In the eighteenth century, antiquaries - wary of the biases of philosophers, scientists, politicians, and historians'used old objects to establish what they claimed was a true account of history. But just what could these small, fragmentary, frequently unidentifiable things, whose origins were unknown and whose worth or meaning was not ......
Avidly Reads is a series of short books about how culture makes us feel. Founded in 2012 by Sarah Blackwood and Sarah Mesle, Avidly-an online magazine supported by the Los Angeles Review of Books-specializes in short-form critical essays devoted to thinking and feeling. Avidly Reads is an exciting new series featuring books that are part memoir, ......
In Red Modernism, Mark Steven asserts that modernism was highly attunedand aesthetically responsiveto the overall spirit of communism. He considers the maturation of American poetry as a longitudinal arc, one that roughly followed the rise of the USSR through the Russian Revolution and its subsequent descent into ......
An indispensable collection that re-examines what it means to belong in the world. "Where are you from?" The word cosmopolitan was first used as a way of evading exactly this question, when Diogenes the Cynic declared himself a "kosmo-polites," or citizen of the world. Cosmopolitanism displays two impulses-on the one hand, a detachment from ......
An encyclopedic dictionary along the lines of Voltaire's classic Dictionnaire Philosophique, Metaphors of Mind provides an in-depth look at the myriad ways in which Enlightenment writers used figures of speech to characterise the mind. Drawn from Brad Pasanek's massive online archive, http://metaphorized.net, this volume constitutes a veritable ......
Renowned as the creator of the detective story and a master of horror, the author of ''The Red Mask of Death,'' ''The Black Cat,'' and ''The Murders of the Rue Morgue,'' Edgar Allan Poe seems to have derived his success from suffering and to have suffered from his success. ''The Raven'' and ''The Tell-Tale Heart'' have been read as signs of his ......
Can computer games be great literature? Do the rapidly evolving and culturally expanding genres of digital literature mean that the narrative mode of discourse--novels, films, television series--is losing its dominant position in our culture? Is it necessary to define a new aesthetics of cyborg textuality? In Cybertext, Espen Aarseth explores the ......
How did creative genius develop in tandem with the criminalization of Blackness in the early United States? In Criminal Genius in African American and US Literature, 1793-1845, Erin Forbes uncovers a model of racialized, collective agency in American literature and culture. Identifying creative genius in the figure of the convict, the zombie, the ......
Examines the paradoxes inherent in the search for symbolic immortality, arguing that there is only one truly serious literary problem: the transmission of texts to posterity.
