Who has the right to speak about trauma? As cultural products, narratives of social suffering paradoxically release us from responsibility while demanding that we examine our own connectedness to the circumstances that produce suffering. As a result, the text's act of "speaking havoc" rebounds in unsettling ways.

Speaking Havoc investigates how literary and cinematic fictions intervene in the politics and reception of social suffering. Amitav Ghosh's modernist novel The Shadow Lines (1988), A Fine Balance (1995) by Rohinton Mistry, the short stories of Saadat...

The cult of the female breast in contemporary American and European society is as pervasive as it is notorious. Our current fascination merely updates a long-standing obsession with the breast, which over the past twenty years has also become a subject of scholarly attention. Most historians and cultural theorists have focused on England and France, with virtually all research starting from the simple assumption that the breast is a signifier of the feminine and the female. With Missing the Breast, Simon Richter uses the texts of Enlightenment-era Germany to challenge that...

Winner of the 2009 International Conference on Romanticism's Jean-Pierre Barricelli Award for the best book in Romanticism studies

As the mental faculty that mediates between self and world, mind and body, the senses and the intellect, imagination is indispensable for modern models of subjectivity. From Rene Descartes's Meditations to the aesthetic and philosophical systems of the Romantic period, to think about the subject necessarily means to address the problem of imagination. In close readings of Descartes, Kant, Fichte, Hardenberg (Novalis) and Coleridge, and with a sustained...

Winner of the 2009 International Conference on Romanticism's Jean-Pierre Barricelli Award for the best book in Romanticism studies

As the mental faculty that mediates between self and world, mind and body, the senses and the intellect, imagination is indispensable for modern models of subjectivity. From Rene Descartes's Meditations to the aesthetic and philosophical systems of the Romantic period, to think about the subject necessarily means to address the problem of imagination. In close readings of Descartes, Kant, Fichte, Hardenberg (Novalis) and Coleridge, and with a sustained...

The destructive power of obsessive love was a defining subject of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian literature. In Febris Erotica, Sobol argues that Russian writers were deeply preoccupied with the nature of romantic relationships and were persistent in their use of lovesickness not simply as a traditional theme but as a way to address pressing philosophical, ethical, and ideological concerns through a recognizable literary trope. Sobol examines stereotypes about the damaging effects of romantic love and offers a short history of the topos of lovesickness in Western...

The destructive power of obsessive love was a defining subject of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian literature. In Febris Erotica, Sobol argues that Russian writers were deeply preoccupied with the nature of romantic relationships and were persistent in their use of lovesickness not simply as a traditional theme but as a way to address pressing philosophical, ethical, and ideological concerns through a recognizable literary trope. Sobol examines stereotypes about the damaging effects of romantic love and offers a short history of the topos of lovesickness in Western...

The Tooth that Nibbles at the Soul brings together Marshall Brown's new and previously published writings on literature and music. These essays engage questions that are central to the development of literature, music, and the arts in the period from Romanticism at the end of the eighteenth century to the avant-garde movements of the early twentieth, a period in which the modern evolution of the arts is coupled with a rise in the significance of music as artistic form.

With a special focus on lyric poetry and canonical composers including Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, and...

The Tooth that Nibbles at the Soul brings together Marshall Brown's new and previously published writings on literature and music. These essays engage questions that are central to the development of literature, music, and the arts in the period from Romanticism at the end of the eighteenth century to the avant-garde movements of the early twentieth, a period in which the modern evolution of the arts is coupled with a rise in the significance of music as artistic form.

With a special focus on lyric poetry and canonical composers including Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, and...