this major reinterpretation of epic poetry beginning with Virgil, David Quint explores the political context and meanings of key works in Western literature.

This magisterial work links the literary and intellectual history of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Britain’s overseas colonies during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to redraw our picture of the origins of cultural nationalism, the lineages of the novel, and the literary history of the English-speaking world. Katie Trumpener recovers and recontextualizes a vast body of fiction to describe the history of the novel during a period of formal experimentation and political engagement, between its eighteenth-century “rise” and its Victorian “heyday.”