Informed by work in both classical philosophy and performance studies, this book argues that Stoicism infused the theatrical culture of early modern England. Plays written during this period instruct audiences to cultivate their virtue, self-awareness, and creativity in keeping with Stoic practice.
In The Novel in the Age of Disintegration, Kate Holland shows that Dostoevsky aimed to use the form of the novel as a means of depicting the disintegration caused by various crises in Russian society in the 1860s.
What makes characters seem real? This book explores the ways Tolstoy and Dostoevsky created the illusion of autonomous characters, through techniques that paradoxically hindered the writers’ ambitions for the novel as a genre.
The book advances an original and provocative argument about the formation, career, and legacies of Vladimir Nabokov, for whom artistic and moral acts served as testaments to free will.
Lindsey Stewart wades into unease about how Black southern joy is portrayed by analyzing work by Zora Neale Hurston. Stewart theorizes the politics of joy, a refusal of the neo-abolitionism that would reduce southern Black life to tragedy or social death.
Focusing on interwar Hebrew and Yiddish writers, Allison Schachter illuminates how women authors leveraged prose fiction to challenge the patriarchal norms of Jewish textual authority, reconceptualize Jewish cultural belonging, and contribute to Jewish literary modernity.
Tsvetaeva’s Orphic Journeys in the Worlds of the Word explores the rich theme of the myth of Orpheus as master narrative for poetic inspiration and creative survival in the life and work of Marina Tsvetaeva.
Queer Tidalectics investigates how Anglophone writers James Baldwin, Jackie Kay, Thomas Glave, and Shani Mootoo employ the trope of fluidity to articulate a Black queer diasporic aesthetics.
An Ideological Death: Suicide in Israeli Literature examines literary challenges to Israel’s national narratives. Many prominent Israeli fiction writers use the prism of suicide to confront the centrality of the army, the mythology of the “new Jew,” the vision of Tel Aviv as the first Israeli city, and the very process by which a nation’s history is constructed.
This book examines the interaction of literature and radical social movement, exploring how to address the limitations of contemporary anarchist politics through attentive engagement with Native women’s literatures. The author argues that anarchists must shift the paradigm that another world is possible to one that sees other worlds here.
