"Nowadays, most readers take the intersection between fiction and fact for granted. We've developed a faculty for pretending that even the most bizarre literary inventions are, for the nonce, real...The value of Davis's book is that it explores the h

The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740, combines historical analysis and readings of extraordinarily diverse texts to reconceive the foundations of the dominant genre of the modern era. Now, on the fifteenth anniversary of its initial publication, The Origins of the English Novel stands as essential reading. The anniversary edition features a new introduction in which the...(展开全部)

The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740, combines historical analysis and readings of extraordinarily diverse texts to reconceive the foundations of the dominant genre of the modern era. Now, on the fifteenth anniversary of its initial publication, The Origins of the English Novel stands as essential reading. The anniversary edition features a new introduction in which the...(展开全部)

Written by one of the world's leading literary theorists, this book provides a wide-ranging, accessible and humorous introduction to the English novel from Daniel Defoe to the present day. Covers the works of major authors, including Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Laurence Sterne, Walter Scott, Jane Austen, the Brontes, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Ha...(展开全部)

`Will stimulate work and thought rather than impose a new orthodoxy. The combination of bold iconoclasm with judicious questioning gives the book an excitement unparalleled in recent English historiography. It is an extraordinarily invigorating blast of fresh air.' History.

The Origins of English Individualism is about the nature of English society during the five centuries leading up to the Industrial Revolution, and the crucial differences between England and other European nations. Drawing upon detailed studies of English parishes and a growing number of other intensive local studies, as well as diaries, legal treatises and contemporary fore...(展开全部)

The Origins of English Individualism is about the nature of English society during the five centuries leading up to the Industrial Revolution, and the crucial differences between England and other European nations. Drawing upon detailed studies of English parishes and a growing number of other intensive local studies, as well as diaries, legal treatises and contemporary fore...(展开全部)

`Will stimulate work and thought rather than impose a new orthodoxy. The combination of bold iconoclasm with judicious questioning gives the book an excitement unparalleled in recent English historiography. It is an extraordinarily invigorating blast of fresh air.' History.

Every novelist's work contains an implicit vision of the history of the novel, an idea of what the novel is. I have tried to express here the idea of the novel that is inherent in my own novels. -- Milan Kundera Kundera brilliantly examines the work of such important and diverse figures as Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne, Diderot, Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Musil. He is especially pe...(展开全部)

One of the most important scholars of our century, Gershom Scholem (1897-1982) opened up a once esoteric world of Jewish mysticism, the Kabbalah, to concerned students of religion. The Kabbalah is a rich tradition of repeated attempts to achieve and portray direct experiences of God: its twelfth-and thirteenth-century beginnings in southern France and Spain are probed in Orig...(展开全部)