Four hundred years since its publication, Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote continues to inspire and to challenge its readers. The universal and timeless appeal of the novel, however, has distanced its hero from its author and its author from his own life and the time in which he lived. The discussion of the novel’s Catholic identity, therefore, is based on a reading that returns Cervantes’s hero to Cervantes’s text and Cervantes to the events t ...
The Political Fiction of Ward Just: Class, Theories of Representation, and Imagining a Ruling Elite uses three theoretical frameworks of representation—literary, political, and diplomatic—to demonstrate how the upper-class status of the ruling elites in Ward Just’s political fiction influences the way they govern. He illustrates how Just’s ruling elites develop a coherent “upper class” ...
The practice of selling one's tale of woe to make a buck has long been a part of American culture. <i>The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-Century America</i> is a powerful cultural history of how ordinary Americans crafted and sold their stories of hardship and calamity during the nineteenth century. Ann Fabian examines the tales of beggars, convicts, ex-slaves, prisoners of the Confederacy, and others to ex ...
Henri Michaux defies common critical definition. Critics have compared his work to such diverse artists as Kafka, Goya, Swift, Klee, and Beckett. Allen Ginsberg called Michaux «genius,» and Jorge Luis Borges wrote that Michaux’s work «is without equal in the literature of our time.» This anthology contains substantial selections from almost all of Michaux’s major works, most never before published in English, and allows readers to explore the ha ...
This is the first anthology of nature writing that celebrates California, the most geographically diverse state in the union. Readers—be they naturalists or armchair explorers—will find themselves transported to California's many wild places in the company of forty noted writers whose works span more than a century. Divided into sections on California's mountains, hills and valleys, deserts, coast, and elements (earth, wind, and fire), ...
“It's good to have a Goffstein,” said The New York Times Book Review . Here's something even better—twenty-six of M. B. Goffstein’s best-known, and best-loved, books for children and adults. Groundbreaking when first published, and perhaps more resonant today than ever, Goffstein’s work champions the value of simplicity, nature, self-reliance, spiritual connections, and living a creative life. With humor and insight, Goffstein enlar ...
