Available in English for the first time, this is a collection of Adorno's essays on such writers as Mann, Bloch, Holderlin, Kare Kraust, Sigfried Kracauer, Goethe, Benjamin and Stefan George. Also included are Adorno's reflections on a variety of subjects: literary titles, the physical qualities of books, political commitment in literature, the light-hearted and the serious in art, and the use of foreign words in writing, to name a few.

From the distinguished polymath George Steiner comes a profound and illuminating vision of the inseparability of Western philosophy and its living language. With his hallmark forceful discernment, George Steiner presents in The Poetry of Thought his magnum opus: an examination of more than two millennia of Western culture, staking out his claim for the essential oneness of great thought and great style. Sweeping yet precise, moving from essential detail to bracing illustration, Steiner spans the entire history of philosophy in the West as it entwines with literature, finding that, as Sartre stated, in all philosophy there is “a hidden literary prose.” “The poetic genius of abstract thought,” Steiner believes, “is lit, is made audible. Argument, even analytic, has its drumbeat. It is made ode. What voices the closing movements of Hegel’s Phenomenology better than Edith Piaf’s non de non, a twofold negation which Hegel would have prized? This essay is an attempt to listen more closely.”

The books in this series help students aged 12 and over understand the present political, social and economic situation in the Middle East, by exploring modern historical events in the region. This book examines why hoped-for economic, social and political reforms did not materialize after the 1991 Gulf War.

"Macy offers a rare and fascinating glimpse into the journey of women's rights through the lens of women in sports during the pivotal decade of the 1920s. With elegant prose, poignant wit, and fascinating primary sources, Macy explores the many hurdles presented to female athletes as they stormed the field, stepped up to bat, and won the right to compete in sports. Featuring bold and talented heroines, this book documents how the social issues and morals of the decade--from politics to segregation to the media--helped shape the changing narratives around women and alter the course of history entirely. It is a fascinating window into a rich and seldom explored history, and also a topical reminder of the many discussions surrounding femininity and the role of women that continue today."--Amazon.com

"A young Jewish boy strolls through Vienna and witnesses acts of anti-Semitism during the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah. At night he dreams of a superhero, Judah Maccabee, who appears to defend Vienna's Jews. When he awakes, he knows there will be no Maccabean rescue and he weeps. Years pass, the boy, now an old man, returns to Vienna and sees the Jewish community and the Temple have been restored. He looks for the eternal light in his Temple and can't find it. Then suddenly it becomes clear to him: The light was there all the time; it was in his own heart"--

"A tribute to Abraham Cahan, founder of a prominent Yiddish language newspaper whose discussion of everything from voting rights to baseball offered crucial guidance to Jewish immigrants"--

Two central themes run through this new collection of authoritative and undogmatic essays: the Jewish experience and that of the work of art as a toy to be used for dreaming and playing rather than as a window to the world. The collection includes three essays on the Bible, as well as pieces devoted to Twelfth Night, Rembrandt's self-portraits, Tristram Shandy, Kafka's stories and aphorisms, Borges, Kierkegaard, and painter Andrez Jackowski. The title essay examines the relationship of the artists' works and their ideas, and the book concludes with personal meditations on memory, the Holocaust, Jewishness, and being a writer-teacher.

Rabbi Isaac ben Abraham was a little-known scholar from the heretical Jewish group, the Karaites, who lived during the late 16th century in Troki, a suburb of Vilna (Vilnius), which by turns was in Poland or Lithuania. In 1593, the last year of his life, he wrote an incisive, cogent polemic against Christianity, which over the centuries has had an impact in Christian and Jewish circles that far exceeds what might have been predicted based on its obscure origins. A kind of underground, samizdat classic of religious criticism, Rabbi Isaac's critique of Christianity has been translated into Spanish, German, Latin, Yiddish, Ladino, and English, among other languages, and has influenced English deism, reform Judaism, the beginnings of Higher Criticism and the quest for the historical Jesus, and even Christian evangelical outreach programs that exist to this day. Now historian and philosopher Richard Popkin has edited a critique of Christianity, originally published in 1813 by a 19th-century Harvard graduate named George Bethune English, which includes the first publication in English of a central portion of Rabbi Isaac's text. The book was part of the discussion surrounding the founding of Unitarianism in New England. Popkin provides a fascinating commentary that notes many points of historical interest involving this unusual work. For example, Voltaire on a visit to England in 1724 learned of the work from an associate of the Reverend Anthony Collins, an English deist. The work was also used in debates about the merits of Christianity between Unitarian minister Joseph Priestly and Anglo-Jewish theologian David Levi. German scholars Hermann Samuel Reimarus and Ephraim Gotthold Lessing referred to the work in their early publications initiating the Higher Criticism movement examining the historical origins of Christianity. And the work also had an influence on Abraham Geiger, the founder of Reform Judaism; on David Deutsch, the defender of Orthodox Judaism; and on Evangelical Christian leader Hermann Strack of Berlin, whose use of excerpts from Rabbi Isaac's work can still be found in Evangelical Christian literature today.Anyone interested in philosophy of religion or the history of dialogue between Christians and Jews will find this work to be of great value.

Moments of royal succession, which punctuate the Stuart era (1603-1714), occasioned outpourings of literature. Writers, including most of the major figures of the seventeenth century from Jonson, Daniel, and Donne to Marvell, Dryden, and Behn, seized upon these occasions: to mark the transition of power; to reflect upon the political structures and values of their nation; and to present themselves as authors worthy of patronage and recognition. This volume of essays explores this important category of early modern writing. It contends that succession literature warrants attention as a distinct category: appreciated by contemporaries, acknowledged by a number of scholars, but never investigated in a coherent and methodical manner, it helped to shape political reputations and values across the period. Benefiting from the unique database of such writing generated by the AHRC-funded Stuart Successions Project, the volume brings together a distinguished group of authors to address a subject which is of wide and growing interest to students both of history and of literature. It illuminates the relation between literature and politics in this pivotal century of English political and cultural history. Interdisciplinary in scope, the volume will be indispensable to scholars of early modern British literature and history as well as undergraduates and postgraduates in both fields

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.