Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature


M.H. Abrams - 1971
    H. Abrams definitively studies the Romantic Age (1789–1835)—the age in which Shelley claimed that "the literature of England has arisen as it were from a new birth." Abrams shows that the major poets of the age had in common important themes, modes of expression, and ways of feeling and imagining; that the writings of these poets were an integral part of a comprehensive intellectual tendency which manifested itself in philosophy as well as poetry, in England and in Germany; and that this tendency was causally related to drastic political and social changes of the age.But Abrams offers more than a work of scholarship, for he ranges before and after, to place the age in Western culture. he reveals what is traditional and what is revolutionary in the period, providing insights into those same two forces in the ideas of today. He shows that central Romantic ideas and forms of imagination were secularized versions of traditional theological concepts, imagery, and design, and that modern literature participates in the same process. Our comprehension of this age and of our own time is deepened by a work astonishing in its learning, vision, and humane understanding.

The Clown


Heinrich Böll - 1963
    The desertion triggers a searing re-examination of his life—the loss of his sister during the war, the demands of his millionaire father and the hypocrisies of his mother, who first fought to “save” Germany from the Jews, then worked for “reconciliation” afterwards.

Collected Poems, 1909-1962


T.S. Eliot - 1963
    Eliot himself wished to preserve than this volume, published two years before his death in 1965.Poet, dramatist, critic, and editor, T. S. Eliot was one of the defining figures of twentieth-century poetry. This edition of Collected Poems 1909-1962 includes his verse from Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) to Four Quartets (1943), and includes such literary landmarks as 'The Waste Land' and 'Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats'.

Crabwalk


Günter Grass - 2002
    A German cruise ship turned refugee carrier, it was attacked by a Soviet submarine in January 1945. Some 9,000 people went down in the Baltic Sea, making it the deadliest maritime disaster of all time. Born to an unwed mother on a lifeboat the night of the attack, Paul Pokriefke is a middle-aged journalist trying to piece together the tragic events. While his mother sees her whole existence in terms of that calamitous moment, Paul wishes their life could have been less touched by the past. For his teenage son, who dabbles in the dark, far-right corners of the Internet, the Gustloff embodies the denial of Germany's wartime suffering. "Scuttling backward to move forward," Crabwalk is at once a captivating tale of a tragedy at sea and a fearless examination of the ways different generations of Germans now view their past.Winner of the Nobel Prize

Critique of Pure Reason


Immanuel Kant - 1781
    It presents a profound and challenging investigation into the nature of human reason, its knowledge and its illusions. Reason, Kant argues, is the seat of certain concepts that precede experience and make it possible, but we are not therefore entitled to draw conclusions about the natural world from these concepts. The Critique brings together the two opposing schools of philosophy: rationalism, which grounds all our knowledge in reason, and empiricism, which traces all our knowledge to experience. Kant's transcendental idealism indicates a third way that goes far beyond these alternatives.

The Way Things Are


Lucretius
    [captures] the relentless urgency of Lucretius' didacticism, his passionate conviction and proselytizing fervour.' --The Classical Review

The Complete Poetry


Edgar Allan Poe - 1831
    But Poe is also the author of some of the most haunting poetry ever written--poems of love, death and loneliness that have lost none of their power to enthrall in this unique Signet Classic edition.

The Devil's Elixirs


E.T.A. Hoffmann - 1815
    As he travels towards Rome he wrestles with the enigma of his own identity while pursued by his murderous doppelganger. The monk's only hope for salvation lies with the beautiful Aurelie; but in order to escape the curse which lies over his family, he must evade the sinister powers of the living and the dead. In this lively and disturbing gothic tale, Hoffmann combines elements of the fantastic and the sublime to analyse the seductive ambiguities of art and the deeply divided nature of the human imagination.

Literature: The Human Experience


Richard Abcarian - 1973
    The arrangement by both theme and genre encourages students to think deeply about crucial topics while they learn about the four main genres of literature. The new edition provides a broader selection of works -- including many from non-Western traditions -- and more help for reading literature.

The Collected Poems


Wallace Stevens - 1954
    This definitive poetry collection, originally published in 1954 to honor Stevens on his 75th birthday, contains:- "Harmonium"- "Ideas of Order"- "The Man With the Blue Guitar"- "Parts of the World"- "Transport Summer"- "The Auroras of Autumn"- "The Rock"

501 German Verbs


Henry Strutz - 1982
    The arrangement is one verb per page in easy to comprehend table form. Each verb is listed with its principal parts and followed by complete conjugation in all tenses. Additional material includes tables of strong verbs arranged according to pattern of change, and a section on prefix verbs and model auxiliaries. An added feature in this edition is a set of 27 verb tests with answers explained. Language students will also find weather expressions as they are used with impersonal verbs, a selection of German idioms and proverbs, and a concise review of rules for verb tenses and moods. This book, with its emphasis on grammatical form, makes a fine classroom supplement for beginner, intermediate, and advanced courses in German.

The Life of Samuel Johnson


James Boswell - 1790
    Johnson had in his friend Boswell the ideal biographer.Notoriously and self-confessedly intemperate, Boswell shared with Johnson a huge appetite for life and threw equal energy into recording its every aspect in minute but telling detail. This irrepressible Scotsman was 'always studying human nature and making experiments', and the marvelously vivacious Journals he wrote daily furnished him with first-rate material when he came to write his biography.The result is a masterpiece that brims over with wit, anecdote and originality. Hailed by Macaulay as the best biography ever written and by Carlyle as a book 'beyond any other product of the eighteenth century', The Life of Samuel Johnson today continues to enjoy its status as a classic of the language.This shortened version is based on the 1799 edition, the last in which the author had a hand.

The Confusions of Young Törless


Robert Musil - 1906
    The Confusions of Young Törless, published in 1906 while he was a student, uncovers the bullying, snobbery, and vicious homoerotic violence at an elite boys academy. Unsparingly honest in its depiction of the author's tangled feelings about his mother, other women, and male bonding, it also vividly illustrates the crisis of a whole society, where the breakdown of traditional values and the cult of pitiless masculine strength were soon to lead to the cataclysm of the First World War and the rise of fascism. More than a century later, Musil's first novel still retains its shocking, prophetic power.

Wandering


Hermann Hesse - 1920
    Now I am about to go to Ticino once again, to live for a while as a hermit in nature and in my work." In 1920, after settling in the Ticino mountain village of Montagnola, he published Wandering, a love letter to this magic-garden world that can be read as a meditation on his attempt to begin a new life. His pure prose, his heartfelt lyricism, and his love for the old earth, for its blessings that renew themselves, all sing in this serene book. The first German edition of Wandering included facsimiles of fourteen watercolor landscapes. Hesse's painting had blossomed in the southern countryside and he even toyed with the idea "that I might still succeed in escaping literature entirely and making a living at the more appealing trade of painter." Unfortunately, his original pictures for Wandering have disappeared; this edition reproduces in black-and-white the full-color reproductions of the 1920 edition.

Paris Spleen


Charles Baudelaire - 1869
    Published posthumously in 1869, Paris Spleen was a landmark publication in the development of the genre of prose poetry—a format which Baudelaire saw as particularly suited for expressing the feelings of uncertainty, flux, and freedom of his age—and one of the founding texts of literary modernism.