The Prophet, by the Lebanese-American author Khalil Gibran, occupies a peculiar place in 20th-century world literature. The Prophet has been translated into more than 100 languages, making it one of the most translated books in history. By 2012, it had… Read More ›
The intense psychoanalytical novel Demian was published by the German Swiss novelist Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) in 1919. It was translated into English in 1923 under an English pseudonym (Emil Sinclair), at first in a series hosted by the cultural review… Read More ›
Although Narcissus and Goldmund investigates the notion of reaching death through love and art, the novel by the esteemed Swiss-German author Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) is a rather serene work, built on bipolar, contrasting patterns. Hesse’s previous great novels, Demian (1922)… Read More ›
A satire on human foibles from the standpoint of a cat, I Am a Cat is one of the most original novels of the Wagahai wa Neko de aru, one of the best loved works by the Japanese writer Natsume… Read More ›
The series of four biblical novels by renowned German author Thomas Mann (1875–1955) chronicles the ancient history of the Jews and evolves as a refutation of prolific racist mythmaking during the Nazi era. Mann wrote the tetralogy over a 16-year… Read More ›
The creative portrayal of Germany’s descent into evil comes to life in the pages of the acclaimed postwar novel by Thomas Mann (1875–1955), Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer, Adrian Leverkühn, as Told by a Friend. This complex novel… Read More ›
The sixth novel by Carlos Fuentes (1928–2012), A Change of Skin demonstrates his use of nonlinear and irregular time regarding narrative structure. Published in Spanish and in English in 1967, it is considered a complementary text to Fuentes’s Terra Nostra… Read More ›
The Nobel Prize–winning author Thomas Mann (1875–1955) stands out as one of the most important figures of early 20th-century literature. Influenced by German philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, Mann’s fiction serves as a model of subtle philosophical examination of… Read More ›
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900 ce) is one of the most controversial figures in the history of philosophy. He also has become one of its most diversely influential thinkers. He was never an “academic philosopher” either by education or by profession, and… Read More ›
The last novel by the Swiss German author Hermann Hesse (1877–1962), The Glass Bead Game is a serene bildungsroman conceived in the form of a “eutopia” (positive, happy utopia) set in the year 2200, somewhere in the German-speaking areas of… Read More ›
Sadeq Hedayat (1903–51) was for many decades the best-known modern prose writer in Persian, the language of a country whose purified literary lexicon and restrictive linguistic formalism he sought to violate by introducing crude idioms and colloquial phrases. He has… Read More ›
The study of value, called axiology, has three main branches: ethics, concerning the morally good; political theory, concerning the social good; and aesthetics, concerning the beautiful, or taste. One might perhaps add another branch, pragmatics, which concerns the utilitarian good… Read More ›
T. Coraghessan Boyle’s “Descent of Man” is not the first American short story to carry the title of Darwin’s controversial study of the evolutionary development of man. However, Edith Wharton’s “The Descent of Man” (1904) uses the title of Darwin’s… Read More ›
The Czech writer Milan Kundera in his collection of critical essays The Art of the Novel (1988) offers a definition of the novel as “a meditation on existence as seen through the medium of imaginary characters,” while providing “my personal… Read More ›
The rise of the “little theater” movement was a reaction to the traditional practices of the American stage prior to 1910. Although the smallest towns had theater buildings and vaudeville houses in which well-worn plays and players kept up a… Read More ›
Historical theory and criticism embraces not only the theory and practice of literary historiographical representation but also other types of criticism that, often without acknowledgment, presuppose a historical ground or adopt historical methods in an ad hoc fashion. Very frequently,… Read More ›
Eugene O’Neill’s greatest play up to this point in his career and the finest American tragedy to be written until then, Desire Under the Elms premiered on November 11, 1924, at the Greenwich Village Theatre in New York City. O’Neill… Read More ›
“Modernist” is a term most often used in literary studies to refer to an experimental, avant-garde style of writing prevalent between World War I and World War II, although it is sometimes applied more generally to the entire range of… Read More ›
Aristotle‘s Poetics, the first major text of Western drama theory, defined the terms of much subsequent discussion. Unlike such classical Eastern theoretical works on drama as the Sanskrit Natyasastra or Zeami Motokiyo’s writings on Noh, it makes only minor passing… Read More ›
It is a sort of living death to be surrounded by the ceaseless concern for judgments and action that one does not even desire to change. In fact, since we are alive, I wanted to demonstrate, through the absurd, the… Read More ›
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