The Novel After Film: Modernism and the Decline of Autonomy
The Novel After Film: Modernism and the Decline of Autonomy. Jonathan Foltz. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. What is the novel after the invention of cinema?…
Under the Cover: The Creation, Production, and Reception of a Novel
Under the Cover: The Creation, Production, and Reception of a Novel. Clayton Childress. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. In Under the Cover, Childress examines the novel…
Theory of the Novel
Theory of the Novel. Guido Mazzoni. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017. Between the mid-sixteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, the novel, which long considered…
The Work of Art: Value in Creative Careers
The Work of Art: Value in Creative Careers. Alison Gerber. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017. In The Work of Art, Gerber shows how the “occupation turn”…
The Intimate Universal: The Hidden Porosity Among Religion, Art, Philosophy, and Politics
The Intimate Universal: The Hidden Porosity Among Religion, Art, Philosophy, and Politics. William Desmond. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. One tradition in western philosophy is…
Did It Have To Be Dido?
In Virgil’s Aeneid, the strongest and most admirable characters like Aeneas and Turnus are seen as ideals of patriotism and courage. At times though, their stories are…
Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace: The Odyssey of Love
As Prince Andrei lay dying beside Natasha and his sister, Princess Marya, he reflects inward, “Love? What is love?”[1] Love is the theme of all great literature,…
An Annunciation on the Battlefield
On December 2, 1805, the French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte achieved his most spectacular victory at the Battle of Austerlitz against an allied army of Russians and Austrians.…
Feminist Thought of Geoffrey Chaucer: The Wife of Bath, and “All Hire Secte”
The political climate of the Middle Ages was atrocious for women. Not only did society and the Holy Church of England view women as property for men,…
The Soul of Statesmanship: Shakespeare on Nature, Virtue, and Political Wisdom
The Poet as Teacher of Statesmen This volume joins a growing chorus of scholars who approach Shakespeare as a political thinker.[1] The chapters that follow explore how…
The Problems Are Everlasting, the Bard Indispensable
The Soul of Statesmanship: Shakespeare on Nature, Virtue, and Political Wisdom. Khalil M. Habib and L. Joseph Hebert, Jr., eds. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2018. In 2015…
Family, Love, and Tragedy in “The Godfather”
The Godfather, by Mario Puzo, was the best-selling book when it was first published and the film adaptation by Francis Ford Coppola is rightly considered a masterpiece.…
Grace in the Garden: The Fall of Man and the British Pastoral Tradition
“An intermediate nature . . . prevents the universe falling into two separate halves.” —Plato, Symposium (203b). Almost from the beginning of when human beings began to…
Short Stories and Political Philosophy: Power, Prose, and Persuasion
This edited volume explores the relationship between short stories and political philosophy, broadly understood. More specifically, each chapter analyzes a single, brief fictional narrative to address the…
Human Nature and Politics in Utopian and Anti-Utopian Fiction
Anti-utopian fiction has recently gripped the American imagination. Books such as The Hunger Games and the Divergent series have sold millions of copies and the movies based…