Paratexts are those liminal devices and conventions, both within and outside the book, that form part of the complex mediation between book, author, publisher and reader: titles, forewords, epigraphs and publishers' jacket copy are part of a book's private and public history. In this first English translation of Paratexts, Gérard Genette shows how the special pragmatic status of paratextual declaration requires a carefully calibrated analysis of their illocutionary force. With clarity, pre...

**The landmark history of France and French culture in the eighteenth century, a winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.“Robert Darnton has the inquisitiveness of an investigative reporter, the thoroughness of a rigorous scholar, and the sensitivity of a novelist.” —New Republic**When the apprentices of a Paris printing shop in the 1730s held a series of mock trials and then hanged all the cats they could lay their hands on, why did they find it so hilariously ...

More than half a century after its translation into English, Erich Auerbach's Mimesis remains a masterpiece of literary criticism. A brilliant display of erudition, wit, and wisdom, his exploration of how great European writers from Homer to Virginia Woolf depicted reality has taught generations how to read Western literature. This new expanded edition includes a substantial essay in introduction by Edward Said as well as an essay, never before translated into English, in which Auerbach re...

Isaiah Berlin's classic essay on Tolstoy - an exciting new edition with new criticism and a foreword.'The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.' This fragment of Archilochus, which gives this book its title, describes the central thesis of Isaiah Berlin's masterly essay on Tolstoy. There have been various interpretations of Archilochus' fragment; Isaiah Berlin has simply used it, without implying anything about the true meaning of the words, ...

A book which should appeal to both literary theorists and to readers of the novel, this study invites the reader to consider how the plot reflects the patterns of human destiny and seeks to impose a new meaning on life.

It was one of the most popular novels of the nineteenth century and Tolstoy called it "the greatest of all novels." Yet today Victor Hugo's Les Misérables is neglected by readers and undervalued by critics. In The Temptation of the Impossible one of the world's great novelists Mario Vargas Llosa helps us to appreciate the incredible ambition power and beauty of Hugo's masterpiece and in the process presents a humane vision of fiction as an alternative reality that can help us imagine ...

A distinguished collection of essays on language, literature, and philosophy from acclaimed scholar and critic George SteinerOn Difficulty is as provocative and relevant today as when its essays were first published. Ranging from critical topics such as the understanding of language to the meaning of meaning, inward speech to the relationship between erotic sensibility and linguistic convention, these eight essays posit myriad topics for exploration and di...

INTRODUCING guide to the cult author, semiologist and analyzer of advertising, Roland Barthes. Roland Barthes is best known as a semiologist, a student of the science of signs. This sees human beings primarily as communicating animals, and looks at the way they use language, clothes, gestures, hair styles, visual images, shapes and colour to convey to one another their tastes, their emotions, their ideal self-image and the values of their society. Introducing Barthes brilliantly elucidates...

In 1857, following the publication of Madame Bovary**, Flaubert was charged with having committed an "outrage to public morality and religion.**" Dominick LaCapra, an intellectual historian with wide-ranging literary interests, here examines this remarkable trial. LaCapra draws on material from Flaubert's correspondence, the work of literary critics, and Jean-Paul Sartre's analysis of Flaubert. LaCapra maintains that Madame Bovary is at t...

Professor Albérès in this well-ordered volume traces through successive works the elaboration of various concepts now linked to French Existentialism—anguish, nausea, hypocrisy, lucidity, consciousness, conformity, commitment, ethical values, situation, etc.Translated from the French by Wade Baskin.

The novel is the most important form of Western art. It aims to represent the totality of life; it is the flagship that literature sends out against the systematic thought of science and philosophy. Indebted to Lukács and Bakhtin, to Auerbach and Ian Watt, Guido Mazzoni’s Theory of the Novel breaks new ground, building a historical understanding of how the novel became the modern book of life: one of the best representations of our experience of the world.The genre arose d...

From eminent critic Peter Brooks, an exploration of the modern preoccupation with identity"We know that it matters crucially to be able to say who we are, why we are here, and where we are going," Peter Brooks writes in Enigmas of Identity. Many of us are also uncomfortably aware that we cannot provide a convincing account of our identity to others or even ourselves. Despite or because of that failure, we keep searching for identity, making it up, trying t...