Both Claire and her husband, M. d'Albe, are virtuous and upstanding, and Frederic, her husband's nineteen-year-old adopted son and factory assistant, is honest and noble-hearted. But in the beautiful and secluded Loire Valley, the friendship between Claire and Frederic gradually develops into a forbidden passion.

Claire d'Albe (1799) was audacious in its day for its representation of adulterous love as a positive act of self-fulfillment. As the volume editor, Margaret Cohen, indicates, Sophie Cottin's best-selling work of sentimentalism highlights the tension in Enlightenment...

The girl Beauty and the boy Love are betrothed to each other as children. But Beauty violates the custom of the tribe by falling in love with him, and Love must undergo the trials of a journey to the Land of the Heart to prove himself worthy--a journey to realization of both his and Beauty's true nature.

The Turkish verse romance Beauty and Love, written in 1783 by ?eyh Galip, head of an Istanbul center of Rumi's order of the Whirling Dervishes, is an innovative interpretation of the Islamic love tale as a story of the action of God's qualities in the world. With its stunning...

Through literary works and public appearances, Edith Bruck, born 1932 in Hungary, has devoted her life to bearing witness to what she experienced in the Nazi concentration camps. In 1954 she settled in Rome and is today the most prolific writer of Holocaust narrative in Italian. The book is composed in two parts. "Letter to My Mother"--an imaginary dialogue between Bruck and her mother, who died in Auschwitz--probes the question of self-identity, the pain of loss and displacement, the power of language to help recover the past, and the ultimate impossibility of that recovery. "Traces," a...