Lucretius's shadow is long and extends across the Humanities. Bringing together essays by scholars at the top of their field, this book examines the relationship between Lucretius and modernity. Nuanced and passionate, these essays offer an account of what is at stake when we claim Lucretius for modernity.

Though they fail, by design, to live up to conventional expectations of mythic heroes, antiheroes are not necessarily "failures." They display different kinds of courage more in tune with our time and our needs:...

For years, Helene Cixous has been writing down fragments of her dreams immediately after awaking. In Dream I Tell You, she collects fifty from the past ten years. Cixous's accounts of her dreamscapes...

"Professor Jones' book uniquely fills a huge hole in gender studies in the Renaissance. Its easy clarity of argument, its scrupulous care for detail, its just plain good story telling, and its theoretical sophistication make it an obvious candidate for the status of standard work." --Maureen Quilligan

.." full of fine insights... a fine addition to a growing body of work on Renaissance women writers." --Renaissance Quarterly

"In this forceful and perceptive study... Jones has fused gyno- and gender criticism superbly and produced one of the most important works on the European...

This book takes a new look at the place occupied by medieval Spanish epic within European folk and literary tradition. Thomas Montgomery traces the origins of key parts of most known medieval Spanish epics to an ancient myth. He shows how the myth of the initiation of the young warrior, shown by Georges Dumezil to be fundamental to the belief systems of widely distributed Indo-European peoples, was variously adapted to shape the action of texts including the Siete Infantes de Lara, the Mocedades de Rodrigo, and the Poema de Mio Cid, in which it accounts for the...

From Alexandre Dumas to Raymond Chandler, Martin Green examines adventure stories and their role in spreading the ideology of the modern nation-state.

Seven Types of Adventure Tale studies widely read and influential adventure tales of the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries in the respectable literary forms. Some of the authors considered are Dumas, Scott, Defoe, Cooper, Verne, Buchan, Kipling, Twain, and Chandler. These stories, though adapted and copied innumerable times and read in their native languages and in translation throughout the Western world, have been...

This books aim is to introduce the English reader to the major Swiss novelist.

This book is a compilation of scholarly articles on a wide variety of subjects pertaining to the cultures of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. Nordic Experiences discusses music, art, literature, folkore, and the social fabric of past and present to offer the reader a many-faceted image of what the term Scandinavia stands for today.

There are now some 12-13 million people of Nordic descent living in the United States, and their culture has played a part in shaping the American experience. The cultural contacts and exchanges between the United States and the...

Some works of philosophy also stand as significant contributions to literature, and some works of literature have profoundly influenced philosophy. Written expressly for high school and college students, this reference insightfully introduces ten widely studied works of philosophical literature. Individual chapters discuss Plato's Republic, Augustine's Confessions, Dante's Divine Comedy, More's Utopia, Voltaire's Candide, Goethe's Faust, Kierkegaard's Either/Or, Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Huxley's Brave New World,...