Arising from a research project on depression in the eighteenth century, this book discusses the experience of depressive states both in terms of existing modes of thought and expression, and of attempts to describe and live with suffering. It also asks what present-day society can learn about depression from the eighteenth-century experience.

Thomas Mann's 1912 novella Death in Venice is one of the most famous and widely read texts in all of modern literature, raising such issues as beauty and decadence, eros and irony, and aesthetics and morality.

In Maps of the Imagination, Peter Turchi posits the idea that maps help people understand where they are in the world in the same way that literature, whether realistic or experimental, attempts to explain human realities. The author explores how writers and cartographers use many of the same devices for plotting and executing their work, making crucial decisions about what to include and what to leave out, in order to get from here to there, without excess baggage or a confusing surplus of information.

Tess O'Toole uncovers Hardy's career-long fascination with the points of intersection between genealogy and fiction and argues that this relationship fuels much of his writing. Hereditary patterns are the product of narrative compulsion; the circulation of the family story is necessary to reproduce the history it records. As well as analyzing Hardy's characteristic treatment of family history, this volume revises existing accounts of genealogical narrative, and in its conclusion considers the presence in other nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels of motifs foregrounded in Hardy's work.

Using the traditional genres of allegory, pastoral, and parable, this book develops alternative paradigms of literary realism with which to reexamine a group of crucial but marginalized 20th century writers who have been misread as conventional mimetic realists.