A new history of classical rhetoric

George Kennedy's three volumes on classical rhetoric have long been regarded as authoritative treatments of the subject. This new volume, an extensive revision and abridgment of The Art of Persuasion in Greece, The Art of Rhetoric in the Roman World, and Greek Rhetoric under Christian Emperors, p...

A new sublime

Boitani’s presentation of the classics is as entertaining and unexpected as it is informative. He invites the reader to discover the timeless beauty and wisdom of ancient literature, highlighting its profound and surprising connections to the present. With their emphasis on the mutability and fl...

Alexander the great

An elegant, concise, and generously illustrated exploration of Alexander the Great’s representations in art and literature through the agesIn this book, John Boardman, one of the world’s leading authorities on ancient Greece, looks beyond the life of Alexander the Great in order to examine the as...

Amor and psyche

The renowned tale of Amor and Psyche, from Apuleius's second-century Latin novel The Golden Ass, is one of the most charming fragments of classical literature. Neumann chose it as the exemplar of an unusual study of feminine psychology. Unfolding the spiritual and mythical background of the pagan...

Antigone's claim

The celebrated author of Gender Trouble here redefines Antigone's legacy, recovering her revolutionary significance and liberating it for a progressive feminism and sexual politics. Butler's new interpretation does nothing less than reconceptualize the incest taboo in relation to kinship—and open...

Augustine's confessions

From Pulitzer Prize–winner Garry Wills, the story of Augustine’s ConfessionsIn this brief and incisive book, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Garry Wills tells the story of the Confessions--what motivated Augustine to dictate it, how it asks to be read, and the many ways it has been misread in th...

Belief and cult

A groundbreaking reinterpretation that draws on cognitive theory to show that belief wasn’t absent from—but rather was at the heart of—Roman religionBelief and Cult argues that belief isn’t uniquely Christian but was central to ancient Roman religion. Drawing on cognitive theory, Jacob Mackey sho...

Celestial aspirations

A unique look at how classical notions of ascent and flight preoccupied early modern British writers and artistsBetween the late sixteenth century and early nineteenth century, the British imagination—poetic, political, intellectual, spiritual and religious—displayed a pronounced fascination with...

Classicism and other phobias

A provocative case for why immortalizing Greek and Roman culture as “classical” marginalizes and devalues Black lifeGreek and Roman antiquity has been enshrined in disciplines and curricula at all levels of education, perpetuating what the historian of political thought J.G.A. Pocock has called “...

Couch city

Crowning six decades of literary, rhetorical, and historical scholarship, Harry Berger, Jr., offers readers another trenchant reading. Berger subverts the usual interpretations of Plato’s kalos kagathos, showing Socrates to be trapped in a double ventriloquism, tethered to his interlocutors’ spee...

How the classics made shakespeare

From one of our most eminent and accessible literary critics, a groundbreaking account of how the Greek and Roman classics forged Shakespeare's imaginationBen Jonson famously accused Shakespeare of having "small Latin and less Greek." But he was exaggerating. Shakespeare was steeped in the classi...

How to tell a story

An inviting and highly readable new translation of Aristotle’s complete Poetics—the first and best introduction to the art of writing and understanding storiesAristotle’s Poetics is the most important book ever written for writers and readers of stories—whether novels, short fiction, plays, scree...

Intellectual property

The first in-depth account of the lives and careers of educated slaves and freedmen in ancient RomeSlaves and freedmen played an important yet understudied role in the literary culture of the Roman Republic. Though their work went largely uncredited, they fulfilled vital roles as editors, researc...

Juno's aeneid

A major new interpretation of Vergil's epic poem as a struggle between two incompatible versions of the Homeric heroThis compelling book offers an entirely new way of understanding the Aeneid. Many scholars regard Vergil's poem as an attempt to combine Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey into a single epic...

Just life

Reorients ethics and politics around the generativity of mothers and daughters rather than the right to property and the sexual proprieties of the oedipal drama

Making silence speak

This collection attempts to recover the voices of women in antiquity from a variety of perspectives: how they spoke, where they could be heard, and how their speech was adopted in literature and public discourse. Rather than confirming the old model of binary oppositions in which women's speech w...

Neopoetics

In Neopoetics, Collins turns his attention to the cognitive evolution of the writing-ready brain. Further integrating neuroscience into the popular field of cognitive poetics, he adds empirical depth to our study of literary texts and verbal imagination and offers a whole new way to look at readi...

Notes on thought and vision

Notes on Thought and Vision by Imagist poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) is an aphoristic meditation on how one works toward an ideal body-mind synthesis; a contemplation of the sources of imagination and the creative process; and a study of gender differences H.D. believed to be inherent in women's an...

On ovid's metamorphoses

Drawing on many years of teaching Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Gareth Williams offers a brisk and lively reading of the poem that emphasizes why it speaks in compelling ways to a twenty-first-century audience. He shows how the Metamorphoses is not just a colorful collection of stories about change but a...

Reading the odyssey

This wide-ranging collection makes available to specialists and nonspecialists alike important critical work on the Odyssey produced during the last half century. The ten essays address five major concerns: the poem's programmatic representation of social and religious institutions and values; it...

Reading the odyssey

A fresh and original introduction to the Odyssey—and how it continues to shape literature, film, art and even the ways we make sense of our livesReading the Odyssey is an introduction to Homer’s masterpiece like no other. It combines a cultural and intellectual history of the epic with an in-dept...

Rome's patron

The story of Maecenas and his role in the evolution and continuing legacy of ancient Roman poetry and cultureAn unelected statesman with exceptional powers, a patron of the arts and a luxury-loving friend of the emperor Augustus: Maecenas was one of the most prominent and distinctive personalitie...

Runes and runic inscriptions

Spring and autumn historiography

The Spring and Autumn is an annals text composed of brief records covering the period 722–479 BCE. Newell Ann Van Auken argues that record-keepers from the ancient Chinese state of Lu—not a later editor—produced the formally regular core of the text.

Stoic romanticism and the ethics of emotion

An exploration of Stoicism’s central role in British and American writing of the Romantic periodStoic philosophers and Romantic writers might seem to have nothing in common: the ancient Stoics championed the elimination of emotion, and Romantic writers made a bold new case for expression, adoptin...

Stone-garland

“As part of the publisher's 'Seedbank' series, aiming to preserve endangered literatures, the poet Beachy-Quick offers a modern gloss on six ancient Greeks.” —New York Times Book Review, "New & Noteworthy Poetry"

The ancient interpretation of dreams

The first book-length study of dream interpretation in classical GreeceLong before Freud, dreams and how to make sense of them fascinated ancient thinkers. In The Ancient Interpretation of Dreams, Mirjam Kotwick traces a continuous intellectual practice of dream interpretation across a range of a...

The battle between the frogs and the mice

Striking illustrations and clever rhyme bring to life an ancient Greek fable about the foolishness of war

The dynastic drama of beowulf

A strikingly original approach to Beowulf, linking its structure to the dynastic life-cycle.The original audience of Beowulf was steeped in ancient Scandinavian royal legend. But for modern readers of the poem, these traditions are frustratingly obscure and confusing. This book argues that Beowul...

The four masterworks of the ming novel

A reinterpretation of some of the great works of Chinese fiction of the late Ming dynastyIn this book, Andrew Plaks reinterprets the great texts of Chinese fiction known as the “Four Masterworks of the Ming Novel” (ssu ta ch'i-shu). Arguing that these are far more than collections of popular narr...

The ingenious language

“A brilliant meditation on language and life.”—Bookriot For word nerds, language loons, and grammar geeks, an impassioned and informative literary leap into the wonders of the Greek language. Here are nine ways Greek can transform your relationship to time and to those around you, nine reflectio...

The islamic context of the thousand and one nights

In this fascinating study, Muhsin J. al-Musawi shows how deeply Islamic heritage and culture is embedded in the tales of The Thousand and One Nights (known to many as the Arabian Nights) and how this integration invites readers to make an Islamic milieu. Conservative Islam dismisses The Thousand ...

The lost history of roman theatre

Investigating the origins of theatre in archaic RomeTheatre was an integral part of Roman civic, religious and political life for nearly a thousand years, but our understanding of it is skewed by the haphazard survival of usable evidence. The widely accepted date for the beginning of Roman drama ...

The lost texts of confucius’ grandson

This book investigates the philosophical import of The Guodian corpus, and proposes their association with Zisi, the famous grandson of Confucius.

The return of proserpina

Sicily and the strategies of empire in the poetic imagination of classical and medieval EuropeIn the first century BC, Cicero praised Sicily as Rome’s first overseas province and confirmed it as the mythic location for the abduction of Proserpina, known to the Greeks as Persephone, by the god of ...

The shape of sex

The Shape of Sex is a pathbreaking history of nonbinary sex, focusing on ideas and individuals who allegedly combined or crossed sex or gender categories from 200–1400 C.E. Ranging widely across premodern European thought and culture, Leah DeVun reveals how and why efforts to define “the human” s...

The story of the odyssey

The trials of orpheus

A revealing look at how the Orpheus myth helped Renaissance writers and thinkers understand the force of eloquenceIn ancient Greek mythology, the lyrical songs of Orpheus charmed the gods, and compelled animals, rocks, and trees to obey his commands. This mythic power inspired Renaissance philoso...

Timaeus in paradise

Tracing the influence and impact of Plato’s Timaeus—and its major themes, creation and beauty—through the centuriesMore than two thousand years after it was written, Plato’s Timaeus continues to fascinate and intrigue its readers. In Timaeus in Paradise, Piero Boitani traces the abiding legacy of...

Tragedy

A major new history of the revolutionary invention of tragedy that sheds fresh and surprising light on both ancient and modern dramaWhy did tragedy come into being—and why is it still so important 2,500 years after it first arose in fifth-century Athens? Does it serve a deeper purpose beyond ente...

When heroes love

Toward the end of the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh King Gilgamesh laments the untimely death of his comrade Enkidu, "my friend whom I loved dearly." Similarly in the Bible, David mourns his companion, Jonathan, whose "love to me was wonderful, greater than the love of women." These passages, al...