"An exploration and manifesto investigating the power of reading--and our potential to become radically better readers in the world"--

"One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 1998" Thomas N. Habinek is Professor of Classics at the University of Southern California and author of The Colometry of Latin Prose. This is the first book to describe the intimate relationship between Latin literature and the politics of ancient Rome. Until now, most scholars have viewed classical Latin literature as a product of aesthetic concerns. Thomas Habinek shows, however, that literature...

John Kucich is Professor of English at Rutgers University. He is the author of The Power of Lies: Transgression in Victorian Fiction; Repression in Victorian Fiction; and Excess and Restraint in the Novels of Charles Dickens. He is also the coeditor of Victorian Afterlife: Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century. British imperialism's favorite literary narrative might seem to be conquest. But real British conquests also generated a surprising...

Contains "Heart of Darkness" in which an English trading company sends a sea captain to find a renegade trader who has become mad with greed and power over the natives in the Congo; and includes three short stories, an introduction to author, questions, and suggestions for further reading.

"A visionary exploration of the life and times of Joseph Conrad, his turbulent age of globalization and our own, from one of the most exciting young historians writing today. Migration, terrorism, the tensions between global capitalism and nationalism, and a communications revolution: these forces shaped Joseph Conrad's destiny at the dawn of the twentieth century. In this brilliant new interpretation of one of the great voices in modern literature,...

"Neither modernity nor colonialism (and likewise, neither postmodernity nor postcoloniality) can be properly understood without recognition of their intertwined development. This book interprets modernity as an asymmetrically global phenomenon complexly connected to the course of Western imperialism, and demonstrates how the impact of Western modernism produced new developments in writing from all the former colonies of Europe and the US. These developments...