This richly illustrated book explores the huge creative endeavour behind Tolkien’s enduring popularity. Lavishly illustrated with over 300 images of his manuscripts, drawings, maps and letters, the book traces the creative process behind his most famous literary works – The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion and reproduces personal photographs and private papers (some of which have never been seen before in print). Tolkien drew on his deep knowledge of medieval literature and language to inform his literary imagination. Six introductory essays cover some of the main themes in Tolkien’s life and work including the influence of northern languages and legends on the creation of his own legendarium; his concept of ‘Faërie’ as a literary construct; the central importance of his invented languages in his fantasy writing; his visual imagination and its emergence in his artwork; and the encouragement he derived from the literary group known as the Inklings. This book brings together the largest collection of original Tolkien material ever assembled in a single volume. Drawing on the archives of the Tolkien collections at the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford, and Marquette University, Milwaukee, as well as private collections, this exquisitely produced catalogue draws together the worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien – scholarly, literary, creative and domestic – offering a rich and detailed understanding and appreciation of this extraordinary author.

“Take Faust, what is it? A ‘tragedy’, as its author states? A great philosophical tale? A collection of lyrical insights? Who can say. How about Moby-Dick? Encyclopedia, novel or romance? Or even a ‘singular medley,’ as one anonymous 1851 review put it? ... ‘It is no longer a novel,’ T.S. Eliot said of Ulysses. But if not novels, then what are they?” Literary history has long been puzzled by how to classify and treat these aesthetic monuments. In this highly original and interdisciplinary work, Franco Moretti builds a theory of the modern epic: a sort of super-genre that has provided many of the “sacred texts” of Western literary culture. He provides a taxonomy capable of accommodating Faust, Moby-Dick, The Nibelung’s Ring, Ulysses, The Cantos, The Waste Land, The Man Without Qualities and One Hundred Years of Solitude. For Moretti the significance of the modern epic reaches well beyond the aesthetic sphere: it is the form that represents the European domination of the planet, and establishes a solid consent around it. Political ambition and formal inventiveness are here continuously entwined, as the representation of the world system stimulates the technical breakthroughs of polyphony, reverie and leitmotif; of the stream of consciousness, collage and complexity. Opening with an analysis of Goethe’s Faust and the different historical roles of epic and the novel, Moretti moves through a discussion of Wagner’s Ring and on to a sociology of modernist technique. He ends with a fascinating interpretation of “magic realism” as a compromise formation between a number of modernist devices and the return of narrative interest, and suggests that the west’s enthusiastic reception of these texts (and One Hundred Years of Solitude in particular) constitutes a ritual self-absolution for centuries of colonialism.

Reading was so important to Marcel Proust that it sometimes seems he was unable to create a personage without a book in hand. Everybody in his work reads: servants and masters, children and parents, artists and physicians. The more sophisticated characters find it natural to speak in quotations. Proust made literary taste a means of defining personalities and gave literature an actual role to play in his novels. In this wonderfully entertaining book, scholar and biographer Anka Muhlstein, the author of Balzac’s Omelette, draws out these themes in Proust's work and life, thus providing not only a friendly introduction to the momentous In Search of Lost Time, but also exciting highlights of some of the finest work in French literature.

Widely considered the preeminent Chinese woman poet, Li Qingzhao (1084-1150s) occupies a crucial place in China’s literary and cultural history. She stands out as the great exception to the rule that the first-rank poets in premodern China were male. But at what price to our understanding of her as a writer does this distinction come? The Burden of Female Talent challenges conventional modes of thinking about Li Qingzhao as a devoted but often lonely wife and, later, a forlorn widow. By examining manipulations of her image by the critical tradition in later imperial times and into the twentieth century, Ronald C. Egan brings to light the ways in which critics sought to accommodate her to cultural norms, molding her “talent” to make it compatible with ideals of womanly conduct and identity. Contested images of Li, including a heated controversy concerning her remarriage and its implications for her “devotion” to her first husband, reveal the difficulty literary culture has had in coping with this woman of extraordinary conduct and ability. The study ends with a reappraisal of Li’s poetry, freed from the autobiographical and reductive readings that were traditionally imposed on it and which remain standard even today.

本书作者将历代古籍中保存的谶谣、谶语摘录、汇辑起来，其内容分大预言、碑铭谶、科名谶、诗词谶、政事谶、杂说六大板块。

The senses and their understanding by the medieval laity is an exciting arena in which many authors of the golden age of Middle English vernacular literature exercised their exegetical ability and literary craftsmanship. This book examines the representation of the divine by the anonymous fourteenth-century Pearl-poet, through a close reading of his three “scriptural” Middle English poems, Cleanness, Patience and Pearl, against the background of the culture of sensorium in late medieval England. In this book, individual corporeal senses and general ideas about sensory perception will be investigated, as well as the non-physical senses. By bringing the Pearl-poet’s treatment of the sensorium－both of God and of humans－into the focus of attention, Dr Bao illustrates how human interpretation of sense-perceptible signs, and their decision to regulate sensory experience accordingly, play a significant role in the poet’s “vernacular theology”, and in the spiritual life of late medieval English laity. 14世纪中古英语头韵复兴运动中的翘楚诗人“珍珠”的全部作品仅有一份手稿存世（大英图书馆柯顿·尼禄A.x手稿）。本书立足于对《珍珠》手稿中三首基于经文的长诗（《清洁》《坚忍》《珍珠》）之中古英语原文的训诂和细读，研究“珍珠”诗人对神性的理解，并探讨诗人对中世纪感官文化及相关思想史背景的反刍。 无论在理论或实践层面,感官及对感官认知的态度在中世纪人道德、宗教、情感模式的形成中都扮演关键的角色，深入研究感官文化的一个重要途径就是文学作品。本书每一章节聚焦《珍珠》手稿的一部作品，研究其中示例人物如何通过规范自己的感官经验，将“抑肉扬灵”的古典感官论中被贬抑的“身体感官”转化为一种通往救赎的路径。本书还将通过探讨“内感官”“精神感官”“神秘感官”等概念在文本中的呈现，比较中世纪感官论与现代感官论的关键差异。作者在语文学—文学解读的基础上，同时考察8—15世纪手抄本中对感官的图像学表述，试图梳理并书写一种形成于图文互动过程中的文学感官史。

──因為懂得，所以慈悲。 ──我們回不去了。 ──見了他，她變得很低很低，低到塵埃裏。 ──長的是磨難，短的是人生。 ──生命是一襲華美的袍，爬滿了蚤子。 這些句子，可能你都熟悉，更因此愛上張愛玲其他文字。但，你真的了解張愛玲嗎？你可知道張愛玲最怕死？最喜歡吃叉燒炒飯？最喜歡用什麼方式占卜？還曾經寫信給王家衛？會用佛洛伊德的角度看李商隱的詩？會寫出「盡我最大力量，別的就管他娘」（I do my best and damn the rest / Do my damnedest and the rest be damned）這種句子？翻開張愛玲寫給友人的書信、散文稿、筆記簿，發現她的內心世界如此豐富又複雜。一起跟作者走進張愛玲的內心世界，重新認識《小團圓》、《少帥》等作品，以及她從上海到香港、到美國的生活點滴。