The Politically Incorrect Guide to English And American Literature

In The Politically Incorrect Guide to English Literature, Elizabeth Kantor has great fun skewering silly English literature professors, a broad and easy target, but the real point of the book is the joy of reading great literature because it is good and true.

Literature In The Greek And Roman Worlds

This text is intended for students and readers of classical and other literature. Topics include: Greek hexameter poetry; rhetoric; Greek literature under the Romans; Latin literature before 70 BC; poetry c.40 BC to the death of Tiberius; and Latin literature after c.150.

Literature and Its Theorists: A Personal View of Twentieth-Century Criticism

In selecting representative twentieth-century thinkers, Todorov's intention is both to illuminate significant conceptual issues and to suggest intellectual points of contact among well-known figures. . . . In addition to dealing with varying interpretations of criticism's functions and tasks, this work considers means by which several writers of fiction arrived at their own positions on major literary controversies. . . . Literature and Its Theorists work gives ample expression to Todorov's literary and moral convictions.

Useful Fictions: Evolution, Anxiety, and the Origins of Literature (Frontiers of Narrative)

Drawing on evolutionary biology, anthropology, narrative theory, cognitive psychology, game theory, and evolutionary aesthetics, Austin develops the concept of a "useful fiction," a simple narrative that serves an adaptive function unrelated to its factual accuracy. In his work we see how these useful fictions play a key role in neutralizing the overwhelming anxiety that humans can experience as their minds gather and process information. Rudimentary narratives constructed for this purpose, Austin suggests, provided a cognitive scaffold that might have become the basis for our well-documented love of fictional stories.

Hellenistic Influence on the Aneid

The Smith College Classical Studies are published from time to time by the Departments of Greek and Latin of Smith College, and have for their main object the encouragement of research in classical literature, archaeology, and antiquities by providing an opportunity for the publication of studies in these fields by scholars connected with Smith College, as teachers, graduate students, or alumnae.