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A stand-alone edition of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound taken from Chicago’s renowned translations of the Greek tragedies.

In the wake of the Olympian gods’ clash with the Titans, Zeus punishes his former ally and fellow deity, Prometheus, for having dared to bring knowledge to humankind. In this sole surviving play of Aeschylus’s Prometheus trilogy, we find Prometheus chained in a desolate landscape, suffering great cruelty at the hands of his fellow gods. 

Drawn from the authoritative third edition of the University of Chicago Press’s Complete Greek Tragedies series, David Grene’s searing translation of Prometheus Bound is presented here in a stand-alone edition. An introduction by Glenn W. Most and Mark Griffith provides essential information about the play’s first production, plot, and reception in antiquity.

A universal test of great writers is the quality of their response to the human dilemma. Prophet in the Wilderness traces the development of that response in the works of the Argentine writer Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, from the first ambitious poems to its definitive expression in the essays and short stories.

His theme is progressive disillusionment, in history and in personal experience, both of which are interpreted in his work as accumulations of error. Modern civilization, he believes, has created many more problems than it has solved. Like Schopenhauer, Freud, and Spengler, the three thinkers who influenced him most, Martínez Estrada found in real events and circumstances all the symbols of disenchantment. Many today have begun to share this disenchantment, for since the publication of X-Ray of the Pampa in 1933 the real world has become more and more like his symbolic world.

Prophet in the Wilderness examines Martínez Estrada's foremost concern: the world as a complex reality to be discovered behind the image of one's own most intimate community. For him, the community assumed many forms: Buenos Aires, the enigmatic metropolis; the cathedral in his story "The Deluge"; the innumerable family of Marta Riquelme; Argentina itself in his masterpiece, X-Ray of the Pampa.

Martínez Estrada is the great solitary of Hispanic American literature, independent of all fashions and trends. With Borges, he had become by 1950 one of the two most discussed writers in Argentina.

Recipient of the Hubert Herring Memorial Award from the Pacific Coast Council on Latin American Studies for the best unpublished manuscript of 1973, Prose Fiction of the Cuban Revolution is an in-depth study of works by Cubans, Cuban exiles, and other Latin American writers. Combining historical and critical approaches, Seymour Menton classifies and analyzes over two hundred novels and volumes of short stories, revealing the extent to which Cuban literature reflects the reality of the Revolution.

Menton establishes four periods—1959–1960, 1961–1965,1966–1970, and 1971–1973—that reflect the changing policies of the revolutionary government toward the arts. Using these periods as a chronological guideline, he defines four distinct literary generations, records the facts about their works, establishes coordinates, and formulates a system of literary and historical classification. He then makes an aesthetic analysis of the best of Cuban fiction, emphasizing the novels of major writers, including Alejo Carpentier's El siglo de las luces, and José Lezama Lima's Paradiso. He also discusses the works of a large number of lesser-known writers, which must be considered in arriving at an accurate historical tableau.

Menton's exploration of the short story combines a thematic and stylistic analysis of nineteen anthologies with a close study of six authors: Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Calvert Casey, Humberto Arenal, Antonio Benítez, Jesús Díaz Rodríguez, and Norberto Fuentes. Several chapters are devoted to the increasing number of novels and short stories written by Cuban exiles as well as to the eighteen novels and one short story written about the Revolution by non-Cubans, such as Julio Cortázar, Carlos Martínez Moreno, Luisa Josefina Hernández, and Pedro Juan Soto.

In studying literary works to reveal the intrinsic consciousness of a historical period, Menton presents not only his own views but also those of Cuban literary critics. In addition, he clarifies the various changes in the official attitude toward literature and the arts in Cuba, using the revolutionary processes of several other countries as comparative examples.

A member of Mexico's privileged upper class, yet still subordinated because of her gender, Rosario Castellanos became one of Latin America's most influential feminist social critics. Joanna O'Connell here offers the first book-length study of all Castellanos' prose writings, focusing specifically on how Castellanos' experiences as a Mexican woman led her to an ethic of solidarity with the oppressed peoples of her home state of Chiapas.

O'Connell provides an original and detailed analysis of Castellanos' first venture into feminist cultural analysis in her essay Sobre cultura feminina (1950) and traces her moral and intellectual trajectory as feminist and social critic. An overview of Mexican indigenismo establishes the context for individual chapters on Castellanos' narratives of ethnic conflict (the novels Balún Canán and Oficio de tinieblas and the short stories of Ciudad Real). In further chapters O'Connell reads Los convidados de agosto,Album de familia, and Castellanos' four collections of essays as developments of her feminist social analysis.

 Known for her far-reaching examinations of psychoanalysis, literature, and politics, Jacqueline Rose has in recent years turned her attention to the Israel-Palestine conflict, one of the most enduring and apparently intractable conflicts of our time. In Proust among the Nations, she takes the development of her thought on this crisis a stage further, revealing it as a distinctly Western problem.

Marcel Proust’s multivolume masterpiece, À la recherche du temps perdu, began to appear in 1913. Over the next fifty years, it gained a reputation as one of the greatest literary works of the twentieth century. But the novel’s classic image as a completed work was later shattered by the discovery of unpublished drafts, and the “war of the Prousts” has kept scholars arguing over its definitive form ever since.

Christine M. Cano’s Proust’s Deadline presents a concise history of the publishing and reception of À la recherche du temps perdu, and sorts out the most important issues that have arisen from the ensuing debates about the text. She ultimately shows how this quintessential “book about time” tells another story about time’s passage: the story of Proust’s mortal confrontation with the temporality of writing, publishing, and reading.

A personal take on Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, written by a woman born into the aristocratic world it describes.

Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is many things: a staggering literary achievement, an evocation of an elite milieu, a complex reckoning with memory. For Laure Murat, it was also a map of the world into which she was born—the world of the French Aristocracy. Descended from French nobility on both sides, Murat saw the châteaux and balls of In Search of Lost Time as the backdrop to her own family story, understood anew through Proust’s eyes.

In this beautiful book, Murat explores both the oppressive constraints of the aristocratic life and the fluidity and linguistic virtuosity of Proust’s astonishing seven-volume novel, which shifts focus from codes of behavior to the experience of living. In Proust, a Family Affair, Murat celebrates the emancipating power of literature and the rewards of paying close attention to a text that may, in turn, provoke a close and loving attendance to the self.

Originally published in French, Proust, a Family Affair has won the Prix Médicis and was shortlisted for France’s most coveted literary award, the Prix Goncourt. This readable, moving translation into English by Charlotte Mandell will appeal to lovers of Proust and to all readers who appreciate personal explorations of literary masterpieces.

How the provinces, rather than cities or capitals, became the key setting dramatized in—but also transformed by—modern novels in English and French.

To be provincial is to mistake one’s narrow milieu for the world: it is to fall prey to an error of scale. But it is also to feel behind, belated, and excluded from the possibilities of the modern world. In this elegant study of the novel “on provincial time,” Victoria Baena argues that the literary geography of “the provinces” played a key role in forging European narratives of modernity.

In the wake of French revolutionaries’ suppression of older provincial identities and as Britain expanded its imperial reach, the provinces were reinvented on various scales: from countryside to small town, from domestic region to faraway colony. Baena brings together Marxist and feminist spatial theory with a close attention to the politics of narrative form in order to show how the remarkably mobile concept of the provinces developed across social and cultural frameworks from 1800 to 1933. Offering new interpretations of novels of the realist tradition—by Honoré de Balzac, George Eliot, Emily Brontë, George Sand, Thomas Hardy, Marcel Proust, Alain-Fournier, James Joyce, and Claude McKay—she shows how the question of representing the provinces transformed the modern novel.

Provinces of the Mind illuminates some of the more pernicious fictions of provincialism. But it also describes, often movingly, the desire no longer to be provincial, along with the ambivalence and alienation that can entail. Ultimately, the book shows how literary critics can use the provinces to translate questions of literary geography across borders. By interrogating the provincialisms of our own time and place, Baena suggests, critics might make a better case for those worth retaining, as well as a better grasp of those to be left behind. 

Symbol and psyche are twin concepts in contemporary symbological studies, where the symbol is considered to be a "statement" by the psyche. The psyche is a manifold of conscious and unconscious contents, and the symbol is their mediator. Because Lorca's dramatic characters are psychic entities made up of both conscious and unconscious elements, they unfold, grow, and meet their fate in a dense realm of shifting symbols.

In Psyche and Symbol in the Theater of Federico García Lorca, Rupert Allen analyzes symbologically three dramatic works of Lorca. He has found Perlimplín to be a good deal more complex in both psyche and symbol than it has been admitted to be. Yerma involves psychological complications that have not been considered in the light of modern critical analysis, and the symbolic reaches ofBlood Wedding have until this book remained largely unexplored.

Lorca was no stranger to the "agony of creation," and this struggle sometimes appears symbolically in the form of his dramatic characters. Both Yerma and Blood Wedding reflect specific problems underlying the creative act, for they are "translations" into the realm of sexuality of the creative turmoil experienced by Lorca the poet. Perlimplín portrays the paradoxical suicide as a self-murder born out of the futile attempt to create not a poem, but a self.

Previous criticism of these three plays has been dominated by critical assumptions that are transcended by Lorca's own twentieth-century mentality. Allen's analysis provides a new view of Lorca as a dramatist and presents new material to students of symbology.

Explores the way Italian women writers craft identities through writing.

In this important volume, Graziella Parati examines the ways in which Italian women writers articulate their identities through autobiography—a public act that is also the creation of a private life. Considering autobiographical writings by five women writers from the seventeenth century to the present, Parati draws important connections between self-writing and the debate over women’s roles, both traditional and transgressive.

Public reading programs are flourishing in many Latin American cities in the new millennium. They defy the conception of reading as solitary and private by literally taking literature to the streets to create new communities of readers. From institutional and official to informal and spontaneous, the reading programs all use public space, distribute creative writing to a mass public, foster collective rather than individual reading, and provide access to literature in unconventional arenas.

The first international study of contemporary print culture in the Americas, Public Pages reveals how recent cultural policy and collective literary reading intervene in public space to promote social integration in cities in Colombia, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Chile. Marcy Schwartz looks at broad institutional programs such as UNESCO World Book Capital campaigns and the distribution of free books on public transportation, as well as local initiatives that produce handmade books out of recycled materials (known as cartoneras) and display banned books at former military detention centers. She maps the connection between literary reading and the development of cultural citizenship in Latin America, with municipalities, cultural centers, and groups of ordinary citizens harnessing reading as an activity both social and literary. Along with other strategies for reclaiming democracy after decades of authoritarian regimes and political violence, as well as responding to neoliberal economic policies, these acts of reading collectively in public settings invite civic participation and affirm local belonging.

From the white editorial authentication of slave narratives, to the cultural hybridity of the Harlem Renaissance, to the overtly independent publications of the Black Arts Movement, to the commercial power of Oprah's Book Club, African American textuality has been uniquely shaped by the contests for cultural power inherent in literary production and distribution. Always haunted by the commodification of blackness, African American literary production interfaces with the processes of publication and distribution in particularly charged ways. An energetic exploration of the struggles and complexities of African American print culture, this collection ranges across the history of African American literature, and the authors have much to contribute on such issues as editorial and archival preservation, canonization, and the "packaging" and repackaging of black-authored texts. Publishing Blackness aims to project African Americanist scholarship into the discourse of textual scholarship, provoking further work in a vital area of literary study.

Publishing Latinidad brings to light the overlooked contributions of early Latinx writers and intellectuals, offering a fresh perspective on their roles in shaping American literary and cultural landscapes.

Jose O. Fernandez meticulously examines the works of notable figures like José Martí, Arturo Schomburg, Jesús Colón, José de la Luz Sáenz, Adela Sloss-Vento, and Américo Paredes, illuminating their innovative approaches to circumventing exclusionary practices in the publishing world. He demonstrates how these writers and intellectuals entered literary, cultural, and intellectual discourses through alternative modes of literary production: crónicas, translations, paratexts, bibliographies, archival practices, sketches, diaries, biographies, unpublished fiction, and scholarly monographs. Through these examples, Fernandez situates Latinx literary production in this time period within the broader context of racial and ethnic solidarity movements in the United States.

Publishing Latinidad is essential reading for anyone interested in the social and cultural underpinnings of Latinx literature and intellectual thought. It challenges traditional narratives and enriches our appreciation of the diverse voices that have long been instrumental in the fight for justice.

    In 1833 Alexander Pushkin began to explore the topic of madness, a subject little explored in Russian literature before his time. The works he produced on the theme are three of his greatest masterpieces: the prose novella The Queen of Spades, the narrative poem The Bronze Horseman, and the lyric "God Grant That I Not Lose My Mind." Gary Rosenshield presents a new interpretation of Pushkin’s genius through an examination of his various representations of madness.
    Pushkin brilliantly explored both the destructive and creative sides of madness, a strange fusion of violence and insight. In this study, Rosenshield illustrates the surprising valorization of madness in The Queen of Spades and "God Grant That I Not Lose My Mind" and analyzes The Bronze Horseman’s confrontation with the legacy of Peter the Great, a cornerstone figure of Russian history. Drawing on themes of madness in western literature, Rosenshield situates Pushkin in a greater framework with such luminaries as Shakespeare, Sophocles, Cervantes, and Dostoevsky providing an insightful and absorbing study of Russia’s greatest writer.