In this shimmering conversation (the outgrowth of an event co-sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History and Poets House), Edward O. Wilson, renowned scientist and proponent of “consilience” or the unity of knowledge, finds an ardent interlocutor in Robert Hass, whose credo as United States poet laureate was “imagination makes communities.” As they explore the many ways that poetry and science enhance each other, they travel from anthills to ancient Egypt and to the heights and depths of human potential.

The contributors explore how the Gothic influences a range of writers including James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, May Sinclair, Elizabeth Bowen, and Djuna Barnes.
This is the first full-length exploration of the relationship between Gothic fiction and Modernism in fiction and film.

Thomas Hurka presents the first full historical study of an important strand in the development of modern moral philosophy. His subject is a series of British ethical theorists from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, who shared key assumptions that made them a unified and distinctive school.

In Masculine Style: The American West and Literary Modernism, Daniel Worden argues for the importance of “cowboy masculinity,” as dramatized in late nineteenth-century dime novels, to the writings of Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, Nat Love, Theodore Roosevelt, John Steinbeck, and Owen Wister.

Michael V. Wedin presents a new interpretation of Parmenides' Way of Truth: the most important philosophical treatise before the work of Plato and Aristotle. The Way of Truth contains the first extended philosophical argument in the western tradition--an argument which decrees that there can be no motion, change, growth, coming to be, or destruction; and indeed that there can be only one thing.