Late antique muckraking.

Procopius, born at Caesarea in Palestine late in the fifth century, became a lawyer. In AD 527 he was made legal adviser and secretary of Belisarius, commander against the Persians, and went with Belisarius again in 533 against the Vandals and in 535 against the Ostrogoths. Sometime after 540 he returned to Constantinople. He may have been that Procopius who was prefect of Constantinople in 562, but the date of his death (after 558) is unknown.

Procopius’ History of the Wars in 8 books recounts the Persian Wars of emperors Justinus and Justinian down to 550 (2 books); the Vandalic War and after-events in Africa 532–546 (2 books); the Gothic War against the Ostrogoths in Sicily and Italy 536–552 (3 books); and a sketch of events to 554 (1 book). The whole consists largely of military history, with much information about peoples and places as well, and about special events. He was a diligent, careful, judicious narrator of facts and developments and shows good powers of description. He is just to the empire’s enemies and boldly criticizes emperor Justinian. Other works by Procopius are the Anecdota or Secret History—vehement attacks on Justinian, Theodora, and others; and the Buildings of Justinian (down to AD 558) including roads and bridges as well as churches, forts, hospitals, and so on in various parts of the empire.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Procopius is in seven volumes.

In one of those rare books that allows us to see the world not as we’ve never seen it before, but as we see it daily without knowing, Victoria Nelson illuminates the deep but hidden attraction the supernatural still holds for a secular mainstream culture that forced the transcendental underground and firmly displaced wonder and awe with the forces of reason, materialism, and science.

In a backward look at an era now drawing to a close, The Secret Life of Puppets describes a curious reversal in the roles of art and religion: where art and literature once took their content from religion, we came increasingly to seek religion, covertly, through art and entertainment. In a tour of Western culture that is at once exhilarating and alarming, Nelson shows us the distorted forms in which the spiritual resurfaced in high art but also, strikingly, in the mass culture of puppets, horror-fantasy literature, and cyborgs: from the works of Kleist, Poe, Musil, and Lovecraft to Philip K. Dick and virtual reality simulations. At the end of the millennium, discarding a convention of the demonized grotesque that endured three hundred years, a Demiurgic consciousness shaped in Late Antiquity is emerging anew to re-divinize the human as artists like Lars von Trier and Will Self reinvent Expressionism in forms familiar to our pre-Reformation ancestors. Here as never before, we see how pervasively but unwittingly, consuming art forms of the fantastic, we allow ourselves to believe.

The United States Constitution, battleground of a politically bifurcated nation, and sponsor of that nation's now threatened cultural unity, is a quintessentially political document. Americans' representatives swear loyalty to it, and her soldiers die for it. Yet no one has ever seriously considered the formative influence this document, so central a force for all Americans, has had on American cultural life. Now, in this ambitious book, Mitchell Meltzer has for the first time demonstrated the extent to which the Constitution is both source and inspiration for America's greatest literary masterworks.

Retelling the history of the Constitution's formation, Meltzer explains how the peculiarly paradoxical form of the Constitution, its "secular revelation," underwent a literary rebirth after the passing of the Founders' generation, and issued in what is strangest and most characteristic in America's classic literature. By combining the secular with the revealed, a Constitutional poetics results that gives rise, in both politics and literature, to the formation of more perfect unions.

Offering powerful new perspectives on Lincoln, Emerson, Whitman, and Melville, Meltzer reveals how the Constitution counterintuitively generated such oft-noted tendencies as these writers' penchant for self-contradiction, their willingness to court radical discontinuity, and their intensely conflicted, romance-directed fictions.

Secular Revelations presents the Constitution in a new role, the inspiration of a great national literature.

Northrop Frye’s thinking has had a pervasive impact on contemporary interpretations of our literary and cultural heritage. In his Anatomy of Criticism, a landmark in the history of modern critical theory, he demonstrated his genius for mapping out the realm of imaginative creation. In The Secular Scripture he turns again to the task of establishing a broad theoretical framework, bringing to bear his extraordinary command of the whole range of literature from antiquity to the present.

Romance, a mode of literature trafficking in such plot elements as mistaken identity, shipwrecks, magic potions, the rescue of maidens in distress, has tended to be regarded as hardly deserving of serious consideration; critics praise other aspects of the Odyssey, The Faerie Queene, Shakespeare’s last plays, and Scott’s Waverley novels, for example, while forgiving the authors’ indulgence in childishly romantic plots. Frye, however, discerns in the innumerable romantic narratives of the Western tradition an imaginative universe stretching from an idyllic world to a demonic one, and a pattern of action taking the form of a cyclical descent into and ascent out of the demonic realm. Romance as a whole is thus seen as forming an integrated vision of the world, a “secular scripture” whose hero is man, paralleling the sacred scripture whose hero is God.

The clarity of Northrop Frye’s perception, the scope and suggestiveness of his conceptualizing, the wit and grace of his style, have won him universal admiration.

The poet Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) has been labeled the very icon of modernity, the scribe of the modern city, and an observer of an emerging capitalist culture. Seeing Double reconsiders this iconic literary figure and his fraught relationship with the nineteenth-century world by examining the way in which he viewed the increasing dominance of modern life. In doing so, it revises some of our most common assumptions about the unresolved tensions that emerged in Baudelaire’s writing during a time of political and social upheaval.

Françoise Meltzer argues that Baudelaire did not simply describe the contradictions of modernity; instead, his work embodied and recorded them, leaving them unresolved and often less than comprehensible. Baudelaire’s penchant for looking simultaneously backward to an idealized past and forward to an anxious future, while suspending the tension between them, is part of what Meltzer calls his “double vision”—a way of seeing that produces encounters that are doomed to fail, poems that can’t advance, and communications that always seem to falter. In looking again at the poet and his work, Seeing Double helps to us to understand the prodigious transformations at stake in the writing of modern life.

Correspondence of a Church Father.

Jerome (Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus), ca. 345–420, of Stridon, Dalmatia, son of Christian parents, at Rome listened to rhetoricians, legal advocates, and philosophers, and in 360 was baptized by Pope Liberius. He traveled widely in Gaul and in Asia Minor; and turned in the years 373–379 to hermetic life in Syria. Ordained presbyter at Antioch in 379 he went to Constantinople, met Gregory of Nazianzus and advanced greatly in scholarship. He was called to Rome in 382 to help Pope Damasus, at whose suggestion he began his revision of the Old Latin translation of the Bible (which came to form the core of the Vulgate version). Meanwhile he taught scripture and Hebrew and monastic living to Roman women. Wrongly suspected of luxurious habits, he left Rome (now under Pope Siricius) in 385, toured Palestine, visited Egypt, and then settled in Bethlehem, presiding over a monastery and (with help) translating the Old Testament from Hebrew. About 394 he met Augustine. He died on 30 September 420.

Jerome’s letters constitute one of the most notable collections in Latin literature. They are an essential source for our knowledge of Christian life in the fourth–fifth centuries; they also provide insight into one of the most striking and complex personalities of the time. Seven of the eighteen letters in this selection deal with a primary interest of Jerome’s: the morals and proper role of women. The most famous letter here fervently extols virginity.

Correspondence of a Church Father.

Aurelius Augustine (AD 354–430), one of the most important figures in the development of western Christianity and philosophy, was the son of a pagan, Patricius of Tagaste, and his Christian wife, Monnica. While studying to become a rhetorician, he plunged into a turmoil of philosophical and psychological doubts, leading him to Manichaeism. In 383 he moved to Rome and then Milan to teach rhetoric. Despite exploring classical philosophical systems, especially skepticism and Neoplatonism, his studies of Paul’s letters with his friend Alypius, and the preaching of Bishop Ambrose, led in 386 to his momentous conversion from mixed beliefs to Christianity. He soon returned to Tagaste and founded a religious community, and in 395 or 396 became bishop of Hippo.

From Augustine’s large output the Loeb Classical Library offers that great autobiography the Confessions (in two volumes); On the City of God (seven volumes), which unfolds God’s action in the progress of the world’s history, and propounds the superiority of Christian beliefs over pagan in adversity; and a selection of Letters which are important for the study of ecclesiastical theologians.

Personal records from the sands of Egypt.

This is the first of two volumes giving a selection of Greek papyri relating to private and public business. They cover a period from before 300 BC to the eighth century AD. Most were found in rubbish heaps or remains of ancient houses or in tombs in Egypt. From such papyri we get much information about administration and social and economic conditions in Egypt, and about native Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Byzantine law, as well as glimpses of ordinary life.

This volume contains: Agreements, 71 examples; these concern marriage, divorce, adoption, apprenticeship, sales, leases, employment of laborers. Receipts, 10. Wills, 6. Deed of disownment. Personal letters from men and women, young and old, 82. Memoranda, 2. Invitations, 5. Orders for payment, 2. Agenda, 2. Accounts and inventories, 12. Questions of oracles, 3. Christian prayers, 2. A Gnostic charm. Horoscopes, 2.

The three-volume Loeb Classical Library edition of Select Papyri also includes a volume of poetry.

The letters of John Keats are, T. S. Eliot remarked, "what letters ought to be; the fine things come in unexpectedly, neither introduced nor shown out, but between trifle and trifle." This new edition, which features four rediscovered letters, three of which are being published here for the first time, affords readers the pleasure of the poet's "trifles" as well as the surprise of his most famous ideas emerging unpredictably.

Unlike other editions, this selection includes letters to Keats and among his friends, lending greater perspective to an epistolary portrait of the poet. It also offers a revealing look at his "posthumous existence," the period of Keats's illness in Italy, painstakingly recorded in a series of moving letters by Keats's deathbed companion, Joseph Severn. Other letters by Dr. James Clark, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Richard Woodhouse--omitted from other selections of Keats's letters--offer valuable additional testimony concerning Keats the man.

Edited for greater readability, with annotations reduced and punctuation and spelling judiciously modernized, this selection recreates the spontaneity with which these letters were originally written.

Pagans’ advocate.

Libanius (AD 314–393) was one of the last great publicists and teachers of Greek paganism. His story, as presented in his Autobiography and the Life by Eunapius, is supplemented by information from a correspondence of over 1500 items and sixty-four extant orations. A native of Antioch, he began his teaching career in Constantinople in 340, but soon had to retire to Nicomedeia, where he became acquainted with St. Basil and influential in the development of Julian’s paganism. After a second tenure at Constantinople he returned home to become professor in Antioch in 354, a position which he held, through many vicissitudes, for the rest of his life.

As sophist of Antioch and a devoted exponent of the traditional Hellenic system of education, Libanius remained deliberately and contemptuously unacquainted with Latin, and deplored its growing influence. Naturally humane in outlook and sympathizing with the local bourgeoisie, he criticized bitterly the encroachments and oppressions of the central administration, and the general cruelty of his day. Sincerely pagan in an increasingly aggressive Christian society, he became an influential voice against religious persecution, official or unofficial. The orations on Julian, to whose memory he remained devoted all his life, were composed between 362 and 365, and present Libanius with a congenial subject, revealing him at the height of his powers and influence.

Also available in the Loeb Classical Library is a two-volume edition of Libanius’ Autobiography and Selected Letters.

Pagans’ advocate.

Libanius (AD 314–393) was one of the last great publicists and teachers of Greek paganism. His story, as presented in his Autobiography and the Life by Eunapius, is supplemented by information from a correspondence of over 1500 items and sixty-four extant orations. A native of Antioch, he began his teaching career in Constantinople in 340, but soon had to retire to Nicomedeia, where he became acquainted with St. Basil and influential in the development of Julian’s paganism. After a second tenure at Constantinople he returned home to become professor in Antioch in 354, a position which he held, through many vicissitudes, for the rest of his life.

As sophist of Antioch and a devoted exponent of the traditional Hellenic system of education, Libanius remained deliberately and contemptuously unacquainted with Latin, and deplored its growing influence. Naturally humane in outlook and sympathizing with the local bourgeoisie, he criticized bitterly the encroachments and oppressions of the central administration, and the general cruelty of his day. Sincerely pagan in an increasingly aggressive Christian society, he became an influential voice against religious persecution, official or unofficial. The orations on Julian, to whose memory he remained devoted all his life, were composed between 362 and 365, and present Libanius with a congenial subject, revealing him at the height of his powers and influence.

Also available in the Loeb Classical Library is a two-volume edition of Libanius’ Autobiography and Selected Letters.

A superb new translation of Kafka’s classic stories, authoritatively annotated and beautifully illustrated.

Selected Stories presents new, exquisite renderings of short works by one of the indisputable masters of the form. Award-winning translator and scholar Mark Harman offers the most sensitive English rendering yet of Franz Kafka’s unique German prose—terse, witty, laden with ambiguities and double meanings. With his in-depth biographical introduction and notes illuminating the stories and placing them in context, Harman breathes new life into masterpieces that have often been misunderstood.

Included are sixteen stories, arranged chronologically to convey a sense of Kafka’s artistic development. Some, like “The Judgment,” “In the Penal Colony,” “A Hunger Artist,” and “The Transformation” (usually, though misleadingly, translated as “The Metamorphosis”), represent the pinnacle of Kafka’s achievement. Accompanying annotations highlight the wordplay and cultural allusions of the original German, pregnant with irony and humor that English readers have often missed.

Although Kafka has frequently been cast as a loner, in part because of his quintessential depictions of modern alienation, he had a number of close companions. Harman draws on Kafka’s diaries, extensive correspondence, and engagement with early twentieth-century debates about Darwinism, psychoanalysis, and Zionism to construct a rich portrait of Kafka in his world. A work of both art and scholarship, Selected Stories transforms our understanding and appreciation of a singular imagination.

Though he died as Benito Mussolini's prisoner, leaving only newspaper articles and fragmentary notes, Antonio Gramsci is now seen as the most significant Marxist thinker since Lenin. This volume is the first English translation of his writings on culture, organically and coherently edited from his journalism and his Prison Notebooks.

Gramsci writes about the popular and the great artists from Jules Verne to Dante, but not as so many timeless monuments. He sees artworks in the context of their reception and their absorption in particular cultures and histories. He is sensitive to the politics of culture as well as to the demands of philological scholarship, as his superb work on Dante in this volume shows. We have in this book Gramsci's changing views on particular literary movements and authors, as well as his ideas on the nature of proletarian and popular cultural criticism. Throughout he is concerned with cultural analysis and strategy rather than literary criticism by itself. The headnotes and footnotes prepared by Forgacs and Nowell-Smith address themselves both to the circumstances surrounding the composition of each segment and to the central problems of contemporary Gramsci scholarship. Antonio Gramsci is the twentieth-century writer who has most brilliantly and suggestively explored the ties that bind culture and politics. The publication of this collection is an event of major significance for theorists of all sorts.

An ARTery Best Book of the Year
An Art of Manliness Best Book of the Year

In a culture that has become progressively more skeptical and materialistic, the desires of the individual self stand supreme, Mark Edmundson says. We spare little thought for the great ideals that once gave life meaning and worth. Self and Soul is an impassioned effort to defend the values of the Soul.

“An impassioned critique of Western society, a relentless assault on contemporary complacency, shallowness, competitiveness and self-regard…Throughout Self and Soul, Edmundson writes with a Thoreau-like incisiveness and fervor…[A] powerful, heartfelt book.”
—Michael Dirda, Washington Post

“[Edmundson’s] bold and ambitious new book is partly a demonstration of what a ‘real education’ in the humanities, inspired by the goal of ‘human transformation’ and devoted to taking writers seriously, might look like…[It] quietly sets out to challenge many educational pieties, most of the assumptions of recent literary studies—and his own chosen lifestyle.”
—Mathew Reisz, Times Higher Education

“Edmundson delivers a welcome championing of humanistic ways of thinking and living.”
—Kirkus Reviews

A literary scholar and investment banker applies economic criticism to canonical novels, dramatically changing the way we read these classics and proposing a new model for how economics can inform literary analysis.

Every writer is a player in the marketplace for literature. Jonathan Paine locates the economics ingrained within the stories themselves, revealing how a text provides a record of its author’s attempt to sell the story to his or her readers.

An unusual literary scholar with a background in finance, Paine mines stories for evidence of the conditions of their production. Through his wholly original reading, Balzac’s The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans becomes a secret diary of its author’s struggles to cope with the commercializing influence of serial publication in newspapers. The Brothers Karamazov transforms into a story of Dostoevsky’s sequential bets with his readers, present and future, about how to write a novel. Zola’s Money documents the rise of big business and is itself a product of Zola’s own big business, his factory of novels.

Combining close readings with detailed analyses of the nineteenth-century publishing contexts in which prose fiction first became a product, Selling the Story shows how the business of literature affects even literary devices such as genre, plot, and repetition. Paine argues that no book can be properly understood without reference to its point of sale: the author’s knowledge of the market, of reader expectations, and of his or her own efforts to define and achieve literary value.

Sense and Sensibility (1811) marked the auspicious debut of a novelist identified only as “A Lady.” Jane Austen’s name has since become as familiar as Shakespeare’s, and her tale of two sisters has lost none of its power to delight. Patricia Meyer Spacks guides readers to a deeper appreciation of the richness of Austen’s delineation of her heroines, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, as they experience love, romance, and heartbreak. On display again in the editor’s running commentary are the wit and light touch that delighted readers of Spacks’s Pride and Prejudice: An Annotated Edition.

In her notes, Spacks elucidates language and allusions that have become obscure (What are Nabobs? When is rent day?), draws comparisons to Austen’s other work and to that of her precursors, and gives an idea of how other critics have seen the novel. In her introduction and annotations, she explores Austen’s sympathy with both Elinor and Marianne, the degree to which the sisters share “sense” and “sensibility,” and how they must learn from each other. Both manage to achieve security and a degree of happiness by the novel’s end. Austen’s romance, however, reveals darker overtones, and Spacks does not leave unexamined the issue of the social and psychological restrictions of women in Austen’s era.

As with other volumes in Harvard’s series of Austen novels, Sense and Sensibility: An Annotated Edition comes handsomely illustrated with numerous color reproductions that vividly recreate Austen’s world. This will be an especially welcome addition to the library of any Janeite.

The Wedding of Vlahinjic Alija represents a unique experiment in field collecting of oral traditional epic poetry. In order to determine whether and exactly how the text of a long epic would change as the best of oral poets told and retold it, Milman Parry first made a complete audio-recording of Avdo Međedović singing this long heroic narrative, and then some days later had the entire epic taken down again by dictation from the same singer.

Both texts, the sung (6053 verses) and the dictated (5883 verses) are presented in this volume, showing precisely the effects both of recomposition and of the “intervention” of writing by an amanuensis. Osmanbeg Delibegović i Pavičević Luka is 13,326 verses long, a modern oral traditional epic of truly Homeric length. It is the longest complete and continuous oral epic text that has yet been recorded anywhere in the modern world.

The authors included in this volume—Ilarion, Klim Smoljatic, and Kirill of Turov—are remarkable for both their personal and literary achievements. Appointed in 1051 by Prince Jaroslav the Wise, Ilarion was the first of only two recorded “native” metropolitans of Kiev. His “Sermon on Law and Grace” constitutes the finest piece of eleventh-century Rus’ rhetorical literature. Klim Smoljatic, the second “native” metropolitan of Rus’ (from 1147), is the author of the controversial “Epistle to Foma,” which addresses the debate over the proper nature and limits of Christian learning. Finally, the twelfth-century monk Kirill of Turov is best known for his collection of allegorical lessons and some of the most accomplished sermons of Kievan Rus’. The volume contains the first complete translations of the “Epistle to Foma” and the lessons and sermons of Kirill, as well as an entirely new rendering of the “Sermon on Law and Grace.”

Simon Franklin prefaces the texts with a substantial introduction that places each of the three authors in their historical context and examines the literary qualities as well as textual complexities of these outstanding works of Rus’ literature.

As early as the 1780s, African Americans told stories that enabled them to survive and even thrive in the midst of unspeakable assault. Tracing previously unexplored narratives from the late eighteenth century to the 1920s, Laurie Maffly-Kipp brings to light an extraordinary trove of sweeping race histories that African Americans wove together out of racial and religious concerns.

Asserting a role in God's plan, black Protestants sought to root their people in both sacred and secular time. A remarkable array of chroniclers—men and women, clergy, journalists, shoemakers, teachers, southerners and northerners—shared a belief that narrating a usable past offered hope, pride, and the promise of a better future. Combining Christian faith, American patriotism, and racial lineage to create a coherent sense of community, they linked past to present, Africa to America, and the Bible to classical literature. From collected shards of memory and emerging intellectual tools, African Americans fashioned stories that helped to restore meaning and purpose to their lives in the face of relentless oppression.

In a pioneering work of research and discovery, Maffly-Kipp shows how blacks overcame the accusation that they had no history worth remembering. African American communal histories imagined a rich collective past in order to establish the claim to a rightful and respected place in the American present. Through the transformative power of storytelling, these men and women led their people—and indeed, all Americans—into a more profound understanding of their interconnectedness and their prospects for a common future.

These seven critical essays, each on a twentieth-century novelist, are disparate in content, but all are concerned with the problem of evil and inhumanity and with the paradoxes of human existence.

Each essay discusses a different author, but this independence of subject is resolved into a central theme through the interpretive approach followed by the seven critics. Each of the contributors presents his subject against the background of the current disillusionment and frustration of our age. Underlying each essay are undertones of the "absurdity" of life today for those who consider it thoughtfully, and the contrast between what men would like reality to be and what they actually find.

This unity of theme—the problem of evil, of inhumanity, of meaninglessness, the concern for the human being and his future—is developed in an interesting manner. It was exploited in different ways by the seven modern novelists discussed in the essays, and it is presented with different analytical techniques by the seven critics. Yet the reader senses the unity of feeling and purpose amid the diversity of fictional content and critical evaluation.

Besdies the interpretive Introduction by Thomas B. Whitbread, the book contains the following essays:

• R. W. Lewis, "The Conflicts of Reality: Cozzens' The Last Adam"
• Alan Friedman, "The Pitching of Love's Mansion in the Tropics of Henry Miller"
• Roger D. Abrahams, "Androgynes Bound: Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts"
• George Clark, "An Illiberal Education: William Golding's Pedagogy"
• Vance Ramsey, "From Here to Absurdity: Heller's Catch-22"
• Anthony Channell Hilfer, "George and Martha: Sad, Sad, Sad"
• Robert G. Twombly, "Hubris, Health, and Holiness: The Despair of J. F. Powers"

Literature is rife with uncertainty. Literature is good for us. These two ideas about reading literature are often taken for granted. But what is the relationship between literature’s capacity to unsettle, perplex, and bewilder us, and literature’s ethical value? To revive this question, C. Namwali Serpell proposes a return to William Empson’s groundbreaking work, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), which contends that literary uncertainty is crucial to ethics because it pushes us beyond the limits of our own experience.

Taking as case studies experimental novels by Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, Bret Easton Ellis, Ian McEwan, Elliot Perlman, Tom McCarthy, and Jonathan Safran Foer, Serpell suggests that literary uncertainty emerges from the reader’s shifting responses to structures of conflicting information. A number of these novels employ a structure of mutual exclusion, which presents opposed explanations for the same events. Some use a structure of multiplicity, which presents different perspectives regarding events or characters. The structure of repetition in other texts destabilizes the continuity of events and frustrates our ability to follow the story.

To explain how these structures produce uncertainty, Serpell borrows from cognitive psychology the concept of affordance, which describes an object’s or environment’s potential uses. Moving through these narrative structures affords various ongoing modes of uncertainty, which in turn afford ethical experiences both positive and negative. At the crossroads of recent critical turns to literary form, reading practices, and ethics, Seven Modes of Uncertainty offers a new phenomenology of how we read uncertainty now.

Presented for the first time in English, the recently discovered early manuscripts of the twentieth century’s most towering literary figure offer uncanny glimpses of his emerging genius and the creation of his masterpiece.

One of the most significant literary events of the century, the discovery of manuscript pages containing early drafts of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time put an end to a decades-long search for the Proustian grail. The Paris publisher Bernard de Fallois claimed to have viewed the folios, but doubts about their existence emerged when none appeared in the Proust manuscripts bequeathed to the Bibliothèque Nationale in 1962. The texts had in fact been hidden among Fallois’s private papers, where they were found upon his death in 2018. The Seventy-Five Folios and Other Unpublished Manuscripts presents these folios here for the first time in English, along with seventeen other brief unpublished texts. Extensive commentary and notes by the Proust scholar Nathalie Mauriac Dyer offer insightful critical analysis.

Characterized by Fallois as the “precious guide” to understanding Proust’s masterpiece, the folios contain early versions of six episodes included in the novel. Readers glimpse what Proust’s biographer Jean-Yves Tadié describes as the “sacred moment” when the great work burst forth for the first time. The folios reveal the autobiographical extent of Proust’s writing, with traces of his family life scattered throughout. Before the existence of Charles Swann, for example, we find a narrator named Marcel, a testament to what one scholar has called “the gradual transformation of lived experience into (auto)fiction in Proust’s elaboration of the novel.”

Like a painter’s sketches and a composer’s holographs, Proust’s folios tell a story of artistic evolution. A “dream of a book, a book of a dream,” Fallois called them. Here is a literary magnum opus finding its final form.

Sex, Celibacy, and Deviance is the first major study to explore the Song of Songs (or Song of Solomon) in Victorian literature and art. As the Bible’s only erotic poem, the Song of Songs is the canonical Judeo-Christian book about love, furnishing the Victorians with an authoritative and literary language for love, marriage, sex, mourning, and religious celibacy.

Duc Dau adopts a queer and feminist lens to consider how Victorians employed and interpreted the Song of Songs in their work. How did writers and artists fashion and, most importantly, challenge the norms of gender, romantic love, and marriage? Spanning the early Victorian era through the first two decades of the twentieth century, Sex, Celibacy, and Deviance considers the works of Charlotte Brontë, Thomas Hardy, Christina Rossetti, John Gray, Michael Field, Edward Burne-Jones, and Simeon Solomon alongside two lesser-known figures: Irish-born Scottish artist Phoebe Anna Traquair and the Catholic religious leader Augusta Theodosia Drane. By addressing the relevance of the Song of Songs in light of shifting and conflicting religious and social contexts, Dau provides a fresh perspective on Victorian literature, religion, and culture.