Rare & Out-of-Print Literature Books - pg. 8 including Revolution and the Historical Novelby: John McWilliams

Hardcover. Lexington Books , 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover in glazed boards, 299 pages. John McWilliams has written the first, much needed account of the ways the promise and threat of political revolution have informed masterpieces of the historical novel. McWilliams provides close readings of some twenty historical novels, from Scott and Cooper through Tolstoy, Zola and Hugo, to Pasternak and Lampedusa, and ultimately to Marquez and Hilary Mantel, but with continuing regard to historical contexts past and present. He traces the transformation of the literary conventions established by Scott's Waverley novels, showing both the continuities and the changes needed to meet contemporary times and perspectives. Although the progressive hopes imbedded in Scott's narrative form proved no longer adaptable to twentieth century carnage and the rise of totalitarianism, the meaning of any single novel emerges through comparison to the tradition of its predecessors. A foreword and epilogue explore the indebtedness of McWilliams's perspective to the Marxist scholarly tradition of Georg Lukacs and Frederic Jameson, while defining his differences from them. This is a scholarly work of no small ambition and achievement. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Biblioasis, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 290 pages. Bruce Jay Friedman has done it all, charming the glitziest industries of American golden-age culture for more than half a century. Lucky Bruce is his long-awaited memoir, and it's everything we'd expect and more: here is Friedman at his best, waltzing from Madison Avenue to Hollywood and back again, and reilluminating with brilliant clarity the dazzle of post-war American life. Cameos by Joseph Heller, Philip Roth, Mario Puzo, Lillian Hellman, Warren Beatty, Marlene Dietrich, Brian Grazer, Candida Donadio, Crazy Joe Gallo, Joyce Carol Oates, Jack Richardson, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Kurt Vonnegut, and the irreplaceable Elaine. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Bloomsbury Academic, 1st, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, glazed pictorial boards, 362 pages. The essays collected in this volume were written to mark the centenary of the birth of Sir Kenneth Dover, one of the twentieth centurys most influential classical scholars. Between them, they explore the two major sides of his career: his groundbreaking scholarship on Greek language, literature and history, and the more public-facing roles he assumed in universities and at the British Academy which brought him into the national spotlight, not without some notoriety, in his later years.The contributors consider the various facets of Dover's life and work from a range of perspectives which reflect the burgeoning field of the history of scholarship. Some contributors were students and colleagues of Dovers at different stages of his career, while others are themselves leading experts in areas of Classics to which he devoted his energies. Chapters on his academic publications and on the controversies he faced in the public realm are not bland celebrations of his legacy but offer critical assessments of his motivations and achievements, cumulatively demonstrating that there is much to be learned not just about Dover himself but also about the fields he helped to shape. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY/Oxford UK, Routledge, 1st, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover in pictorial boards, 190 pages. This book examines Gore Vidal's lifelong engagement with the ancient world. Incorporating material from his novels, essays, screenplays and plays, it argues that his interaction with antiquity was central to the way in which he viewed himself, his writing, and his world. Divided between the three primary subjects of his writing - sex, politics, and religion - this book traces the lengthy dialogue between Vidal and antiquity over the course of his sixty-year career. Broughall analyses Vidal's portrayals of the ancient past in novels such as Julian (1964), Creation (1981) and Live from Golgotha (1992). He also shows how classical literature inspired Vidal's other fiction, such as The City and the Pillar (1948), Myra Breckinridge (1968), and his Narratives of Empire (1967-2000) novels. Beyond his fiction, Broughall examines the ways in which antiquity influenced Vidal's careers as a playwright, an essayist and a satirist, and evaluates the influence of classical authors and their works upon him. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Oxford University Press, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, glazed boards, 205 pages. Much has been written about Graham Greene's relationship to his Catholic faith and its privileged place within his texts. His early books are usually described as "Catholic Novels" - understood as a genre that not only uses Catholic belief to frame the issues of modernity, but also offers Catholicism's vision and doctrine as a remedy to the present crisis in Western civilization. Greene's later work, by contrast, is generally regarded as falling into political and detective genres. In this book, Mark Bosco argues that this is a false dichotomy created by a narrowly prescriptive understanding of the Catholic genre and obscures the impact of Greene's developing religious imagination on his literary art. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Faber & Faber, 1st UK, 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 251 pages. Translated from the French by Ralph Manheim.(London): Faber and Faber, (1982). First edition in English, first printing. "First published in 1982" statement to the copyright page. In this in-depth study of his life and his works, Robert explores Kafka's loneliness, his omission of the words 'lonely' and 'Jew' in his writings, compares his life with his allegories, and more. Clean copy.

Softcover. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, reprint, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 414 pages. A work of literary criticism in which Said differentiates between the concept of "origin" and "beginning", also reflecting reflexively on the role of criticism and of the intellectual within a larger culture. Clean copy.

Softcover. Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 1st, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 287 pages. Because Naipaul's work occupies such an important place in English literature today, it is necessary to understand the forces that shape his work and the issues with which he is concerned. If this study raises some of the more important questions about Naipaul's work and demonstrates that is cannot be seen as an unproblematic guide to post colonial "reality," then it would have gone a long way toward opening up the terrain in which the most meaningful discussion of his work can take place. Like it or not, Naipaul's work represents an important postcolonial impulse/response that begs to be understood and interpreted. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. NY, Simon & Schuster, 1st, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, A sociological look at the influence of Shakespeare's Shylock on world mythology describes the character's creation and his evolution on the stage, and presents writing about him by Proust, James, T. S. Eliot, and others. Amazingly, Shylock is in only five scenes in the Merchant of Venice. Yet, as pointed out by Gross, the theater critic for the London Sunday Telegraph , his impact and significance transcend his physical presence, so much so that his name and "pound of flesh" idea are almost universally known. In the first part of this character/cultural study, Gross examines the antecedents of Shylock and the play, and his development within the play. The second part considers "interpretations" both theatrical and literary in England and America until World War II; the third part considers Shylock more broadly as a touchstone (e.g., how his "type" is used by the Victorians--Trollope's Lopez, Dickens's Riah, Ruskin's use of him in Munera Pulveris ). Clean copy.

Softcover. Oakville Ontario , Mosaic Press , 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 276 pages. B&W illustrations. Here is an affectionate look back at the outsized heroes who once occupied the imagination of millions of loyal readers. The Shadow. Tarzan. Doc Savage. Captain Future. The Spider. Zero. They were the original super guys - godfathers and inpsiration to the likes of Superman, Batman, and James Bond. Fascinating and informative, The Great Pulp Heroes is a lively and entertaining history of those fabulous characters, of them gaudy, glorious magazines that spawned them, and of the amazing wordsmiths who churned out their monthly adventures. Bright, clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Barnes & Noble, reprint, 1981, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 194 pages. Includes a bibliography of Bannerman's books and 47 reproductions of the first British and first American editions and her illustrations for them. Phyllis Yuill and Justin Schiller helped with the publishing history and supplied illustrations. Hay shows that it was the illustrations of later artists that provoked the controversy over THE STORY OF LITTLE BLACK SAMBO, not Bannerman's original text or pictures. Bound in the original gilt-stamped red boards. From the dust jacket: "This first biography of Helen Bannerman covers much new ground and is based on the vast collection of letters to the children, usually lovingly illustrated, in the possession of the Bannerman family. As well as telling the story of one of the most popular children's books of all time, Elizabeth Hay's biography offers an intimate picture of the daily life of a British memsahib in the heyday of the Raj." Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Lothrop, Lee & Shepard , 1st, 1981, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 244 pages. Notable collection of writings about children's books by such contributors as Susan Cooper, Lloyd Alexander, Paula Fox, Arnold Lobel, etc. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Doubleday, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 480 pages. A fascinating figure of English literary and political history, Radclyffe Hall was born in 1880 in Bournemouth, England. Hall suffered through an exceedingly unhappy childhood until her father's death. With her inheritance, Hall leased a house in Kensington and began to live the way she pleased. She started dressing in chappish clothes, called herself Peter, then John, and wrote her first collection of verse. She was a political reactionary, a reformed Catholic, a member of the Society for Psychical Research, fussy about food and obsessive about work. She got her pipes from Dunhill's, wore brocade smoking jackets, spats in winter, and had her hair cropped off at the barber's. Hall is most famous today for her book, The Well of Loneliness, which she wrote in 1928. A novel about lesbian love, the book caused an enormous scandal on its publication and it was suppressed both in the U.S. and the United Kingdom, where Hall was put on trial under the Obscene Publications Act.

Hardcover. Athens GA, University of Georgia Press, 1st, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 176 pages. INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on front end paper. In the 1960s, as the underpinnings of society weakened, the traditional novel form seemed less suited to describe American reality. Theorists groped towards non-mimetic fiction as the tools that had sustained the novel since its birth-coherent characterization, linear plot, symbolism-became tools of New Journalism. The New American Novel of Manners explores the virtual reinvention of the novel of manners in America out of the same subjectivity that charged the works of New Journalism.In place of the rigid social structures that never seemed to depict America, novelists such as Richard Yates, Dan Wakefield, and Thomas McGuane located America's modern-day manners in its semiotics, in the system of signs that envelops us-the blue jeans people wear, the fast food they eat, the decor of the bars they drink in and the rock-and-roll lyrics that play through memories. The new generation of mannerists describe lifestyles that are determined by words and images, by actions that are dictated by what has been read and seen, and patterns of behavior in which life is edited and fictionalized. Klinkowitz reveals a fiction that is once again capable of reflecting the way people live. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Free Press, 1st, 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 270 pages, b&w illustrations. Light edgewear to dust jacket, else a clean, tight copy. Recounts the life of the English poet who died during World War I, looks at the group of his friends and fellow poets known as the Neo-Pagans, and discusses the influence of homosexuality on his life. His sonnet "The Soldier" and early death in World War I made British poet Rupert Brooke a key figure in the nation's myth of patriotism and youthful valor. Biographer Delaney places him among the Neo-pagans, a small circle of writers, artists, and intellectuals who flourished from 1908 to 1912. The group honored youth, comradeship, and the simple life and aimed to set aside the constraints of Victorianism. Delany shows how the internal dynamics of the group, not shock of war, led to its disintegration.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1st, 1975, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. First edition of this collection of pieces penned in the first half of the 1970s, by four-time Pulitzer nominee. Included are reflections on man and nature in rural Georgia ("Travels in Georgia"), a profile of an Arkansas horseman hoping to make it big in an important horse race ("Ruidoso"), a quest to discover the true location that inspired the "Marvin Gardens" square in the Monopoly game, ("In Search of Marvin Gardens"), and more. Very bright, clean copy.

Hardcover. Meadville PA, The Chautauqua-Century Press, reprint, 1892, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, tan cloth with gilt lettering and gilt and white decorations on front cover, beveled edges, top edge gilt. Illustrated with a frontispiece of King George I, and other b&w drawings and decorations by George Wharton Edwards. 211 pages, clean copy.

Hardcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1st, 1973, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket. Foreword by Joseph Frank. Erich Kahler sees cultural history as a subtle process in which reality plays upon consciousness and consciousness itself is forever transforming reality. He traces the ebb and flow of this relationship by studying changes in narrative form from its beginnings in the Gilgamesh Cycle to the end of the eighteenth century. The general direction is tow Erich Kahler sees cultural history as a subtle process in which reality plays upon consciousness and consciousness itself is forever transforming reality. He traces the ebb and flow of this relationship by studying changes in narrative form from its beginnings in the Gilgamesh Cycle to the end of the eighteenth century. Clean copy.

Softcover. London, Village Press, 1st, 1975, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 367 pages. Volume 1 only. Selected and edited by Malcolm Elwin. With his younger brother Llewelyn, to whom he had been an impressive protective figure since childhood, he spoke almost without reserve, although the tow brothers were fundamentally so different, one from the other, as brothers can be. John's imaginative ability to put himself in another's place, together with his acute awareness of human suffering, made it impossible for him to wound. Llewelyn's vivid, spontaneous and sensual response to life was sometimes not so sensitive to the feelings of others.Had their understanding not been so deeply rooted he might have wounded John by his outspoken criticism of his brother's undisciplined and torrential writing power. But in literary criticism he did not surpass John, who could and did point out flaws in Llewelyn's own work. The Mutual criticism was only one aspect of the constant exchange, when they were apart, of their thoughts and feelings in an unending flow of letters. Spine faded, a clean copy.

Softcover. Dublin NH, William L Bauhan, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 163 pages. An unconventional family idyll in pastoral Bucks County, Pennsylvania of the 1930?s is suddenly broken to pieces by the arrival of a band of writers led by poets Robert Graves and especially Laura Riding. Told from the perspective of her 12-year-old self, the author paints an evocative portrait of a family, friends, childhood adventures and events against the background of a countryside still threaded with dirt roads winding past meadows and woodland, not a shopping mall in sight.

Hardcover. NY, New York University Press, 1st, 1968, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 200 pages. Joyce Cary long a popular author among discriminating readers, is gaining a wider audience for his novels every year. This critical study of his work considers the developing relationship between his matter and his manner. It especially emphasizes his growth as artist and thinker. Looking closely at the language and structure of Cary's books, the author examines all the novels- the African ones, the historical ones, and the two trilogies most of them in detail. To gain an overall view he also considers Cary's nonfiction and some as yet unpublished material. While this study is essentially non-biographical, it does analyze Cary's interpretations of history, sociology and politics as they are gathered from the actions and words of his colorful characters. One of the most intriguing features of Dr. Wolkenfeld's book is the dialogue between characters of the various novels, where likenesses as well as dissimilarities, which reveal so much about Cary as a writer, become evident. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1st, 1980, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 266 pages. Christian religion's influence on secular Victorian culture, especially literature. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Princeton University Press, 1st, 1956, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, green cloth covers with gilt and black title on spine, 353 pages. WITH THE AUTHOR'S INSCRIPTION pasted to front fly leaf. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Faber and Faber Limited, 1st, 1959, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in an edgeworn dust jacket, 334 pages. The editor has chosen excerpts from de Tocquville's 14 notebooks he kept on his visit to America 1831-32. The detailed notes were the raw material that became his classic Democracy In America. Many of these observations never made into the final work. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Harcourt, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Tragic, comic, and utterly honest, this extraordinary memoir is at once a great family saga and a magical self-portrait of a writer who witnessed the birth of a nation and lived through its turbulent history. It is the story of a boy growing up in the war-torn Jerusalem of the forties and fifties, in a small apartment crowded with books in twelve languages and relatives speaking nearly as many. His mother and father, both wonderful people, were ill-suited to each other. When Oz was twelve and a half years old, his mother committed suicide, a tragedy that was to change his life. He leaves the constraints of the family and the community of dreamers, scholars, and failed businessmen and joins a kibbutz, changes his name, marries, has children, and finally becomes a writer as well as an active participant in the political life of Israel. Clean copy.

Softcover. Boston, David R. Godine, reprint, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover in pictorial wrappers, 368 pages. Eagerly exchanging an existence of idle privilege and social intrigue for one of hard work and literary distinction, Origo led a life characterized by vitality and commitment. Born in 1902 into a wealthy American family, she and her British mother permanently left the U.S. after the untimely death of her father in 1910. Traveling extensively throughout Europe, they eventually settled outside of Florence, becoming prominent members of the stuffy Anglo-Florentine community of expatriates. Asserting her trademark independence, she married Antonio Origo, the illegitimate son of a cavalry officer-sculptor. Together Antonio and Iris purchased and totally revitalized an arid Tuscan valley and renovated a crumbling estate. With virtually no experience and few practical skills, they transformed themselves into agrarian pioneers and their extensive acreage into a prosperous working community supporting more than 200 people. During the war years, they quietly supported the Allies, offering refuge to countless numbers of partisans and prisoners of war. In addition to these accomplishments, Iris also buried one child and raised two more, conducted several heart-wrenching extramarital affairs, and distinguished herself as both a biographer and a literary critic. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Columbia University Press, 1st, 1969, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, lightly worn dust jacket, 194 pages. Index, map, biliographies, appendices. Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, W. W. Norton & Company, reprint, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 447 pages, b&w illustrations. Sylvia Beach ran a bookshop in Paris in the 1920s and 30s and was at the heart of the literary world there which also included Hemingway, Pound, Flanner, Gide, and of course Joyce whose novel "Ulysses" she published. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. London, Jonathan Cape, 1st, 1937, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue cloth with gilt lettering on spine. Frontiepiece photograph of the author as Lord Beaconsfield. 392 pages. Autobiography dealing with the author's life up to the mid 1930s. He was the brother of A E Housman, and was well-known in his own right as a writer of plays, as well as being active in the women's suffrage campaign and in the pacifist movement. A prolific writer with around a hundred published works to his name, Housman's output eventually covered all kinds of literature from socialist and pacifist pamphlets to children's stories. He wrote an autobiography, The Unexpected Years (1937), which, despite his record of controversial writing, said little about his homosexuality, the practice of which was then illegal. Mild shelf wear. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 375 pages. B&W photographs and illustrations. Pictorial dust jacket. Green cloth with gilt title to spine. Erratum laid-in. Overall, a clean, tight copy. ohn Betjeman was by far the most popular poet of the twentieth century; his collected poems sold more than two million copies. As poet laureate of England, he became a national icon, but behind the public man were doubts and demons. The poet best known for writing hymns of praise to athletic middle-class girls on the tennis courts led a tempestuous emotional life. For much of his fifty-year marriage to Penelope Chetwode, the daughter of a field marshal, Betjeman had a relationship with Elizabeth Cavendish, the daughter of the Duke of Devonshire and lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret. Betjeman, a devout Anglican, was tormented by guilt about the storms this emotional triangle caused. Betjeman, published to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of the poet's birth, is the first to use fully the vast archive of personal material relating to his private life, including literally hundreds of letters written by his wife about their life together and apart. Here too are chronicled his many friendships, ranging from "Bosie" Douglas to the young satirists of Private Eye, from the Mitford sisters to the Crazy Gang. This is a celebration of a much-loved poet, a brave campaigner for architecture at risk, and a highly popular public performer. Betjeman was the classic example of the melancholy clown, whose sadness found its perfect mood music in the hymns of a poignant Anglicanism. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1st, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 654 pages. From the more than 4000 letters that have survived, the editors have selected some 400 letters of one of the most important 20th century authors, Edith Wharton. These range from a letter written when Wharton was twelve years old to a letter penned just before her death. The collection shows Wharton at her epistolary best and most characteristic and in all the striking variety of her many voices. Clean copt.

Hardcover. Boston, David R. Godine, 1st, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 391 pages, b&w illustrations. INSCRIBED BY PAYNE on half title page and SIGNED again on title page. The first biography of the writer/naturalist, and one of the leading founders of the modern environmental movement, Henry Beston. Scholar Daniel Payne-granted unrestricted access to the writer's archives and drawing on interviews with friends and family-has crafted a scrupulously researched narrative; one presenting a masterful portrait that traces the intellectual growth and tumultuous life of a vital American writer whose work and thought have exerted a tremendous pull on poets, naturalists, and novelists alike. This is the story of a life, at once hidden and transparent, that is here finally revealed. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, The Cresset Press, 1st UK, 1953, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 189 pages. 3rd volume of the autobiography of this celebrated thinker and writer on philosophical and metaphysical matters. The greater part deals with the period he spent in England, in Oxford, Cambridge and elsewhere, and his circle of brilliant friends and acquaintances.

Softcover. Berkeley, University of California Press, reprint, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 947 pages. Complete in one volume. Revised and annotated by Charles S. Singleton. Singleton preserves the genius of Payne's language and style, but removes the Victorianisms that intrude upon the enjoyment of contemporary readers. He adds essential annotation and original interpretation to round out this unexcelled English edition of Boccaccio's great work. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Baltimore, John Hopkins University Press, 1st, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 432 pages. Biography of Edward Gibbon, who wrote arguably the most famous work of history ever, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1789). Clean copy.

Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2003, Two hardcovers in dust dackets with sunning to spines, 479 and 493 pages. Andrew Marvell (1621-78) is best known today as the author of a handful of exquisite lyrics and provocative political poems. In his own time, however, Marvell was famous for his brilliant prose interventions in the major issues of the Restoration, religious toleration, and what he called "arbitrary" as distinct from parliamentary government. This is the first modern edition of all Marvell's prose pamphlets, complete with introductions and annotation explaining the historical context. Four major scholars of the Restoration era have collaborated to produce this truly Anglo-American edition. From the Rehearsal Transpros'd, a serio-comic best-seller which appeared with tacit permission from Charles II himself, through the documentary Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government, Marvell established himself not only as a model of liberal thought for the eighteenth century but also as an irresistible new voice in political polemic, wittier, more literary, and hence more readable than his contemporaries. Name, date on front fly leafs, otherwise clean. DUE TO WEIGHT, DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY.

Softcover. Hanover NH, Dartmouth College Press, reprint, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 277 pages. One of Rousseau?s later and most puzzling works and never before available in English, this neglected autobiographical piece was the product of the philosopher?s old age and sense of persecution. Long viewed simply as evidence of his growing paranoia, it consists of three dialogues between a character named ?Rousseau? and one identified only as ?Frenchman? who discuss the bad reputation and works of an author named ?Jean-Jacques.? Dialogues offers a fascinating retrospective of his literary career. Clean copy.

Hardcover. UK, Oxford University Press, reprint, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Two hardcover volumes in bright dust jackets, 408 and 388 pages. The secular Latin poetry of the Middle Ages is at once great in bulk and interesting in kind, embracing as it does lyrical, epical, satirical, philosophical, grammatical, and historical verse. The rhetorical tradition of the ancient world can be traced throughout its development, from the fifth to the thirteenth century, when the tradition passes over into the new literary vernaculars. No adequate English survey of this delightful and historically important literature has hitherto been made. These volumes form a sequel to the same author's 'History of Christian-Latin Poetry', and the two works together offer a complete introduction to the whole field of medieval Latin poetry. First published in 1934. Clean copies.

Hardcover. Barcelona Spain, Galaxia Gutenberg, 1st thus, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Two hardcover volumes in bright dust jackets, housed in a cardboard slipcase. ALL TEXT IN SPANISH. 1.368 and 1.454 pages. Clean set. DUE TO WEIGHT, DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY.

Hardcover. NY, St. Martin's Press, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a violet dust jacket with light fading to spine, 232 pages. A collection of essays exploring all aspects on a controversial English poet, the 17th century libertine, The Earl of Rochester. Different sections focus on sexual politics, on the poetry of intellect, and on Rochester and his contemporaries. Name, date and light pencil notations on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. Oxford UK, Clarendon Press, reprint, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover in glossy boards, 639 pages. Volume 3 ONLY of a six volume set. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. NY, Oxford University Press, 1st, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 166 pages. Pindar (c. 518-438 B.C.), one of ancient Greece's most famous lyric poets, is perhaps best known for his victory (epinicean) odes, written to honor the winners at various sets of games, such as the Olympiad. In Crown of Song, Deborah Steiner's study of these odes, she writes "If Pindar is remote from us in genre, his style strikes the reader as vivid and immediate. And in my reading of the epinicean odes, it is the poet's use of metaphor that accounts for the dynamic quality of his verse." Steiner begins her analysis by exploring both ancient and modern theories of metaphor, and then turns to specific imagery employed by the poet--plant life, athletics, minerals and numerous others--as a way of understanding how these metaphoric complexes function in the poet's praise of the victor, his assertion of his own place as perpetuator of the victor's immortal fame, and in his vision of human achievement and glory in the context of mortal life and immortal gods. Written in a lively, readable style, Crown of Song opens up the sometimes difficult verse of this celebrated ancient poet to modern readers. Name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Softcover. NY, Fordham University Press, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 387 pages. Focusing on major authors and problems from the Italian fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, from Petrarch and Boccaccio to Machiavelli, Ariosto and Tasso, A Local Habitation and a Name examines the unstable dialectic of "reality" and "imagination," as well as of "history" and "literature." Albert Ascoli identifies and interprets the ways in which literary texts are shaped by and serve the purposes of multiple, intertwined historical discourses and circumstances, and he equally probes the function of such texts in constructing, interpreting, critiquing, and effacing the histories in which they are embedded. Throughout, he poses the theoretical and methodological question of how formal analysis and literary forms can at once resist and further the historicist enterprise. Mild damp wrinkle to bottom corner of first 10 pages, otherwise very good, clean.

Hardcover. London, John Murray, 1st, 1899, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, maroon cloth stamped with gilt lettering, 262 pages. Frotis. portrait. A supplemental volume to the two-volume set The Lif and Letters of Benjamin Jowett published in 1897. Name on inside front cover, clean copy.

Softcover. Los Angeles, The Augustan Reprint Society , reprint, 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, Introduction by Vincent Carrata plus 52 pages. Facsimile reprints. Clean copy.

Softcover. Los Angeles, The Augustan Reprint Society , reprint, 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 56 pages. Introduction by Frank Ellis. A facsimile reprint.

Softcover. Los Angeles, The Augustan Reprint Society , reprint, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 12 page introduction by Peter Sabor plus a 56 page facsimile reprint of Sarah Fielding's (Henry"s sister) criticism of Samuel Richardson's novel. Clean copy.

Softcover. Los Angeles, The Augustan Reprint Society, reprint, 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 70 pages, a facsimile reprint of his fantastic tales first published in 1785. Horatio Walpole, also known as Horace Walpole, was an English art historian, man of letters, antiquarian and Whig politician. His literary reputation rests on his Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764) and his Letters, which are of significant social and political interest. "The Hieroglyphic Tales were undoubtedly written a little before the creation of the world, and have ever since been preserved, by oral tradition, in the mountains of Crampcraggiri, an uninhabited island, not yet discovered. Of these few facts we could have the most authentic attestations of several clergymen, who remember to have heard them repeated by old men long before they, the said clergymen, were born." (From Walpole's own ntroduction). Clean copy.

Softcover. Los Angeles, Augustan Reprint Society, reprint, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, Facsimile reprint of 18th century edition; stapled wraps; 64 clean, umarked pages, with 10 page introduction by Simon Varey. Fictional letters by an 18th century romance writer. Clean copy.

Softcover. Los Angeles, Augustan Reprint Society, reprint, 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 64 pages, facsimile reprint of a pamphlet, an early feminist document in the form of a poem with a 14 page introduction by Gae Holladay. Clean copy.