The early 1830s witnessed an extraordinary transformation in British political, literary, and intellectual life. New scientific disciplines begin to take shape, while new concepts of the natural world were hotly debated.

The main purpose of the book is to lay stress upon the mystical aspect of the "Divina Commedia", and to trace the influence upon Dante of the earlier mystics from St. Augustine onwards.

Guided by Ezra Pound's dictum --"Make it new"--a generation of writers set out to create fiction and poetry that was unlike anything that came before it. However, as Seamus O'Malley shows, historical narrative was a key site for modernist experimentation.

With the publication in 1989 of her first novel, "The Joy Luck Club", Amy Tan was immediately recognized as a major contemporary novelist. Her work explores the lives of the women in four Chinese-American families and the daughters who struggle to fulfill or reject the cultural and familial expectations placed on them. This new edition offers a selection of diverse critical voices that explore and elucidate the intricate relationships that course through the novel. Complete with an introduction from literary scholar Harold Bloom, this study guide also features a chronology, a bibliography, an index, and notes on the contributors.

A Handbook of Latin Literature (reprint of the 1954 edition) is a concise, yet comprehensive survey of Latin literature that provides brief biographical information about ancient authors from the earliest to the Christian and pagan writers, analyses of the most prominent works, and the historical and cultural context. It also places the works alongside their contemporaries, rates their relative importance in their own times and later periods, and explores their influence on subsequent literatures and Western Civilization.