These are the first English translations of four popular French musical comedies about Mormons: Mormons in Paris (1874), Berthelier Meets the Mormons (1875), Japheth’s Twelve Wives (1890), and Stephana’s Jewel (1892). The book’s introduction and notes contextualize the plays, examining how Mormons were depicted by French playwrights, and connecting France’s shifting social landscape to representations of this new and controversial American religion.

These are the first English translations of four popular French musical comedies about Mormons: Mormons in Paris (1874), Berthelier Meets the Mormons (1875), Japheth’s Twelve Wives (1890), and Stephana’s Jewel (1892). The book’s introduction and notes contextualize the plays, examining how Mormons were depicted by French playwrights, and connecting France’s shifting social landscape to representations of this new and controversial American religion.

Johnson in Japan reflects not just the history of Samuel Johnson studies in Japan, but also the broader current conditions of scholarship in Japanese academia. In addition to Johnson’s works, the essays in this volume engage with works by other important English writers, such as Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, and Matthew Arnold, and also with later Japanese writers.

This incisive new study demonstrates how Columbian writer Manuel Zapata Olivella’s novel Changó el gran putas (1983) and Brazilian-born Ana Maria Gonçalves’ saga Um defeito de cor (2006) transcend Paul Gilroy’s paradigm of the Black Atlantic to show revolutions, communities, and femininities that prophesy a just “New World.” 

Writing Lives in the Eighteenth Century is a collection of essays on memoir, biography, and autobiography during a formative period for the genre. Employing the methodology William Godwin outlined for novelists of taking material “from all sources, experience, report, and the records of human affairs,” each contributor examines within the contexts of their time and historical traditions the anxieties and imperatives of the auto/biographer as she or he shapes material into a legacy.

Published in 1719, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is one of those extraordinary literary works whose importance lies not only in the text itself but in its persistently lively afterlife. This celebratory collection of tercentenary essays testifies to the Robinsonade’s endurance, analyzing its various literary, aesthetic, philosophical, and cultural implications in historical context.

The essays in this volume discuss critical developments in the philosophy, pedagogy, psychology, politics, and poetics of play around 1800. They illustrate that, in this time period, the parameters are set that continue to guide our debates about what are good rather than bad games or practices of play.

Narrative Mourning argues that the cultural disappearance of the dead/dying body in eighteenth-century Britain found expression in fictional representations of the relic (object) or relict (person) within certain British novels. These relics/relicts exist as material signs of loss and as compensation for loss; they exist as surrogates for the absent (living, dead, or dying) and as reliquaries for their “psychic” essences.

Between Market and Myth is a study of novels about artists and the art world written in Spain in the years following the Transition to democracy after Francisco Franco’s death. The novels studied portray a clash between the myth of artistic freedom and artists’ willing recruitment or cooptation by market forces or political influence.

Transpoetic Exchange illuminates the poetic interactions between Octavio Paz (1914-1998) and Haroldo de Campos (1929-2003) from three perspectives--comparative, theoretical, and performative. The poem Blanco by Octavio Paz, written when he was Ambassador to India in 1966, and Haroldo de Campos’ translation (or what he calls a “transcreation”) of that poem, published as Transblanco in 1986, as well as Campos’ Galáxias, written from 1963 to 1976, are the main axes around which the book is organized.

Paz and Campos, one from Mexico and the other from Brazil, were central figures in the literary history of the second half of the 20th century, in Latin America and beyond. Both poets signal the direction of poetry as that of translation, understood as the embodiment of otherness and of a poetic tradition that every new poem brings back as a Babel re-enacted.

This volume is a print corollary to and expansion of an international colloquium and poetic performance held at Stanford University in January 2010 and it offers a discussion of the role of poetry and translation from a global perspective. The collection holds great value for those interested in all aspects of literary translation and it enriches the ongoing debates on language, modernity, translation and the nature of the poetic object.

Transpoetic Exchange illuminates the poetic interactions between Octavio Paz (1914-1998) and Haroldo de Campos (1929-2003) from three perspectives--comparative, theoretical, and performative. The poem Blanco by Octavio Paz, written when he was Ambassador to India in 1966, and Haroldo de Campos’ translation (or what he calls a “transcreation”) of that poem, published as Transblanco in 1986, as well as Campos’ Galáxias, written from 1963 to 1976, are the main axes around which the book is organized.

Paz and Campos, one from Mexico and the other from Brazil, were central figures in the literary history of the second half of the 20th century, in Latin America and beyond. Both poets signal the direction of poetry as that of translation, understood as the embodiment of otherness and of a poetic tradition that every new poem brings back as a Babel re-enacted.

This volume is a print corollary to and expansion of an international colloquium and poetic performance held at Stanford University in January 2010 and it offers a discussion of the role of poetry and translation from a global perspective. The collection holds great value for those interested in all aspects of literary translation and it enriches the ongoing debates on language, modernity, translation and the nature of the poetic object.

Lothario’s Corpse explores the persistent appeal of Restoration libertine drama (and its absolutist heroes and scenarios of lawless license) in the century following its supposed disappearance from the British stage. Tracing the stage libertine’s haunting of post-1688 culture, Gustafson illustrates how its literary and political manifestations document a fantasy of sovereign power at the heart of the emergent liberal imagination.