Is Shakespeare any good?

Sample

Sandra Macpherson

In this unconventional study of the 18th century novel, Macpherson (English, the Ohio State University) argues that accident and injury, rather than volition and intention, are key elements in the early realist novel's view of personhood and belonging. She offers fresh readings of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, demonstrating that the liberal counter-tradition which she explores emerges from 18th century novels based on questions about agency and from contemporary developments in laws of 'strict liability.'

Sample

Wilhelm Dilthey

"This is the fifth volume in a six-volume translation of the major writings of Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911), a philosopher and historian of culture who has had a significant, and continuing, influence on twentieth-century Continental philosophy and in a broad range of scholarly disciplines. In addition to his landmark works on the theories of history and the human sciences, Dilthey made important contributions to hermeneutics and phenomenology, aesthetics, psychology, and the methodology of the social sciences. This volume presents Dilthey's principal writings on aesthetics and the philosophical understanding of poetry, as well as representative essays of literary criticism. The essay "The Imagination of the Poet" (also known as his Poetics) is his most sustained attempt to examine the philosophical bearings of literature in relation to psychological and historical theory. Also included are "The Three Epochs of Modern Aesthetics and its Present Task," "Fragments for a Poetics," and two final essays discussing Goethe and Hḻderlin. The latter are drawn from Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung, a volume that was acclaimed on publication as a classic of literary criticism and that continues to be a model for the geistesgeschichtliche approach to literary history."-- Publisher description.

Sample

Thomas Keenan

The book is driven by a sense that literary and theoretical questions, and the ideas or concepts they appeal to or provoke, play a critical role in the way we think about and experience politics, but that literary critics and theorists do far too little to understand those links or make them matter outside a very restricted sphere. The author seeks to harness this specialized discourse in order to consider what ethical and political thinking might learn from literature and its theorists; from the difficult burdens that literature places on its readers and the unusual transformations it can enact in our language, the very medium of our shared life.

Sample

Dong Daxi bian

The Prophet is a book of 26 poetic essays written in English in 1923 by the Lebanese-American artist, philosopher and writer Khalil Gibran. In the book, the prophet Almustafa who has lived in the foreign city of Orphalese for 12 years is about to board a ship which will carry him home. He is stopped by a group of people, with whom he discusses many issues of life and the human condition. The book is divided into chapters dealing with love, marriage, children, giving, eating and drinking, work, joy and sorrow, houses, clothes, buying and selling, crime and punishment, laws, freedom, reason and passion, pain, self-knowledge, teaching, friendship, talking, time, good and evil, prayer, pleasure, beauty, religion, and death.