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From small questions of taste to large questions concerning the nature of existence, intellectual debate takes up much of our time. This book examines what most commentators ignore: the role of temperament and taste in the forming of aesthetic and ideological opinions. In provocative chapters about reading and writing, about the relation between life and literature, about knowledge and certainty, about God and death, and about a gradual disaffection with the literary scene, the book demonstrates that opposing points of view are based more on innate predilections than on disinterested thought or analysis. Not beholden to any fashionable theory or political agenda, the book interrogates the usual suspects in the cultural wars from an independent, though not impartial, vantage point. Clearly personal and unabashedly belletrist, the chapters ask important questions. What makes culture one thing and not another? What inspires aesthetic values? What drives us to make comparisons? And how does a bias for one kind of evidence as opposed to another contribute to the form and content of intellectual argument?

The Art of Survival: France and the Great War Picaresque is a new literary and cultural history of the First World War in France. It offers readers a fresh perspective on wartime popular culture, uncovering the attitudes and outlooks of the people who lived through the war one hundred years ago. The book develops a counternarrative to postwar interpretations of the infantryman as passive victim or active resister, focusing instead on the mechanisms through which soldiers and civilians resigned themselves to the war but imagined themselves as survivors. They were able to do so by reactivating a form of storytelling-the picaresque-whose central concern had always been the survival of a nonheroic protagonist in a hostile and chaotic world. During the Great War, French novelists, journalists, graphic artists, and cultural critics drew both consciously and unconsciously upon the long and rich European picaresque tradition. With its spirit of self-preservation as opposed to self-sacrifice and its affirmation of the value of life over death, the picaresque was a literary and cultural mode uniquely appropriate for expressing and attenuating the anxieties provoked by modern, industrialized warfare. The French reinvented the picaro as an apt hero for the modern age and positioned the picaresque as the dominant ethos of the modern cultural imagination.

This book presents a collection of one of America's finest drama critics. The book chronicles a major period in American theatre history, one that witnessed the birth or spread of Off-Broadway, regional theatre, nonprofit companies, and avant-garde performance, as well as growing interest in plays by women and minorities and in world drama. This book is a criticism for the ages. There are essays, profiles, and book reviews dealing with such topics as the “new naturalism” in theatre, Brecht's collected plays, and the legacy of Stanislavski. There is also a generous sampling of other comments on plays by O'Neill, Miller, Chekhov, Albee, Ibsen, Anouilh, Beckett, Ionesco, Pinter, Fugard, and many others.

The Elusive Brain is the first comprehensive survey of contemporary literature’s engagement with neuroscience. Jason Tougaw analyzes the works of contemporary writers—including Oliver Sacks, Temple Grandin, Richard Powers, Maud Casey, Jonathan Lethem, Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay, and Siri Hustvedt, Ellen Forney, and David B.—arguing that their experiments with literary form offer a necessary counterbalance to a wider cultural neuromania that seeks out purely neural explanations for human behaviors as varied as reading, economics, empathy, and racism. Tougaw surveys memoirs about life with autism, epilepsy manic depression, or brain injury; revisionist mystery novels; and graphic narratives that engage neuroscience. The book argues that these works offer insight about how it feels and what it means to live with a brain whose role in the making of self or consciousness is far from fully understood. Brain memoirs and neuronovels revel in the mysteries of the explanatory gap between brain physiology and mental experience. In the process, these literary works offer an antidote to polarizing and outmoded debates about the “cerebral subject,” whether we are our brains (or not our brains). Rather than engaging in abstract philosophical debate, these literary works explore questions about neurodiversity politics and the stakes of rapidly advancing brain research for people whose experience represent what critic Ralph Savarese calls “all manner of neurologies.”

Millennia ago, Greek myths exposed the dangers of violent rage and the need for empathy and self-restraint. Homer's Iliad, Euripides' Hecuba, and Sophocles' Ajax show that anger and vengeance destroy perpetrators and victims alike. Composed before and during the ancient Greeks' groundbreaking movement away from autocracy toward more inclusive political participation, these stories offer guidelines for modern efforts to create and maintain civil societies. The book reveals how these three masterworks of classical Greek literature can teach us, as they taught the ancient Greeks, to recognize violent revenge as a marker of illogical thinking and poor leadership. These time-honored texts emphasize the costs of our dangerous penchant for glorifying violent rage and those who would indulge in it. By promoting compassion, rational thought, and debate, Greek myths help to arm us against the tyrants we might serve and the tyrants we might become.

In works of Western literature ranging from Homer's Odyssey to Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the giving and taking of hospitality is sometimes pleasurable, but more often perilous. This book traces this leitmotiv through the history of our greatest writings, including Christ's Last Supper, Macbeth's murder of his royal guest, and Camus' short story on French colonialism in Arab Algeria. By means of such examples and many more, it considers what literary hosts, hostesses, and guests do to as well as for each other. In doing so, it shows how often treachery rends the fabric of trust that hospitality weaves.

In the fall of 2010 and the spring of 2011, the NBER held two conferences that brought together leading academic researchers, central bankers, and other financial market experts to discuss ideas on measurement and macroeconomic modelling. This book contains a selection of the papers that were presented at the conferences. Existing measurement systems focus on measuring flows and stock variables. However, simply focusing on flow or stock variables is insufficient, especially in a world of derivatives that may divorce initial risk exposures and cash flows. Thus a theme that runs through the measurement scenarios analyzed in this book is the importance of measuring risks to form a comprehensive "risk topography" of the economy. A large part of macro risk is endogenously generated by the system. Systemic crises are the result of a negative shock, or trigger, affecting a fragile or vulnerable economy. While the triggers vary from crisis to crisis, the underlying vulnerabilities have much more commonality across crises. This book informs us about vulnerabilities as opposed to triggers and outlines the issues that might be addressed by a new measurement system that captures the linkage between finance and the macroeconomy. Many of the chapters explain how a given measurement can be used to further understand systemic risk and thus illustrate the potential of using measurement to inform models.

In eighteenth-century Britain, venereal disease was everywhere and nowhere: while physicians and commentators believed the condition to be widespread, it remained shrouded in secrecy, and was often represented using slang, symbolism, and wordplay. This book explores the cultural significance of the “clap” (gonorrhea), the “pox” (syphilis), and the “itch” (genital scabies) for the development of eighteenth-century British literature and art. As a condition both represented through metaphors and used as a metaphor, venereal disease provided a vehicle for the discussion of cultural anxieties about gender, race, commerce, and immigration. The book highlights four key concepts associated with venereal disease, demonstrating how infection's symbolic potency was enhanced by its links to elite masculinity, prostitution, foreignness, and facial deformities. Casting light where the sun rarely shines, this study will fascinate anyone interested in the history of literature, art, medicine, and sexuality.

The author of this book has long been fascinated by the complicated relationship between an author's life and work, and began exploring the underlying values and patterns that guide authors in both their writing and their lives. In a series of provocative, incisive, and unflinching essays written over the past decade and collected for the first time here, this book reveals how style and content in a novel reflect a whole pattern of communication and positioning in the author's ordinary and daily behavior. We see how life and work are deeply enmeshed in the work of writers as diverse as Charles Dickens, Feodor Dostoevsky, James Joyce, Anton Chekhov, Philip Roth, Julian Barnes, Peter Stamm, and Geoff Dyer, among others. The book further shows us how readers' reactions to these writers and their works are inevitably connected to these communicative patterns, establishing a relationship that goes far beyond aesthetic appreciation. The book takes us into the psychology of some of our greatest writers and challenges us to see with more clarity how our lives become entangled with theirs through our reading of their novels.

In the Golden Age of Spanish theater, an age of highly dramatized coronations and regal spectacles, this book presents a surprising but persistent preoccupation with the disrobing of the king. In both the celebrations of majesty and the enthrallment with its unveiling, it finds the chilling recesses in which a culture struggled to reconcile the public and the private, society and the individual, the monarch and the man. In reinterpreting two of Lope de Vega's plays, long regarded as conventional royalist propaganda, the book places his texts in the context of political and institutional history, philosophy, theology, and art history. In so doing it shows how Spanish theater anticipated the decisive changes in human consciousness that characterized the ascendance of the absolutist state and its threat to the cultivation of individuality, authenticity, and humanity.

This book explores how the works of William Shakespeare, John Milton, Jonathan Swift, and others were taken up by caricaturists as a means of helping the eighteenth-century British public make sense of political issues, outrages, and personalities. The first in-depth exploration of the relationship between literature and visual satire in this period, the book explores how great texts, seen through the lens of visual parody, shape how we understand the political world. It offers a fascinating, novel approach to literary history.

When did the suburbs gain their reputation as places of dullness and sterility? This book traces the origins of such suburban stereotypes back to the 1820s, the earliest decade of suburban growth, and argues that those stereotypes were forged from the first to denigrate women and the new middle classes. Disdain for the suburbs blazed especially hotly at the fin de siècle. Writers like George Gissing and H. G. Wells famously presented the suburbs as dull and tedious places, inimical to creativity, and these are the images of the Victorian suburbs scholars know best to this day. This book traces a long-forgotten counter discourse back into the early decades of the century, showing that in women’s fiction especially, the suburbs functioned narratively as places of opportunity and new beginnings. The very existence of suburban problems, meanwhile, offered women a vocation, with professional work in and around the suburban home offered tentatively as the answer, the solution, the future. Drawing on a broad range of Victorian literature, from Charles Dickens and Mary Elizabeth Braddon to less well-known writers like John Claudius Loudon, Emily Eden, Bertha Buxton, Julia Frankau, and Jane Ellen Panton, this book bring forgotten voices back into the conversation about the growth of a new landscape, a new way of life.

Restless Secularism explores the efforts of modernist writers to articulate a viable secular imagination, to trace the relation of this secular imagination to the Christian culture from which it emerged, and to purify secular life of its religious residues. Yet it is also a study of the difficulty modernists have disentangling themselves from religious modes of understanding and experiencing the world, and emphasizes the persistent appeal of religious forms of imagination. The book contends that secularism has a distinct and historically contingent imaginary; it traces the modernist struggle both to articulate the contours of this imaginary and to elucidate its consequences for multiple fields of experience. Rather than focusing on private religious belief, the book shows, through a careful investigation of the work of Wallace Stevens, Virginia Woolf, W. B. Yeats, and W. H. Auden, how the shift from a religious to a secular imaginary has far-reaching consequences for our understanding of language, aesthetics, emotion, and the body and the material world. The book centers on Stevens’s attempts to pit a secular poetics of tautology against the religious promiscuity of metaphor, Woolf’s skirmishes with the eschatological significance of beauty, Yeats’s attempt to replace spiritualized emotion with the pagan “passions,” and Auden’s critique of magical thinking. Finally, it identifies a distinctly post-religious “problem of evil” that disturbs the secular imperative to affirm the immanence of life.

Readers of Shakespeare's greatest tragedies have long noted the absence of readily explainable motivations for some of Shakespeare's greatest characters: Why does Hamlet delay his revenge for so long? Why does King Lear choose to renounce his power? Why is Othello so vulnerable to Iago's malice? While many critics have chosen to overlook these omissions or explain them away, this book demonstrates that they are essential elements of Shakespeare's philosophy of doubt. Examining the major tragedies, the book reveals the persistent strain of philosophical skepticism. Like his contemporary, Montaigne, Shakespeare repeatedly calls attention to the essential unknowability of our world. In a period of social, political, and religious upheaval, uncertainty hovered over matters great and small—the succession of the crown, the death of loved ones from plague, the failure of a harvest. Tumultuous social conditions raised ultimate questions for Shakespeare, the book argues, and ultimately provoked in him a skepticism that casts shadows of existential doubt over his greatest masterpieces.

The confusion of sin and evil, or religious and moral transgression, is the subject of this book. It calls attention to the important distinction between sin and evil that in our times is largely ignored, and to the further confusion caused by the term “moral values.” Ranging widely through the history of Western literature, the book focuses particularly on American and English works of the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries to discover how questions of evil and sin, and evil and sinful behavior, have been discussed and represented. The book takes the reader from Greek and Roman tragedy, to Christian satire in the work of Swift and Hogarth, to Hawthorne's and Melville's novels, and finally to twentieth-century studies of good and evil by such authors as James, Conrad, Faulkner, Greene, Heller, Vonnegut, and O'Brien. Where does evil come from? What are “moral values”? If evil is a cultural construct, what does that imply?

Two centuries before the advent of radio, television, and motion pictures, books were a cherished form of popular entertainment and an integral component of domestic social life. This history explores the ways in which shared reading shaped the lives and literary culture of the time, offering new perspectives on how books have been used by their readers, and the part that they have played in middle-class homes and families. Drawing on marginalia, letters and diaries, library catalogues, elocution manuals, subscription lists, and more, the book offers fresh and fascinating insights into reading, performance, and the history of middle-class home life.

What does eating have to do with aesthetic taste? While most accounts of aesthetic history avoid the gustatory aspects of taste, this book rewrites standard history to uncover the constitutive and dramatic tension between appetite and aesthetics at the heart of the British literary tradition. From Milton through the Romantics, the metaphor of taste serves to mediate aesthetic judgment and consumerism, gusto and snobbery, gastronomers and gluttons, vampires, and vegetarians, as well as the philosophy and physiology of food. The book advances a theory of taste based on Milton's model of the human as consumer, and digester, of food, words, and other commodities—a consumer whose tasteful, subliminal self remains haunted by its own corporeality. Radically rereading Wordsworth's feeding mind, Lamb's gastronomical essays, Byron's cannibals and other deviant diners, and Keatsian nausea, this book resituates Romanticism as a period that naturally saw the rise of the restaurant and the pleasures of the table as a cultural field for the practice of aesthetics.

Great writers of the past whose works we still read and love will be read forever. They will survive the test of time. We remember authors of true genius because their writings are simply the best. Or … might there be other reasons that account for an author's literary fate? This original book takes a fresh look at our beliefs about literary fame by examining how it actually comes about. The author wrestles with entrenched notions about recognizing genius and the test of time by comparing the reputations of a dozen writers of the Romantic period—some famous, some forgotten. Why are we still reading Jane Austen but not Mary Brunton, when readers in their own day sometimes couldn't tell their works apart? Why Keats and not Barry Cornwall, who came from the same circle of writers and had the same mentor? Why not that mentor, Leigh Hunt, himself? The author offers new and unorthodox accounts of the coming-to-fame of some of Britain's most revered authors and compares their reputations and afterlives with those of their contemporary rivals. What she discovers about trends, champions, institutional power, and writers' conscious efforts to position themselves for posterity casts fresh light on the actual processes that lead to literary fame.

In readings of a diverse group of texts from the seventeenth century through the early eighteenth, this book addresses a crucial and contested topic in literary and philosophical writing of the period: sympathy. Correcting the standard history of the emergence of sympathy in Anglo-American culture, it argues that the seventeenth century was a critical period of transition between two major ideas of sympathy, the first—now obsolete—referring to magical correspondences in the universe and the second—the familiar, modern idea—to fellow-feeling between human beings. Whereas most treatments of sympathy in Renaissance studies have supported the view that sympathy was a casualty of an “epistemological rupture” occurring in the seventeenth century, most treatments of sympathy in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century studies share the dubious historical premise that sympathy had no intellectual life before 1700. This book makes a case for a continuous history of sympathy, one in which sympathy was not forgotten, but, in response to a range of social and intellectual pressures, increasingly conceived as a moral and psychological subject. By exploring the intersections among magic, philosophy, and literature in the seventeenth century, this book establishes sympathy at the center of crucial debates in the period—linguistic, philosophical, theological, and political—and opens up a new vantage from which to understand representations of sympathy in the later periods in which it has been most often studied. Long after occult ideas of sympathy were forced to the margins of natural philosophy, they continued to resonate in the realm of art.

Spanning nearly 500 years of cultural and social history, this book examines the ways that literature and surveillance have developed together, as kindred modern practices. As ideas about personhood—what constitutes a self—have changed over time, so too have ideas about how to represent, shape, or invade the self. The chapters of this book show that, since the Renaissance, changes in observation strategies have driven innovations in literature; literature, in turn, has provided a laboratory and forum for the way we think about surveillance and privacy. Ultimately, they contend that the habits of mind cultivated by literature make rational and self-aware participation in contemporary surveillance environments possible, and are consequently necessary for fully realized citizenship in a liberal society.