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Four Essays on Romance
Herschel C. Baker
Harvard University Press, 1971

In his Introduction, Herschel Baker writes, “Although Romance, the dominant genre of secular literature throughout the later Middle Ages, has prompted floods of scholarship and speculation, it still bristles with unanswered problems of origin, development, and even definition.”

Helaine Newstead contributes “Malory and Romance”; A. Bartlett Giamatti, “Spenser: From Magic to Miracle”; Norman Rabkin, “The Holy Sinner and the Confidence Man: Illusion in Shakespeare’s Romances”; and Barbara K. Lewalski, “Milton: Revaluations of Romance.”

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Fragments and Assemblages
Forming Compilations of Medieval London
Arthur Bahr
University of Chicago Press, 2013
In Fragments and Assemblages, Arthur Bahr expands the ways in which we interpret medieval manuscripts, examining the formal characteristics of both physical manuscripts and literary works. Specifically, Bahr argues that manuscript compilations from fourteenth-century London reward interpretation as both assemblages and fragments: as meaningfully constructed objects whose forms and textual contents shed light on the city’s literary, social, and political cultures, but also as artifacts whose physical fragmentation invites forms of literary criticism that were unintended by their medieval makers. Such compilations are not simply repositories of data to be used for the reconstruction of the distant past; their physical forms reward literary and aesthetic analysis in their own right. The compilations analyzed reflect the full vibrancy of fourteenth-century London’s literary cultures: the multilingual codices of Edwardian civil servant Andrew Horn and Ricardian poet John Gower, the famous Auchinleck manuscript of texts in Middle English, and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. By reading these compilations as both formal shapes and historical occurrences, Bahr uncovers neglected literary histories specific to the time and place of their production. The book offers a less empiricist way of interpreting the relationship between textual and physical form that will be of interest to a wide range of literary critics and manuscript scholars.
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Framed
The New Woman Criminal in British Culture at the Fin de Siecle
Elizabeth Carolyn Miller
University of Michigan Press, 2008

Framed uses fin de siècle British crime narrative to pose a highly interesting question: why do female criminal characters tend to be alluring and appealing while fictional male criminals of the era are unsympathetic or even grotesque?

In this elegantly argued study, Elizabeth Carolyn Miller addresses this question, examining popular literary and cinematic culture from roughly 1880 to 1914 to shed light on an otherwise overlooked social and cultural type: the conspicuously glamorous New Woman criminal. In so doing, she breaks with the many Foucauldian studies of crime to emphasize the genuinely subversive aspects of these popular female figures. Drawing on a rich body of archival material, Miller argues that the New Woman Criminal exploited iconic elements of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century commodity culture, including cosmetics and clothing, to fashion an illicit identity that enabled her to subvert legal authority in both the public and the private spheres.

"This is a truly extraordinary argument, one that will forever alter our view of turn-of-the-century literary culture, and Miller has demonstrated it with an enrapturing series of readings of fictional and filmic criminal figures. In the process, she has filled a gap between feminist studies of the New Woman of the 1890s and more gender-neutral studies of early twentieth-century literary and social change. Her book offers an extraordinarily important new way to think about the changing shape of political culture at the turn of the century."
---John Kucich, Professor of English, Rutgers University

"Given the intellectual adventurousness of these chapters, the rich material that the author has brought to bear, and its combination of archival depth and disciplinary range, any reader of this remarkable book will be amply rewarded."
---Jonathan Freedman, Professor of English and American Culture, University of Michigan

Elizabeth Carolyn Miller is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Davis.

digitalculturebooks is an imprint of the University of Michigan and the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library dedicated to publishing innovative and accessible work exploring new media and their impact on society, culture, and scholarly communication. Visit the website at www.digitalculture.org.

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Framing the Polish Home
Postwar Cultural Constructions of Hearth, Nation, and Self
Bozena Shallcross
Ohio University Press, 2002

As the subject of ideological, aesthetic, and existential manipulations, the Polish home and its representation is an ever-changing phenomenon that absorbs new tendencies and, at the same time, retains its centrality to Polish literature, whether written in Poland or abroad. Framing the Polish Home is a pioneering work that explores the idea of home as fundamental to the question of cultural and national identity within Poland's recent history and its tradition.

In this inaugural volume of the
Polish and Polish-American Studies Series, the Polish home emerges in its rich verbal and visual representations and multiple material embodiments, as the discussion moves from the loss of the home during wartime to the Sovietized politics of housing and from the exilic strategies of having a home to the the idyllic evocation of the abodes of the past.

Although, as Bożena Shallcross notes in her introduction, “few concepts seem to have such universal appeal as the notion of the home,” this area of study is still seriously underdeveloped. In essays from sixteen scholars, Framing the Polish Home takes a significant step to correct that oversight, covering a broad range of issues pertinent to the discourse on the home and demonstrating the complexity of the home in Polish literature and culture.

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Frances Burney and Narrative Prior to Ideology
Brian McCrea
University of Delaware Press, 2014

Frances Burney and Narrative Prior to Ideology works between Burney’s Journals and Letters and her fiction more thoroughly than any study of her in the past twenty-five years. By doing so, it offers significant reinterpretations of Burney’s four novels: EvelinaCeciliaCamilla, and The Wanderer. It describes Burney’s eluding the major modern–isms through which critics have tried to read her: Feminism (with its “gendering” of beauty and reversal of gender roles); Capitalism and its Marxist critique (here the details of Burney’s housekeeping become important); Professionalism (as a response to status inconsistency and class conflict); and Ian Watt’s “Formal Realism” (Burney perhaps saved the novel from a sharp decline it suffered in the 1770s, even as she tried to distance herself from the genre).

Burney’s most successful writing appeared before the coining of “ideology.” But her standing “prior to ideology” is not a matter of chronological accident. Rather, she quietly but forcefully resisted shared explanations—domesticity as model for household management, debt as basis for family finance, professional status as a means to social confidence, the novel as the dominant literary genre—that became popular during her long and eventful life.

Frederic Jameson has described Paul de Man, “in private conversation,” claiming, “Marxism . . . has no way of understanding the eighteenth century.” Frances Burney and Narrative Prior to Ideology conjoins Burney’s “eighteenth-centuryness” with her modernity.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
 
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Francophonie and the Orient
French-Asian Transcultural Crossings (1840-1940)
Mathilde Kang
Amsterdam University Press, 2018
Based on transnational France-Asia approaches, this book studies Asian cultures once steeped in French civilisation but free of a colonial mode in order to highlight the transliterary examples of cultural transfer. This book is a pioneering study of the Francophone phenomenon within the context of cultures categorised as non-Francophone. Espousing a transcultural approach, Francophonie and the Orient examines the emergence of French heritage in the Far-East, the various forms of its manifestation, and the modes of its identification.Several thematic signposts guide the diverse pathways of the research. Firstly, the question is posed as to whether colonisation is the ultimate coat of arms for entry into Francophonie? Secondly, the book raises issues relative to Asian Francophone works: the emergence of literatures with French expression from Asian countries historically free of French domination. Finally, the study reconfigures the Asian Francophone heritage with new paradigms (transnational/global studies), which redefine the frontiers of Francophonie in Asia.
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Francophonie en Orient
Aux croisements France-Asie (1840-1940)
Mathilde Kang
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
This book offers a pioneering study of Asian cultures that officially escaped from French colonisation but nonetheless were steeped in French civilisation in the colonial era and had heavily French-influenced, largely francophone literatures. It raises a number of provocative questions, including whether colonisation is the ultimate requirement for a culture's being defined as francophone, or how to think about francophone literatures that emerge from Asian nations that were historically free from French domination. The ultimate result is a redefining of the Asian francophone heritage according to new, transnational paradigms.
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Frankenstein and STEAM
Essays for Charles E. Robinson
Robin Hammerman
University of Delaware Press, 2022

Charles E. Robinson, Professor Emeritus of English at The University of Delaware, definitively transformed study of the novel Frankenstein with his foundational volume The Frankenstein Notebooks and, in nineteenth century studies more broadly, brought heightened attention to the nuances of writing and editing. Frankenstein and STEAM consolidates the generative legacy of his later work on the novel's broad relation to topics in science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM). Seven chapters written by leading and emerging scholars pay homage to Robinson's later perspectives of the novel and a concluding postscript contains remembrances by his colleagues and students. This volume not only makes explicit the question of what it means to be human, a question Robinson invited students and colleagues to examine throughout his career, but it also illustrates the depth of the field and diversity of those who have been inspired by Robinson's work. Frankenstein and STEAM offers direction for continuing scholarship on the intersections of literature, science, and technology.

Published by the University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

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The Frankenstein of 1790 and Other Lost Chapters from Revolutionary France
Julia V. Douthwaite
University of Chicago Press, 2012
The French Revolution brings to mind violent mobs, the guillotine, and Madame Defarge, but it was also a publishing revolution: more than 1,200 novels were published between 1789 and 1804, when Napoleon declared the Revolution at an end. In this book, Julia V. Douthwaite explores how the works within this enormous corpus announced the new shapes of literature to come and reveals that vestiges of these stories can be found in novels by the likes of Mary Shelley, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, and L. Frank Baum.
 
Deploying political history, archival research, and textual analysis with eye-opening results, Douthwaite focuses on five major events between 1789 and 1794—first in newspapers, then in fiction—and shows how the symbolic stories generated by Louis XVI, Robespierre, the market women who stormed Versailles, and others were transformed into new tales with ongoing appeal. She uncovers a 1790 story of an automaton-builder named Frankénsteïn, links Baum to the suffrage campaign going back to 1789, and discovers a royalist anthem’s power to undo Balzac’s Père Goriot. Bringing to light the missing links between the ancien régime and modernity, The Frankenstein of 1790 and Other Lost Chapters from Revolutionary France is an ambitious account of a remarkable politico-literary moment and its aftermath.
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Franz Kafka
Sander L. Gilman
Reaktion Books, 2005
The conflation of reality and the fantastic, ambiguity, the relentless confrontation with horror, the fractured sense of identity: Franz Kafka created a wholly unique and enduring worldview through his literature and life, and he remains one of the central intellectual and cultural figures of our time. Sander L. Gilman brings together Kafka's literary works, personal writings, and biography to create a compelling and wholly accessible narrative of the literary master's life.

Gilman focuses on the relationship between Kafka's life and work, reconstructing both Kafka's cultural environment and the writer's conceptual understanding of his own body. Kafka's letters, diaries, and writings emerge in Gilman's analysis as windows into his ongoing attempt to create an identity in a world where being a Central European Jew dictated an uneasy fate. The volume emphasizes in particular the image and role of the Jew in Kafka's modern world and how Kafka responded to prevailing attitudes, repressive actions, and stereotypes in society at large. Gilman also examines the influence of psychoanalytic ideas on Kafka and his works, exploring how Kafka wove such psychoanalytic experiences into his literature. Gilman concludes with consideration of the "Kafka-myth" and the wealth of material emerging from it over the past eighty years, including work by such illustrious minds as Walter Benjamin and Ted Hughes. 

Franz Kafka features illuminating archival photographs and illustrations as well as a comprehensive bibliography and filmography of work by and about Kafka. This succinct yet penetrating volume offers valuable and original insight into how Kafka's life and work shaped how we perceive our modern society and how, indeed, some aspect of the world is always "Kafkaesque."
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Franz Kafka
Subversive Dreamer
Michael Löwy, translated by Inez Hedges
University of Michigan Press, 2016
Franz Kafka: Subversive Dreamer is an attempt to identify and properly contextualize the social critique in Kafka’s biography and work that links father-son antagonisms, heterodox Jewish religious thinking, and anti-authoritarian or anarchist protest against the rising power of bureaucratic modernity. The book proceeds chronologically, starting with biographical facts often neglected or denied relating to Kafka’s relations with the Anarchist circles in Prague, followed by an analysis of the three great unfinished novels—Amerika, The Trial, The Castle—as well as some of his most important short stories. Fragments, parables, correspondence, and his diaries are also used in order to better understand the major literary works. Löwy’s book grapples with the critical and subversive dimension of Kafka’s writings, which is often hidden or masked by the fabulistic character of the work. Löwy’s reading has already generated controversy because of its distance from the usual canon of literary criticism about the Prague writer, but the book has been well received in its original French edition and has been translated into Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Greek, and Turkish.

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Freaks of History
Two Performance Texts
James MacDonald
Intellect Books, 2017
Disability studies have long been the domain of medical and pedagogical academics. However, in recent years, the subject has outgrown its clinical origins. In Freaks of History, James MacDonald presents two dramatic explorations of disability within the wider themes of sexuality, gender, foreignness, and the other. Originally directed by Martin Harvey and performed by undergraduate students at the University of Exeter, Wellclose Square and Unsex Me Here analyze cultural marginalization against the backdrop of infamous historical events.
            MacDonald, who is cerebral palsied, recognizes that disability narratives are rarely written by and for disabled people. Therefore his plays, accompanied by critical essays and director’s notes, are a welcome addition to the emerging discourse of Crip theory, and essential reading for disability students and academics alike.
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Freedom's Empire
Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640-1940
Laura Doyle
Duke University Press, 2007
In this pathbreaking work of scholarship, Laura Doyle reveals the central, formative role of race in the development of a transnational, English-language literature over three centuries. Identifying a recurring freedom plot organized around an Atlantic Ocean crossing, Doyle shows how this plot structures the texts of both African-Atlantic and Anglo-Atlantic writers and how it takes shape by way of submerged intertextual exchanges between the two traditions. For Anglo-Atlantic writers, Doyle locates the origins of this narrative in the seventeenth century. She argues that members of Parliament, religious refugees, and new Atlantic merchants together generated a racial rhetoric by which the English fashioned themselves as a “native,” “freedom-loving,” “Anglo-Saxon” people struggling against a tyrannical foreign king. Stories of a near ruinous yet triumphant Atlantic passage to freedom came to provide the narrative expression of this heroic Anglo-Saxon identity—in novels, memoirs, pamphlets, and national histories. At the same time, as Doyle traces through figures such as Friday in Robinson Crusoe, and through gothic and seduction narratives of ruin and captivity, these texts covertly register, distort, or appropriate the black Atlantic experience. African-Atlantic authors seize back the freedom plot, placing their agency at the origin of both their own and whites’ survival on the Atlantic. They also shrewdly expose the ways that their narratives have been “framed” by the Anglo-Atlantic tradition, even though their labor has provided the enabling condition for that tradition.

Doyle brings together authors often separated by nation, race, and period, including Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, Olaudah Equiano, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Wilson, Pauline Hopkins, George Eliot, and Nella Larsen. In so doing, she reassesses the strategies of early women novelists, reinterprets the significance of rape and incest in the novel, and measures the power of race in the modern English-language imagination.

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Freethinkers, Libertines and Schwarmer
Heterodoxy in German Literature, 1750-1800
K. F. Hilliard
University of London Press, 2010
Professor Senia Pašeta argues that our understanding of modern Irish and British politics would be enormously enriched if we recognized two things: that the Irish and British suffrage movements were deeply connected; and that the women’s suffrage movement across the United Kingdom was shaped in fundamental ways by the Irish Question from the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth. In other words, the women’s suffrage movement did not exist in a political vacuum. It interacted with, influenced and was influenced by the other main political questions of the day, and with the main political question of the day - Ireland.
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The French Atlantic Triangle
Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade
Christopher L. Miller
Duke University Press, 2008
The French slave trade forced more than one million Africans across the Atlantic to the islands of the Caribbean. It enabled France to establish Saint-Domingue, the single richest colony on earth, and it connected France, Africa, and the Caribbean permanently. Yet the impact of the slave trade on the cultures of France and its colonies has received surprisingly little attention. Until recently, France had not publicly acknowledged its history as a major slave-trading power. The distinguished scholar Christopher L. Miller proposes a thorough assessment of the French slave trade and its cultural ramifications, in a broad, circum-Atlantic inquiry. This magisterial work is the first comprehensive examination of the French Atlantic slave trade and its consequences as represented in the history, literature, and film of France and its former colonies in Africa and the Caribbean.

Miller offers a historical introduction to the cultural and economic dynamics of the French slave trade, and he shows how Enlightenment thinkers such as Montesquieu and Voltaire mused about the enslavement of Africans, while Rousseau ignored it. He follows the twists and turns of attitude regarding the slave trade through the works of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century French writers, including Olympe de Gouges, Madame de Staël, Madame de Duras, Prosper Mérimée, and Eugène Sue. For these authors, the slave trade was variously an object of sentiment, a moral conundrum, or an entertaining high-seas “adventure.” Turning to twentieth-century literature and film, Miller describes how artists from Africa and the Caribbean—including the writers Aimé Césaire, Maryse Condé, and Edouard Glissant, and the filmmakers Ousmane Sembene, Guy Deslauriers, and Roger Gnoan M’Bala—have confronted the aftermath of France’s slave trade, attempting to bridge the gaps between silence and disclosure, forgetfulness and memory.

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The French Joyce
Geert Lernout
University of Michigan Press, 1992
A major contribution to James Joyce studies, as well as a historical review of the French intellectual climate since the 1960s
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French Lessons
A Memoir
Alice Kaplan
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Brilliantly uniting the personal and the critical, French Lessons is a powerful autobiographical experiment. It tells the story of an American woman escaping into the French language and of a scholar and teacher coming to grips with her history of learning. Kaplan begins with a distinctly American quest for an imaginary France of the intelligence. But soon her infatuation with all things French comes up against the dark, unimagined recesses of French political and cultural life.

The daughter of a Jewish lawyer who prosecuted Nazi war criminals at Nuremburg, Kaplan grew up in the 1960s in the Midwest. After her father's death when she was seven, French became her way of "leaving home" and finding herself in another language and culture. In spare, midwestern prose, by turns intimate and wry, Kaplan describes how, as a student in a Swiss boarding school and later in a junior year abroad in Bordeaux, she passionately sought the French "r," attentively honed her accent, and learned the idioms of her French lover.

When, as a graduate student, her passion for French culture turned to the elegance and sophistication of its intellectual life, she found herself drawn to the language and style of the novelist Louis-Ferdinand Celine. At the same time she was repulsed by his anti-Semitism. At Yale in the late 70s, during the heyday of deconstruction she chose to transgress its apolitical purity and work on a subject "that made history impossible to ignore:" French fascist intellectuals. Kaplan's discussion of the "de Man affair" — the discovery that her brilliant and charismatic Yale professor had written compromising articles for the pro-Nazi Belgian press—and her personal account of the paradoxes of deconstruction are among the most compelling available on this subject.

French Lessons belongs in the company of Sartre's Words and the memoirs of Nathalie Sarraute, Annie Ernaux, and Eva Hoffman. No book so engrossingly conveys both the excitement of learning and the moral dilemmas of the intellectual life.
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French Rococo Ébénisterie in the J. Paul Getty Museum
Gillian Wilson
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2021

The first comprehensive catalogue of the Getty Museum’s significant collection of French Rococo ébénisterie furniture.

This catalogue focuses on French ébénisterie furniture in the Rococo style dating from 1735 to 1760. These splendid objects directly reflect the tastes of the Museum’s founder, J. Paul Getty, who started collecting in this area in 1938 and continued until his death in 1976.
 
The Museum’s collection is particularly rich in examples created by the most talented cabinet masters then active in Paris, including Bernard van Risenburgh II (after 1696–ca. 1766), Jacques Dubois (1694–1763), and Jean-François Oeben (1721–1763). Working for members of the French royal family and aristocracy, these craftsmen excelled at producing veneered and marquetried pieces of furniture (tables, cabinets, and chests of drawers) fashionable for their lavish surfaces, refined gilt-bronze mounts, and elaborate design. These objects were renowned throughout Europe at a time when Paris was considered the capital of good taste.
 
The entry on each work comprises both a curatorial section, with description and commentary, and a conservation report, with construction diagrams. An introduction by Anne-Lise Desmas traces the collection’s acquisition history, and two technical essays by Arlen Heginbotham present methodologies and findings on the analysis of gilt-bronze mounts and lacquer.

The free online edition of this open-access publication is available at www.getty.edu/publications/rococo/ and includes zoomable, high-resolution photography. Also available are free PDF, EPUB, and Kindle/MOBI downloads of the book, and JPG downloads of the main catalogue images.

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French Suite
A Book of Essays
Michael Fried
Reaktion Books, 2022
From Manet to Gericault, Daubigny to Corot, an insightful, breathtakingly original exploration of French art and literature.
 
French Suite examines a range of important French painters and two writers, Baudelaire and Flaubert, from the brothers Le Nain in the mid-seventeenth century to Manet, Degas, and the Impressionists in the later nineteenth century. A principal theme of Michael Fried’s essays is a fundamental concern of his throughout his career: the relationship between painting and the beholder. Fried’s typically vivid and strongly argued essays offer many new readings and unexpected insights, examining both familiar and lesser-known French artistic and literary works.
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French Women Authors
The Significance of the Spiritual, 1400–2000
Kelsey L. Haskett
University of Delaware Press, 2013
French Women Authors examines the importance afforded the spiritual in the lives and works of French women authors over the centuries, thereby highlighting both the significance of spiritually informed writings in French literature in general, as well as the specific contribution made by women writers. Eleven different authors have been selected for this collection, representing major literary periods from the medieval to the (post)modern. Each author is examined in the light of a Christian worldview, creating an approach which both validates and interrogates the spiritual dimension of the works under consideration. At the same time, the book as a whole presents a broad perspective on French women writers, showing how they reflect or stand in opposition to their times. The chronological order of the chapters reveals an evolution in the modes of spirituality expressed by these authors and in the role of spiritual belief or religion in French society over time. From the overwhelmingly Christian culture of the Middle Ages and pre-Enlightenment France to the wide diversity prevalent in (post)modern times, including the rise of Islam within French borders, a radical shift has permeated French society, a shift that is reflected in the writers chosen for this book. Moreover, the sensitivity of women writers to the individual side of spiritual life, in contrast with the practices of organized religion, also emerges as a major trend in this book, with women often being seen as a voice for social and religious change, or for a more meaningful, personal faith. Lastly, despite a blatant rejection of God and religion, spiritual threads still run through the works of one of France’s most celebrated contemporary writers (Marguerite Duras), whose cry for an absolute in the midst of a spiritual vacuum only reiterates the quest for transcendence or for some form of spiritual expression, as voiced in the works of her female predecessors and contemporaries in France, and as demonstrated in this book.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
 
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The French Writers' War, 1940-1953
Gisèle Sapiro
Duke University Press, 2014
The French Writers' War, 1940–1953, is a remarkably thorough account of French writers and literary institutions from the beginning of the German Occupation through France's passage of amnesty laws in the early 1950s. To understand how the Occupation affected French literary production as a whole, Gisèle Sapiro uses Pierre Bourdieu's notion of the "literary field." Sapiro surveyed the career trajectories and literary and political positions of 185 writers. She found that writers' stances in relation to the Vichy regime are best explained in terms of institutional and structural factors, rather than ideology. Examining four major French literary institutions, from the conservative French Academy to the Comité national des écrivains, a group formed in 1941 to resist the Occupation, she chronicles the institutions' histories before turning to the ways that they influenced writers' political positions. Sapiro shows how significant institutions and individuals within France's literary field exacerbated their loss of independence or found ways of resisting during the war and Occupation, as well as how they were perceived after Liberation.
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Freud's Couch, Scott's Buttocks, Brontë's Grave
Simon Goldhill
University of Chicago Press, 2011

The Victorian era was the high point of literary tourism. Writers such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Sir Walter Scott became celebrities, and readers trekked far and wide for a glimpse of the places where their heroes wrote and thought, walked and talked. Even Shakespeare was roped in, as Victorian entrepreneurs transformed quiet Stratford-upon-Avon into a combination shrine and tourist trap.

Stratford continues to lure the tourists today, as do many other sites of literary pilgrimage throughout Britain. And our modern age could have no better guide to such places than Simon Goldhill. In Freud's Couch, Scott’s Buttocks, Brontë's Grave, Goldhill makes a pilgrimage to Sir Walter Scott's baronial mansion, Wordsworth's cottage in the Lake District, the Bront ë parsonage, Shakespeare's birthplace, and Freud's office in Hampstead. Traveling, as much as possible, by methods available to Victorians—and gamely negotiating distractions ranging from broken bicycles to a flock of giggling Japanese schoolgirls—he tries to discern what our forebears were looking for at these sites, as well as what they have to say to the modern mind. What does it matter that Emily Brontë’s hidden passions burned in this specific room? What does it mean, especially now that his fame has faded, that Scott self-consciously built an extravagant castle suitable for Ivanhoe—and star-struck tourists visited it while he was still living there? Or that Freud's meticulous recreation of his Vienna office is now a meticulously preserved museum of itself? Or that Shakespeare’s birthplace features student actors declaiming snippets of his plays . . . in the garden of a house where he almost certainly never wrote a single line?

Goldhill brings to these inquiries his trademark wry humor and a lifetime's engagement with literature. The result is a travel book like no other, a reminder that even today, the writing life still has the power to inspire.

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Friedrich Dürrenmatt
Selected Writings, Volume 1, Plays
Friedrich Dürrenmatt
University of Chicago Press, 2006

These translations of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s plays introduce the writer to a new generation of readers.

The Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–90) was one of the most important literary figures of the second half of the twentieth century. During the years of the Cold War, arguably only Beckett, Camus, Sartre, and Brecht rivaled him as a presence in European letters. Yet outside Europe, this prolific author is primarily known for only one work, The Visit

Dürrenmatt’s concerns are timeless, but they are also the product of his Swiss vantage during the Cold War: his key plays, gathered in the first volume of Selected Writings, explore such themes as guilt by passivity, the refusal of responsibility, greed and political decay, and the tension between justice and freedom. In The Visit, for instance, an old lady who becomes the wealthiest person in the world returns to the village that cast her out as a young woman and offers riches to the town in exchange for the life of the man, now its mayor, who once disgraced her. Joel Agee’s crystalline translation gives a fresh lease to this play, as well as four others: The Physicists, Romulus the Great, Hercules and the Augean Stables, and The Marriage of Mr. Mississippi.

Dürrenmatt has long been considered a great writer—but one unfairly neglected in the modern world of letters. With these elegantly conceived and expertly translated volumes, a new generation of readers will rediscover his greatest works.

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Friedrich Dürrenmatt
Selected Writings, Volume 3, Essays
Friedrich Dürrenmatt
University of Chicago Press, 2006

These translations of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s essays introduce the writer to a new generation of readers.

The Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–90) was one of the most important literary figures of the second half of the twentieth century. During the years of the Cold War, arguably only Beckett, Camus, Sartre, and Brecht rivaled him as a presence in European letters. Yet outside Europe, this prolific author is primarily known for only one work, The Visit. With these long-awaited translations of his plays, fictions, and essays, Dürrenmatt becomes available again in all his brilliance to the English-speaking world. 

Dürrenmatt’s essays, gathered in this third volume of Selected Writings, are among his most impressive achievements. Their range alone is astonishing: he wrote with authority and charm about art, literature, philosophy, politics, and the theater. The selections here include Dürrenmatt’s best-known essays, such as “Theater Problems” and “Monster Essay on Justice and Law,” as well as the notes he took on a 1970 journey in America (in which he finds the United States “increasingly susceptible to every kind of fascism”). This third volume of Selected Writings also includes essays that shade into fiction, such as “The Winter War in Tibet,” a fantasy of a third world war waged in a vast subterranean labyrinth—a Plato’s Cave allegory rewritten for our own troubled times. 

Dürrenmatt has long been considered a great writer—but one unfairly neglected in the modern world of letters. With these elegantly conceived and expertly translated volumes, a new generation of readers will rediscover his greatest works.

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Friendship and Literature
Spirit and Form
Ronald A. Sharp
Duke University Press, 1986

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From Arcadia to Revolution
The Neapolitan Monitor and Other Writings
Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel
Iter Press, 2019
Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel was a poet, a political writer, a journalist, and a politician. She was the editor, and virtually the only writer of the Monitore Napoletano (Neapolitan Monitor), the journal in which she recorded the events and debates that took place in the short-lived Neapolitan Jacobin Republic of 1799. She sought to influence both government policy and public opinion. As a political analyst she also put forward with this journal one of the first analyses ever of popular culture and its political implications, and confronted the challenge of trying to implement a revolutionary political project in a situation of abject poverty intertwined with a deeply conservative populist mind-set.

The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series, Volume 67
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From Copyright to Copperfield
The Identity of Dickens
Alexander Welsh
Harvard University Press, 1987

In this engaging analysis of a crucial period in Dickens's life, Alexander Welsh corrects our picture of the novelist's development and advocates a new approach to biographical criticism. Welsh centers our attention on an early crisis in Dickens's life and writing. His starting point is 1842, when the thirty year-old established writer (already author of The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, and The Old Curiosity Shop) traveled in America advocating international copyright. Welsh argues that the frustration and chagrin Dickens felt on this trip—when the American press accused him of hypocritical self-interest—had a demonstrable impact on his creative development. New powers of characterization are evident in the novels published in the decade that followed: Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, and David Copperfield, books named for heroes who became progressively more like projections of the author himself.

In these novels Dickens also asserts his kinship with Moliere, Milton, and Shakespeare. Playing boldly on Tartuffe, Paradise Lost, and King Lear, he lays claim to his own identity as a writer. Welsh shows that as much weight should be given to such literary concerns as to Dickens's recollection—in this same stage of his career—of the childhood trauma memorably inscribed in Copperfield.

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From Jane Austen to Joseph Conrad
Robert C. Rathburn and Martin Steinmann Jr., Editors
University of Minnesota Press, 1967

From Jane Austen to Joseph Conrad was first published in 1967. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

David Daisches, Douglas Bush, Robert B. Heilman, Arthur Mizener, and William Van O'Connor are among the contributors to this volume of essays on the nineteenth-century British novel. Each of the selections has been written expressly for this book and is published here for the first time.

There are a total of 20 essays, each by a different contributor. In addition, Rathburn, in an introductory essay, relates the nineteenth-century novel to that of the eighteenth century and Steinmann, in the concluding essay, discusses the nineteenth-century novel in relation to that of the present century.

The contributors, in addition to the two editors of the volume, and the novelists they discuss are the following: Charles Murrah, Jane Austen; Alan D Mckillop, Jane Austen; David Dasches, Walter Scott; Curtis Dahl, Edward Bulwer-Lytton; J. Y T. Greig, William Makepeace Thackeray; Douglas Bush, Charles Dickens; George H. Ford, Dickens; Melvin; R. Watson, the Brontes; Robert B. Heilman, Charlotte Bronte; Yvonne French, Elizabeth Gaskell; Bradford A. Booth, Anthony Trollope; Arthur Mizener, Anthony Trollope; Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot; Sumner J. Ferris, George Eliot; Wayne Burns, Charles Reade; Fabian Gudas, George Meredith; John Holloway, Thomas Hardy; Jacob Korg, George Gissing; William Van O'Connor, Samuel Burlter; W. Y. Tindall, Joseph Conrad. Although each essay is focused on a single novel or on one aspect of the novelist, all of them are written to give the reader sense of the novelist's whole achievement.

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From Laughter to Forgetting
A Source-Book of Czech Avant-Garde Discourses
Edited by Zuzana Ríhová and Peter Zusi
Karolinum Press, 2023
A comprehensive reader on the Czech literary avant-garde.
 
In recent years a prominent trend in the study of European modernism and the avant-garde has been increased attention to texts and traditions that have long stood in the shadow of the French, German, and British traditions that dominate the canon. Yet this more expansive view of European modernism and the avant-garde has been hindered by the limited range of texts available outside the original languages. This book addresses that problem by offering a wide-ranging selection of literary, theoretical, and documentary sources from one of the most dynamic and original European avant-garde traditions: that of the first Czechoslovak Republic and of the Bohemian lands. The Czech avant-garde is in many respects the ideal “alternative” avant-garde to present in detail to a wider readership: it tracks Central European developments and was often influential internationally while being deeply embedded in particular cultural dynamics that produced original forms. This volume returns interwar Czech avant-garde writings to their place as a firmly embedded component of the European avant-garde.
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From Many Gods to One
Divine Action in Renaissance Epic
Tobias Gregory
University of Chicago Press, 2006

Epic poets of the Renaissance looked to emulate the poems of Greco-Roman antiquity, but doing so presented a dilemma: what to do about the gods? Divine intervention plays a major part in the epics of Homer and Virgil—indeed, quarrels within the family of Olympian gods are essential to the narrative structure of those poems—yet poets of the Renaissance recognized that the cantankerous Olympians could not be imitated too closely. The divine action of their classical models had to be transformed to accord with contemporary tastes and Christian belief.

From Many Gods to One offers the first comparative study of poetic approaches to the problem of epic divine action. Through readings of Petrarch, Vida, Ariosto, Tasso, and Milton, Tobias Gregorydescribes the narrative and ideological consequences of the epic’s turn from pagan to Christian. Drawing on scholarship in several disciplines—religious studies, classics, history, and philosophy, as well as literature—From Many Gods to One sheds new light on two subjects of enduring importance in Renaissance studies: the precarious balance between classical literary models and Christian religious norms and the role of religion in drawing lines between allies and others.

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From Misa to Mise en Scène
Fra Francesc Moner’s Prototype of the Spanish Sacramental Theater of the Fifteenth Century
Peter Cocozzella
Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2020
As both layman and Franciscan friar, the Catalan writer known as Francesc Moner (ca 1463–1495) is one of the leading exponents of the bilingual (Catalan-Castilian) culture that flourished in Barcelona in the late 1400s. In his approach to Sepultura d’amor (Burial of Love), Moner’s longest poem, Peter Cocozzella focuses on the author’s ingenious version of a kind of parody that desacralizes but does not desecrate the celebration of the funeral Mass. Cocozzella discovers the aspects of Moner’s unconventional idea of a theater based on the dramatics of the monologue and on the transformation of the divine ritual into a human analogue of transubstantiation. This allegorical pattern validates the profile of the masterpiece in question as one of the earliest manifestations of the auto sacramental, the distinctive theatrical genre scripted in the language of Castile. The book includes the text of Sepultura and its translation. 
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From Mother and Daughter
Poems, Dialogues, and Letters of Les Dames des Roches
Madeleine and Catherine des Roches
University of Chicago Press, 2006
Among the best-known and most prolific French women writers of the sixteenth century, Madeleine (1520–87) and Catherine (1542–87) des Roches were celebrated not only for their uncommonly strong mother-daughter bond but also for their bold assertion of poetic authority for women in the realm of belles lettres. The Dames des Roches excelled in a variety of genres, including poetry, Latin and Italian translations, correspondence, prose dialogues, pastoral drama, and tragicomedy; collected in From Mother and Daughter are selections from their celebrated oeuvre, suffused with an engaging and enduring feminist consciousness.
 
Madeleine and Catherine spent their entire lives in civil war–torn Poitiers, where a siege of the city, vandalism, and desecration of churches fueled their political and religious commentary. Members of an elite literary circle that would inspire salon culture during the next century, the Dames des Roches addressed the issues of the day, including the ravages of religious civil wars, the weak monarchy, education for women, marriage and the family, violence against women, and the status of women intellectuals. Through their collaborative engagement in shared public discourse, both mother and daughter were models of moral, political, and literary agency.
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From the Berlin Journal
Max Frisch
Seagull Books, 2017
The daily journal of a giant of German literature,  touching subjects ranging from everyday life to the political and social conditions in East Germany as viewed from West Berlin.

Max Frisch (1911–91) was a giant of twentieth-century German literature. When Frisch moved into a new apartment in Berlin’s Sarrazinstrasse, he began keeping a journal, which he came to call the Berlin Journal. A few years later, he emphasized in an interview that this was by no means a “scribbling book,” but rather a book “fully composed.” The journal is one of the great treasures of Frisch’s literary estate, but the author imposed a retention period of twenty years from the date of his death because of the “private things” he noted in it. From the Berlin Journal now marks the first publication of excerpts from Frisch’s journal. Here, the unmistakable Frisch is back, full of doubt, with no illusions, and with a playfully sharp eye for the world. 

From the Berlin Journal pulls from the years 1946–49 and 1966–71. Observations about the writer’s everyday life stand alongside narrative and essayistic texts, as well as finely-drawn portraits of colleagues like Günter Grass, Uwe Johnson, Wolf Biermann, and Christa Wolf, among others. Its foremost quality, though, is the extraordinary acuity with which Frisch observed political and social conditions in East Germany while living in West Berlin. 
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A Fugitive from Utopia
The Poetry of Zbignew Herbert
Stanislaw Baranczak
Harvard University Press, 1987

The leading Polish poet still residing in his native land, Zbigniew Herbert as not been the subject of a book-length study in English until now. Stanislaw Baranczak, himself a poet, critic, and translator, emigrated from Poland only in 1981, and is therefore eminently qualified to supply a politico-cultural context for Herbert while describing and analyzing the texts and themes of his poems.

Herbert's poetry is based on permanent confrontation--the confrontation of Western tradition with the experience of a "barbarian" from Eastern Europe, of the classical past with the modern era, of cultural myth with a practical, empirical point of view. Baranczak illustrates these oppositions by examining, first, the complex relations between "disinheritance" and "heritage" as they appear in Herbert's work on various structural levels, from symbolic key words to lyrical characters; second, the forms and functions of Herbert's "unmasking metaphor"; third, his uses of irony; fourth, his ethical system, which enables him to be both ironist and moralist. Baranczak pays special attention to irony as the most conspicuous feature of Herbert's poetic method.

A Fugitive from Utopia makes Herbert's poetic ideas fully accessible to the general reader, and will also be of interest to students of Polish literature, of East European culture and society, and of modern poetry. Those who have already encountered Herbert's poetry in one of the several translations into English currently available will welcome this lucid explication of his work.

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Fugitive Objects
Sculpture and Literature in the German Nineteenth Century
Catriona MacLeod
Northwestern University Press, 2014

Winner of the 2014 Jean-Pierre Barricelli Prize for Best Book on Romanticism

In Fugitive Objects, Catriona MacLeod examines the question of why sculpture is both intensively discussed and yet rendered immaterial in German literature. She focuses on three forms of disappearance: sculpture’s vanishing as a legitimate art form at the beginning of the nineteenth century in German aesthetics, statues’ migration from the domain of high art into mass reproduction and popular culture, and sculpture’s dislodging and relocation into literary discourse. Through original readings of Clemens Brentano, Achim von Arnim, Adalbert Stifter, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, and others, MacLeod reveals that if sculpture has disappeared from much of nineteenth-century German literature and aesthetics, it is a vanishing act that paradoxically relocates the statue back onto another cultural pedestal, attesting to the powerful force of the medium.

 
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The Fulfillment of the Scriptures
Abraham, Moses, and Piers
Ruth W. Ames
Northwestern University Press, 1970
Ruth M. Ames’s The Fulfillment of Scriptures approaches Langland’s key medieval text, Piers Plowman, using critical literary methods developed in interdisciplinary programs that explore the intersections of religion and literature. Ames draws on the history of the development of Christian doctrine as she explores the ways that the allegory of Piers parallels the story of Jesus in Christian doctrine. Ames’s work offers a significantly new critical reading of Piers Plowman, influencing interpretations of medieval literature.
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The Fullness of Time
Temporalities of the Fifteenth-Century Low Countries
Matthew S. Champion
University of Chicago Press, 2017
The Low Countries were at the heart of innovation in Europe in the fifteenth century. Throughout this period, the flourishing cultures of the Low Countries were also wrestling with time itself. The Fullness of Time explores that struggle, and the changing conceptions of temporality that it represented and embodied showing how they continue to influence historical narratives about the emergence of modernity today.
 
The Fullness of Time asks how the passage of time in the Low Countries was ordered by the rhythms of human action, from the musical life of a cathedral to the measurement of time by clocks and calendars, the work habits of a guildsman to the devotional practices of the laity and religious orders. Through a series of transdisciplinary case studies, it explores the multiple ways that objects, texts and music might themselves be said to engage with, imply, and unsettle time, shaping and forming the lives of the inhabitants of the fifteenth-century Low Countries. Champion reframes the ways historians have traditionally told the history of time, allowing us for the first time to understand the rich and varied interplay of temporalities in the period.
 
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Further on, Nothing
Tadeusz Kantor’s Theatre
Michal Kobialka
University of Minnesota Press, 2009

A new encounter with the work of a master of avant-garde theatre

Tadeusz Kantor (1915–1990) was one of the twentieth century’s most innovative visual artists, stage directors, and theoreticians. His theatre productions and manifestos challenged the conventions of creating art in post–World War II culture and expanded the boundaries of Dada, surrealist, Constructivist, and happening theatre forms. Kantor’s most widely known productions—The Dead Class (1975), Wielopole, Wielopole (1980), Let the Artists Die (1985), and Today Is My Birthday (1990)—have had a profound impact on playwrights and artists who continue today to engage with his radical theatre.

In Further on, Nothing, Michal Kobialka explores Kantor’s theatre practice from the critical perspective of current debates about representation, memory, and history. He pursues the intriguing proposition that Kantor gave material form to a theatre practice that defined the very mode of postmodern operation and that many of its theoretical notions are still in circulation. According to Kobialka, Kantor’s theatre still offers an answer to reality rather than a portrayal of a utopian alternative. Further on, Nothing includes new translations of Kantor’s work, presented in conversation with Kobialka’s own theoretical analyses, to show us a Kantor who continues to offer—and deliver on—the promise of the avant-garde.
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Fury
Elfriede Jelinek
Seagull Books, 2022
A new play from Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek that deals with the 2015 terror attack on the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo’s offices in Paris.
 
In Greek mythology, it is Hera who blinds the hero Heracles, so that, in a fit of fury, he kills his own family. In the twenty-first century, the gods have another name. So did the three young men who stormed a magazine’s editorial office and a Jewish supermarket in Paris in January 2015 and murdered twelve people. The blind fury, however, remained and more virulent than ever, not least because the weapons were so much more effective.
 
In this raging text, arguably one of her darkest, Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek investigates topical political events in the context of enduring history and myths. Fury expresses itself not only multi-voiced and from the changing perspective of Islamist terrorists (and their special hatred of Jews), in the shape of furious German citizens, individual narcissistic humiliation, or brutal distribution battles around the globe. Rather, fury also appears as the motor that has driven people with a devastating force for centuries.
 
With her characteristic linguistic power, Jelinek articulates her own disconcertedness in the face of these crimes. In passing, she returns repeatedly to the contradiction between religious laws against representation and the deluge of images online, where movies of assassination, severed heads, and other atrocities are exhibited for millions to see. Fury is a compact grand epic that starts in primal times and attempts to describe the indescribable, relating the inexplicable in our times.
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Fuseli and the Modern Woman
Fashion, Fantasy, Fetishism
Edited by David Solkin
Paul Holberton Publishing, 2022
A catalog accompanying the first exhibition devoted to a fascinating group of drawings by one of eighteenth-century Europe’s most idiosyncratic, original, and controversial artists. 

Best known for his notoriously provocative painting The Nightmare, Anglo-Swiss painter Henry Fuseli (1741–1825) cultivated a reputation for eccentricity, with vividly stylized images of supernatural creatures, muscle-bound heroes, and damsels in distress. While these convinced some viewers of the greatness of his genius, others dismissed him as a charlatan, or as completely mad.

By bringing together more than fifty of his works, this volume offers unprecedented access to see one of the finest draftsmen of the Romantic period at his most innovative and exciting. Visitors to the show and readers of the lavishly illustrated catalog will further be invited to consider how Fuseli’s drawings of women, as products of the turbulent aftermath of the American and French Revolutions, speak to concerns about gender and sexuality that have never been more relevant than they are today.

The exhibition showcases drawings brought together from international collections, including the Kunsthaus Zürich, the Auckland Art Gallery in New Zealand, and other European and North American institutions.
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Futurity
Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past
Amir Eshel
University of Chicago Press, 2012
When looking at how trauma is represented in literature and the arts, we tend to focus on the weight of the past. In this book, Amir Eshel suggests that this retrospective gaze has trapped us in a search for reason in the madness of the twentieth century’s catastrophes at the expense of literature’s prospective vision. Considering several key literary works, Eshel argues in Futurity that by grappling with watershed events of modernity, these works display a future-centric engagement with the past that opens up the present to new political, cultural, and ethical possibilities—what he calls futurity.
 
Bringing together postwar German, Israeli, and Anglo-American literature, Eshel traces a shared trajectory of futurity in world literature. He begins by examining German works of fiction and the debates they spurred over the future character of Germany’s public sphere. Turning to literary works by Jewish-Israeli writers as they revisit Israel’s political birth, he shows how these stories inspired a powerful reconsideration of Israel’s identity. Eshel then discusses post-1989 literature—from Ian McEwan’s Black Dogs to J. M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year—revealing how these books turn to events like World War II and the Iraq War not simply to make sense of the past but to contemplate the political and intellectual horizon that emerged after 1989. Bringing to light how reflections on the past create tools for the future, Futurity reminds us of the numerous possibilities literature holds for grappling with the challenges of both today and tomorrow.
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