Genesis Rabbah, the earliest rabbinic commentary on the book of Genesis, was composed in Roman Palestine around the fifth century CE and continued to be studied throughout medieval and modern times. In this volume, an international team of scholars explores the literary formation and textual transmission of this work as well as the historical, cultural, religious, and political contexts in which it was composed. -- From back cover.

Anarchism is Not Enough is a manifesto against systematic thinking, a difficult book by a famously difficult writer. For the scope of its critical imagination, it is the most radical work of Laura Riding's early period. This period extends from the end of 1925, when she left America for Europe and Robert Graves, to 1939, the year she returned to America, renounced any further writing of poetry, and soon after married Schuyler Jackson. Published in 1928, when Riding was twenty-seven, Anarchism is a kind of early autobiographia literaria . Long out of print and now available for the first time in paperback, this is one of the most imaginative and daring works of literary theory ever written by a modernist figure. Lisa Samuels's edition sets the work in its historical context and elucidates its central intellectual difficulties. Her introduction and notes are a valuable aid to an understanding of Riding's work.

"The author has constructed a chronicle of the life of Ilia Zdanevich (known as Iliazd), an important writer and artist in Russian and French modernism, and enriched this chronicle with commentary on the process of writing a biography and a discussion of the twentieth-century avant-garde. The author originally researched Iliazd with the help of his widow many years ago, and she revisited her notes taken at that time with an experienced scholar's critical distance"--

This is a reissue of Professor Stern's distinguished study of German prose from the death of Goethe to the heyday of the Wilhelminian Empire. Professor Stern argues that nineteenth-century German prose is characterized by a particular combination of the prophetic and the archaic, of the existential and the parochial, and is only partially and sometimes not at all related to the social and political realities of the age. In this sense, German literature of the period stands apart from the main stream of European realism and has, for that reason, received little attention from the common reader outside its own country. The book contains studies of Goethe, Grillparzer, Büchner, Schopenhauer, Heine, Stifter and Fontane, all of whom re-interpreted the world from points of view other than that of the common and commonly explored social certainties of their age. Consequently, Professor Stern suggests alternative criteria to the common notion of realism with which to asses their work.

126p hardback, purple dustjacket, index, nice fresh copy, this copy published in the year 1969

In this book Darko Suvin discerns the shape of an emerging post-Individualist drama which may be to our age what the theatre of Shakespeare and Ibsen was to theirs. Suvin establishes the principles of composition of a crucial group of modern plays. He examines some major attempts and failures to replace Ibsen's "Individualist" theatre with this new "Collectivist" drama. Two particularly important and original contributions to the subject are Suvin's chapters on the Happenings in the USA and on the Paris Commune Theatre Law. The book focuses on the work of Brecht, both because of the importance of his plays and because of what Professor Suvin sees as Brecht's central position today in any cultural critique that refuses to despair.

""The echo of the stone/ where I carved the [Buddha's] honorable footprints/ reaches the Heaven, [...]". This book presents the transcription, translation, and analysis of Chinese (753 AD) and Japanese inscriptions (end of the 8th century AD) found on two stones now in the possession of the Yakushiji temple in Nara. All these inscriptions praise the footprints of Buddha, and more exactly their carvings in the stone. The language of the Japanese inscription, which consists of twenty-one poems, reflects the contemporary dialect of Nara. Its writing system shows a quite unique trait, being practically monophonic. The book is richly illustrated by photos of the temple and of the inscriptions"--

Originally published in 1952, this book provides a detailed critical analysis of 40 German lyrics. All the poems analysed are reprinted in full, so that criticism may be checked by reference to the original text. The book therefore provides a unique introduction to German poetry from the Age of Enlightenment to that of Rilke, without burdening the reader with too much details about minor figures.

Poetica 19 Peter Levi's inaugural lecture as Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford discusses the lamentation of the dead in written and oral poetry from Homer and the Bible to recent times, by way of Shakespeare, Milton and the Serbian epics. He puts forward the view that `The Lament for Arthur O'Leary', composed by his widow Eileen O'Connell, is among the finest examples of the lamentation of the dead, and the greatest poem written in these islands in the whole of the eighteenth century. The text of Peter Levi's lecture is followed by Eilís Dillon's translation of the poem.

Zusammenfassung: "Gustav Mahler and Julius Korngold, critic at the highly influential newspaper Neue Freie Presse, had much in common. He, along with his fellow journalists, were close to and supportive of Mahler. For the first time, their essays on the man and his music are made available in English. The essays on Mahler and his time at Vienna's Imperial Opera were extensive and well informed. Julius Korngold had replaced Eduard Hanslick as principal music critic. Both Korngold and Mahler shared a common Moravian Jewish background, born in 1860 and both students of Anton Bruckner. Mahler also took an early interest in Korngold's son, the child prodigy Erich Wolfgang Korngold. The paper was Jewish owned, and Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist Movement, was its cultural editor and Julius Korngold's employer. Claims that Mahler was driven out of a Vienna by an antisemitic press are wrong given Mahler's support by the most powerful critic of the day writing in the Empire's most influential newspaper. Importantly, the essays also reveal a world of Modernism that includes Mahler's innovations at the opera, and Modernism in music before departures from tonality. This book will interest Mahler enthusiasts, musicians and cultural historians. Mahler was claimed by Arnold Schoenberg as his musical hero, firmly placing him in the Modernist camp. Yet Korngold was universally seen as an archconservative and his relationship with Mahler was personal and his understanding profound. The book addresses the question of "Mahler, the first Modernist or the last Romantic?""--

This groundbreaking new work is the first full critical edition and English translation of the Hebrew book Sefer ha-Pardes [The Book of the Orchard], written at the end of the thirteenth century by the Provençal Jewish author Jedaiah ha-Penini. It is purportedly an example of musar: a compilation of wise epigrams and meshalim [parables] that teach moral lessons on different topics, such as the service of God, friendship, the deceitfulness of the world, medicine, logic, music, magic, and poetry. However, it is in reality a compendium of sayings that reveal the author's personal views and feelings on a variety of religious topics, secular sciences, and their practitioners. David Torollo presents a fluent and illuminating English-Hebrew parallel text based on four sixteenth-century witnesses: three manuscripts and a printed edition. A rigorous study accompanies and contextualises the Hebrew work, exploring Sefer ha-Pardes's transmission and reception in different places over time; its structure and content; its place in the intellectual environment and literary tradition of Provence; and possible lines of enquiry for future research. This essential new work offers a significant contribution to scholarship in the field of Medieval Hebrew Hispano-Provencal literature.

Originally published in 1971, this book outlines the period of Germany's belated industrial revolution and suggests why German literature does not, before the 1880s, contribute to the tradition of European realism. It considers the alternatives to realism offered in three genres of drama, poetry and prose fiction.