This is a critical introduction to Dostoyevsky's work Professor of Peace concentrates on the four major novels, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Devils and The Brothers Karamazov. He analyses them in detail, paying particular attention to theme, interprets complexities of structure and characterisation, and defines Dostoyevsky's literary achievement. His arguments are reinforced by extensive quotation in English.

The purpose of these notes is to give a geometrical treatment of generalized homology and cohomology theories.

Comprises texts from the American colonial period, which bear witness to the extraordinary diversity of writing at this time.

This is one of the first studies to treat Valery's theory and practice of poetry together and is the first full-length study of his poetry in English. Discussion of his ideas on poetic composition leads to a detailed analysis of the principal poetry: the long term poem La Jeune Parque and all the poems in the main collection. While serving as a step-by-step introduction to Valery's poetic achievement, the argument is not merely neutral; it elicits and comments on his little-known concept of 'Voice', now seen increasingly to be central. This is not simply the acoustic or musical effect of one...

This book is a comprehensive study of the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre. As well as examining the drama and the fiction, the book analyses the evolution of his philosophy, explores his concern with ethics, psychoanalysis, literary theory, biography and autobiography and includes a lengthy section on the still much-neglected study of Flaubert, L'Idiot de la famille. One important aim of the book is to rebut the charges made by many theorists and philosophers by revealing that Sartre is in fact a major source for concepts such as the decentred subject and detotalised truth and for the revolt...

When it was published this was the full, post-glasnost critical biography of Mikhail Bulgakov (1891 1940), a great comic writer whose works are regarded as modern classics. This account of Bulgakov's career as playwright and prose-writer examines all his works in the context of the changing demands put upon artists in the Soviet Union of the 1920s and 1930s, who were faced with the choice of integrity at the price of silence, or publication and production at the price of conformty with the totalitarian state. Lesley Milne traces through Bulgakov's career an ethical concept of the writer's...

Professor Christian is concerned to show what is characteristic about Tolstoy's fiction in this study.

Boileau has traditionally been regarded as the spokesman of French neo-classicism, but some elements of scholarship have discounted the importance of neo-classical doctrine in general and of Boileau's particular contribution to it. Many critical approaches have stressed instead the liveliness and wit of Boileau's poems, his love of language and his passionate temperament. Mr Pocock uses these critical approaches to demonstrate in detail how Boileau's verve, love of contrasts, and essentially dramatic imagination animate the major poems. But he also argues that such approaches do not in...

This 1982 book was the first major critical study of Jaroslav Ha ek and his most important literary creation, The Good Soldier vejk. For many people Ha ek's book is simply extremely funny. Cecil Parrott begins from the point of view that a closer examination of the conditions under which the book was written reveal it to be a much deeper work than it appears on the surface: a tragic as well as a comic masterpiece. A leading authority on Ha ek, Parrott wrote the definitive biography, The Bad Bohemian, and translated the unexpurgated version of vejk and many of Ha ek's short stories. This book...

Among seventeenth-century classical French writers La Rochefoucauld owes his renown to his maxims and La Bruyere to his stylised portraits, or caracteres. This book starts from the basic assumption that both writers were 'moralists', and as such were concerned with a universal picture of man and society within the limitations of nature and reason. The two moralists are studied separately. Professor de Mourgues stresses their individual characteristics, and the complexity of their views. She draws attention to the problems of literary diction they had to face, and comments on the artistic...