But how to visualize the poet's story has always been a challenge for modern-day readers. In Beowulf: An Illustrated Edition, John D. Niles, a specialist in Old English literature, provides visual counterparts to Heaney's remarkable translation. More than one hundred full-page illustrations--Viking warships, chain mail, lyres, spearheads, even a reconstruction of the Great Hall--make visible Beowulf's world and the elemental themes of his story: death, divine power, horror, heroism, disgrace, devotion, and fame. This mysterious world is now transformed into one of material splendor as readers ... View More...
The plays translated in this volume represent everything one would not expect either from the third-century B.C. playwright Plautus or from Roman comedy in general.A common theme in all three comedies is the triumph of women over men. In Truculentus, prostitutes snare all of the men in the play; in Bacchides, the victims include fathers and sons. In Casina, Plautus creates a fantasy that turns traditional social and sexual roles upside down. The plays' mordant, cynical treatment of the normal plots and casts of Roman comedy, their dark humor rooted in homosexuality, oedipal encounters, cruelty... View More...
The Cambridge Chaucer Companion contains a series of essays by internationally known Chaucer experts, designed to provide a challenging introduction to the poet. The collection is divided between pieces which concentrate squarely on one or more of Chaucer's major poems, identifying themes, styles, moods and tones, and pieces of wider scope which give more general information about Chaucer's literary sources and historical background, or study his experiments with style and structure over a range of poems, or set his works in the context of medieval genres and literary traditions. While introdu... View More...
Translated and edited for study, this book presents a collection of Aeschylus's plays and fragments of plays, together with works by other dramatists which were attributed to him. Recent scholarship on Aeschylus is presented to enable an understanding of his life and times. View More...
The only surviving trilogy from ancient times - a story of murder, madness and justice Aeschylus (525-c.456 bc) set his great trilogy in the immediate aftermath of the Fall of Troy, when King Agamemnon returns to Argos, a victor in war. Agamemnon depicts the hero's discovery that his family has been destroyed by his wife's infidelity and ends with his death at her callous hand. Clytemnestra's crime is repaid in The Choephori when her outraged son Orestes kills both her and her lover. The Eumenides then follows Orestes as he is hounded to Athens by the Furies' law of vengeance and depicts Athen... View More...
A unique treatise by a poet, written for poets, on the art of poetry The La Vita Nuova is elaborately and symbolically patterned, consisting of a selection of Dante's early poems, interspersed with his own prose commentary. The poems themselves tell the story of his love for Beatrice, from their first meeting at a May Day party in her father's house, through Dante's sufferings and his attempts to conceal the true object of his devotion by the use of 'screen-loves', to his overwhelming grief at her death, ending with the transformative vision of her in heaven. These are some of the richest lov... View More...
The second volume of Dante's Divine Comedy Beginning with Dante's liberation from Hell, Purgatory relates his ascent, accompanied by Virgil, of the Mount of Purgatory - a mountain of nine levels, formed from rock forced upwards when God threw Satan into depths of the earth. As he travels through the first seven levels, Dante observes the sinners who are waiting for their release into Paradise, and through these encounters he is himself transformed into a stronger and better man. For it is only when he has learned from each of these levels that he can ascend to the gateway to Heaven: the Garden... View More...
The only suriving continuous narrative source for the events between 133 and 70 BC Appian's writings vividly describe Catiline's conspiracy, the rise and fall of the First Triumvirate, and Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon, defeat of Pompey and untimely death. The climax comes with the brith of the Second Triumvirate out of anarchy, the terrible purges of Proscriptions which followed and the titanic struggle for world mastery which was only to end with Augustus's defeat of Antony and Cleopatra.If Appian's Roman History as a whole reveals how an empire was born of the struggle against a series o... View More...
Apuleius's Golden Ass is a unique, entertaining, and thoroughly readable Latin novel--the only work of fiction in Latin to have survived from antiquity. It tells the story of the hero Lucius, whose curiosity and fascination for sex and magic results in his transformation into an ass. After suffering a series of trials and humiliations, he is ultimately returned to human shape by the kindness of the goddess Isis. Simultaneously a blend of romantic adventure, fable, and religious testament, The Golden Ass is one of the truly seminal works of European literature, of intrinsic interest as a novel ... View More...
An enchanting story that has inspired generations of writers, including Boccaccio, Shakespeare, Cervantes and Keats Written towards the end of the second century AD, The Golden Ass tells the story of the many adventures of a young man whose fascination with witchcraft leads him to be transformed into a donkey. The bewitched Lucius passes from owner to owner - encountering a desperate gang of robbers and being forced to perform lewd 'human' tricks on stage - until the Goddess Isis finally breaks the spell and initiates Lucius into her cult. It has long been disputed whether Apuleius meant this... View More...
Composed in the twelfth century in north-eastern Iran, Attar's great mystical poem is among the most significant of all works of Persian literature. A marvellous, allegorical rendering of the Islamic doctrine of Sufism - an esoteric system concerned with the search for truth through God - it describes the consequences of the conference of the birds of the world when they meet to begin the search for their ideal king, the Simorgh bird. On hearing that to find him they must undertake an arduous journey, the birds soon express their reservations to their leader, the hoopoe. With eloquence and ins... View More...
Beyond its importance as a cultural touchstone and literary work of unvarnished genius, Chaucer's unfinished epic poem is also one of the most beloved works in the English language-and for good reason: It is lively, absorbing, perceptive, and outrageously funny-an undisputed classic that has held a special appeal for generations of readers. Chaucer has gathered twenty-nine of literature's most indelible archetypes-from the exalted Knight to the bawdy Wife to the besotted Miller to the humble Plowman-in a vivid group portrait that captures the full spectrum of late-medieval English society and ... View More...
Readers of this witty and fluent new translation of The Canterbury Tales should find themselves turning page after page: by recasting Chaucer's ten-syllable couplets into eight-syllable lines, Joseph Glaser achieves a lighter, more rapid cadence than other translators, a four-beat rhythm well-established in the English poetic tradition up to Chaucer's time. Glaser's shortened lines make compelling reading and mirror the elegance and variety of Chaucer's verse to a degree rarely met by translations that copy Chaucer beat for beat. Moreover, this translation's full, Chaucerian range of diction--... View More...
One spring day, 30 pilgrims set off from an inn in Southwark for a shrine in Canterbury. The inn keeper offers a free dinner, on their return, to the person who can tell the best story. So begins an assortment of tales from such varied characters as the Knight, the Wife of Bath and the Miller. View More...
A well-established and respected series. Texts are in the original Middle English, and each has an introduction, detailed notes and a glossary. Selected titles are also available as CD recordings. View More...
In the fourteenth century Geoffrey Chaucer, who served three kings as a customs official and special envoy, virtually invented English poetry. He did so by wedding the language of common speech to metrical verse, creating a medium that could accommodate tales of courtly romance, bawdy fabliaux, astute psychological portraiture, dramatic monologues, moral allegories, and its author's astonishing learning in fields from philosophy to medicine and astrology. Chaucer's accomplishment is unequalled by any poet before Shakespeare and--in The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Cressida--ranks with that... View More...
In the fourteenth century Geoffrey Chaucer, who served three kings as a customs official and special envoy, virtually invented English poetry. He did so by wedding the language of common speech to metrical verse, creating a medium that could accommodate tales of courtly romance, bawdy fabliaux, astute psychological portraiture, dramatic monologues, moral allegories, and its author's astonishing learning in fields from philosophy to medicine and astrology. Chaucer's accomplishment is unequalled by any poet before Shakespeare and--in The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Cressida--ranks with that... View More...
