This companion provides a comprehensive survey of the life, work and legacy of Benjamin Franklin-the oldest, most distinctive, and multifaceted of the founders. • Includes contributions from across a range of academic disciplines • Combines traditional and cutting-edge scholarship, from accomplished and emerging experts in the field • Pays special attention to the American Revolution, the Enlightenment, journalism, colonial American society,...

Shakespeare, Our Contemporary is a provocative, original study of the major plays of Shakespeare. More than that, it is one of the few critical works to have strongly influenced theatrical productions. Peter Brook and Charles Marowitz are among the many directors who have acknowledged their debt to Jan Kott, finding in his analogies between Shakespearean situations and those in modern life and drama the seeds of vital new stage conceptions. Shakespeare,...

This is a guide to the life and work of the French intellectual Georges Bataille, best known as the author of the celebrated erotic novel, The Story of the Eye. Benjamin Noys introduces Bataille as a writer out of step with the dominant intellectual trends of his day - surrealism and existentialism - and shows that it was his very marginality that accounted in large part for his subsequent importance for the post-structuralists and the counterculture,...

"Esta es una historia parcial y muy simplificada de una idea lingüística. No se trata de una historia de la lingüística en el sentido clásico de la expresión, es decir, una historia que hace un recuento cronológico de lo que cada gramático o cada filósofo dijo sobre el lenguaje. Se trata más bien de la historia selectiva de una idea contada desde la perspectiva del siglo XXI. Me he tomado libertades extraordinarias para establecer la forma...

El Greco, or Doménikos Theotokópoulos, was born to Greek parents on the island of Crete. He is considered by many art historians to be the last great Mannerist painter. El Greco, or "The Greek," left Crete for Venice, Italy, in his mid-twenties. Following the Venetian Renaissance tradition, he began to elongate his figures, a style that would come to be associated with his most famous works. But like all artists of the time, El Greco needed a patron...

Charles Olson was an important force behind the raucous, explicit, jaunty style of much of twentieth-century poetry in America. This study makes a major contribution to our understanding of his life and work.

Paul Christensen draws upon a wide variety of source materials—from letters, unpublished essays, and fragments and sketches from the Olson Archives to the full range of Olson's published prose and poetry. Under Christensen's critical

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Thirty years after her death in March 1982, Ayn Rand's ideas have never been more important. Unfettered capitalism, unregulated business, bare-bones government providing no social services, glorification of selfishness, disdain for Judeo-Christian morality - these are the tenets of Rand's harsh philosophy.

Since its first publication in 1981, Borges and His Fiction has introduced the life and works of this Argentinian master-writer to an entire generation of students, high school and college teachers, and general readers. Responding to a steady demand for an updated edition, Gene H. Bell-Villada has significantly revised and expanded the book to incorporate new information that has become available since Borges' death in 1986. In particular, he offers...