Dualism is a motif that runs through literature of all genres and historical contexts, inspiring argumentation at the highest level and showing the formation of ideas in association as a creative exchange. It arises with special pertinence in western literature since the Renaissance and Reformation. In Dualisms, noted scholar Ricardo J. Quinones considers four major intellectual encounters: Erasmus and Luther, Voltaire and Rousseau, Turgenev and Dostoevsky, and Sartre and Camus. These four instances, Quinones argues, are important for what they are and what they represent: major...

Foundation Sacrifice in Dante's "Commedia" is the first book to take an anthropological approach to the Divine Comedy, applying it to a previously unexplored dimension of Dante's great poem. Ricardo Quinones examines foundation sacrifice--the death of another that has become a parable for existence--as a unifying theme that connects the three parts of the poem. In the process, Quinones gives new life to the Purgatorio, treating it not only as a sequel but actually as a dramatic response--in revealing detail--to the Inferno. His motif allows him to...

Professor Quinones describes significant stages in the development of literary Modernism, redefining the period as extending from about 1900 to 1940, and beyond, and not as an entity centered on the 1920s.

Originally published in 1985.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the...

Era by era, from the writings of the classical Christian epoch up to East of Eden and Amadeus, from Philo to Finnegans Wake, Ricardo Quinones examines the contexts of a master metaphor of our culture. This brilliant work is the first comprehensive book on the Cain and Abel story.

"Ricardo Quinones takes us on a grand tour of Western civilization in his admirable book, which reveals the riches of the Cain-Abel story as it develops from its Biblical origin to Citizen Kane and Michel Tournier. This is cultural history and literary criticism of the first order, finely written,...

The division of European society and culture along a North/South axis was one of the most decisive and enduring developments in the modern world. In North/South, which completes a trilogy of works devoted to the study of the mind and body of Europe, Ricardo J. Quinones examines the momentous early modern origins of this division. Quinones focuses on four concepts connected with the Protestant Reformation whose emergence defines the rise of the North and the subjugation of the South: Christian liberty, skepticism, tolerance, and time. Tracing their influence through the political...