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One of the greatest works of world literature, Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy has, despite its enormous popularity and importance, often stymied readers with its multitudinous characters, references, and themes. But until now, students of the Inferno have lacked a suitable resource to guide their reading. This book takes readers on a geographic journey through Dante's underworld circle by circle—from the Dark Wood down to the ninth circle of Hell—in much the same way Dante and Virgil proceed in their infernal descent. Each chapter—or “region”—of the book begins with a summary of the action, followed by detailed chapters, significant verses, and useful study questions. The chapters, based on a close examination of the poet's biblical, classical, and medieval sources, help locate the characters and creatures Dante encounters and assist in decoding the poem's vast array of references to religion, philosophy, history, politics, and other works of literature.

In the wake of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Invasion, German thought was placed in a position of profound ambivalence when it came to the figure of the dynasty. On the one hand, the Revolution was understood as a disruption of traditional modes of transmission and legitimation, and this disruption was often understood and staged as a severing of dynastic family lines. On the other, after the Napoleonic Wars, most of the dynasties that had been disrupted in this way were able to continue on, fairly uninterrupted. As a result of this ambivalence, the figure of the dynasty became a favorite motif by which German intellectuals, poets, and political thinkers could interrogate the wages of continuity and discontinuity, the category of the nation, and, indeed, the question of modernity itself. In the course of the nineteenth century, however, the dynastic family underwent a marked change: what had been, in the hands of conservative and monarchist thinkers, an index of a vanishing old order, was transformed in the hands of poets and artists in a position from which to critique the new one.

In 1815, Goethe gave symbolic expression to his intense relationship with Marianne Willemer, a recently married woman thirty-five years his junior. He gave her a leaf from the ginkgo tree, explaining that, like its deeply cleft yet still whole leaf, he was “single yet twofold.” Although it is not known if their relationship was ever consummated, they did exchange love poetry, and Goethe published several of Marianne's poems in his West-East Divan without crediting her authorship. This book considers what this episode means to our estimation of a writer many consider nearly godlike in stature. The author begins by exploring the botanical and medical lore of the ginkgo, including the use of its nut as an aphrodisiac and anti-aging serum. He then delves into Goethe's writings for the light they shed on his relationship with Marianne, and reveals Goethe as a great yet human being, subject, as any other man, to the vagaries of passion.

Joyce's Ghosts realigns haunting from the romantic Gothic genre to the spectral forms of Ireland's colonial modernity. The new psychology sought to exorcise the ghost by reducing it to a projection of the mind, but in Joyce's Ireland, inner life itself was an incomplete project, and was in no position to internalize the ghost. Though originally seen as an exploration of bourgeois subjectivity, Joyce's modernism is more concerned to explore the limits of interiority, unsettling the boundaries between inner and outer worlds, past and present, representation and reality. Central to Joyce's innovative technique is the idiomatic cast given to free indirect style, which is less concerned with stream of consciousness than the “dialect of the tribe,” the inner speech of a culture in crisis. Ireland thus achieves articulation not only as subject matter or content but also as form, allowing Joyce to pioneer a mode of vernacular modernism. The shock of modernity in the colonial periphery ensured that the city, nation, and empire harbored their own phantoms, the shadows thrown by the Great Famine and the fall of Parnell in Ireland becoming part of the “involuntary memory” of the colonial subject. It was if the colonial past weighed so heavily that it could not be contained within the minds of the living. Instead of giving up the ghost, memory in Joyce's work slips its psychological moorings and returns as the nightmare of history.

The Man Who Thought He Was Napoleon explores for the first time, in archives and unpublished materials, the relationship between history and madness, ideology and pathology. “Ambitious monomania,” “revolutionary neuroses,” “democratic disease” are names of just some of the many “diseases” related to political convictions that French physicians discovered from 1789 to 1871. How can one read today this epistemological construction? Is history legible through registers of lunatic asylums and how? By investigating nineteenth-century medical cases and doctors’ observations, this book attempts to understand how political events such as revolutions and the rise of new systems of government affect mental health and/or can be represented as delirious in psychiatric and literary discourses. Rather than denouncing wrongful confinements, this book analyzes what is at stake in the intertwined discourses of madness, psychiatry, and political theory.

In the decades surrounding World War I, religious belief receded in the face of radical new ideas such as Marxism, modern science, Nietzschean philosophy, and critical theology. This book addresses both this decline of religious belief and the new modes of secular faith that took religion's place in the minds of many writers and poets. The book examines the motives for this embrace of the secular, locating new modes of faith in art, escapist travel, socialism, politicized myth, and utopian visions. James Joyce turned to art as an escape, while Hermann Hesse made a pilgrimage to India in search of enlightenment. Other writers, such as Roger Martin du Gard and Thomas Mann, sought temporary solace in communism or myth. And H. G. Wells, the book argues, took refuge in utopian dreams projected in another dimension altogether. Rooted in comparative reading of the work of writers from France, England, Germany, Italy, and Russia, the book offers insight in the human compulsion to believe in forces that transcend the individual.

A city of immense literary mystique, Prague has inspired writers across the centuries with its beauty, cosmopolitanism, and tragic history. Envisioning the ancient city in central Europe as a multilayered text, or palimpsest, that has been constantly revised and rewritten—from the medieval and Renaissance chroniclers who legitimized the city's foundational origins to the modernists of the early twentieth century who established its reputation as the new capital of the avant-garde—this book argues that Prague has become a paradoxical site of inscription and effacement, of memory and forgetting, a utopian link to the prewar and pre-Holocaust European past and a dystopia of totalitarian amnesia. Considering a wide range of writers, including the city's most famous son, Franz Kafka, it reassesses the work of poets and novelists such as Bohumil Hrabal, Milan Kundera, Gustav Meyrink, Jan Neruda, Vítězslav Nezval, and Rainer Maria Rilke and engages with other famous authors who “wrote” Prague, including Guillaume Apollinaire, Ingeborg Bachmann, Albert Camus, Paul Celan, and W. G. Sebald. The result is a comparative study that helps to explain why Prague—more than any other major European city—has haunted the cultural and political imagination of the West.

This book emphasizes that folk and fairy tales are meant to undergo constant transformations to the point of becoming unrecognizable. My book questions the received idea that classical tales such as Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty are eternal as Perrault or the Brothers Grimm told them. Challenging the traditional division between ‘oral’ and ‘literary’ tale, this book interprets ‘oral’ and ‘written’ in a new way. ‘Oral’ is a form of storytelling that is obscure, incomplete, disrespectful, and immoral, whereas ‘literary’ is what is told in a coherent and moral manner. This view of ‘oral’ versus ‘literary’ tale is already visible in Basile’s The Tale of Tales (1634), the first book of the Western tradition of literary fairy tales. Basile’s book is a literary product but reads like the transcription of a sequence of oral tales. In my analysis of The Tale of Tales, I identify in the myth of Cupid and Psyche a fundamental narrative that gave birth to innumerable other tales. The second part of this book examines how German Romanticism appropriated and interpreted Basile’s Italian collection of tales. My book examines how the Brothers Grimm and Clemens Brentano offered two very different adaptations of Basile’s book. The third part of the book deals with American post-modern interpretation of classical fairy tales.

To be rootless is to lack context, and because the conditions of modernity have tended to remove context by extracting the human from nature, erasing traditions and collective memory, and promoting placelessness, the sense of being rootless seems more prevalent than ever. Why and how have we taken the metaphor of humans as rooted creatures so literally? This book explores the ways the metaphor of rootedness has been literalized in twentieth-century France and Germany, as these two nations are the epicenters of the transformation of the root metaphor, from its biological, positivist stylings at the end of the nineteenth century, through nationalist, racializing discourses, to its recent rhizomatic, neo-paganistic treatment. In France and Germany more than anywhere else, modern cultural debates have organized themselves around the problem of roots and radicality. The appeal for a return to or a refusal of roots surfaces constantly and in unprecedented ways there due to the particular interplay of nationalism, regionalism, Catholicism, residual paganism, Philhellenism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, technophobia, and colonialism. The appeal to roots evinces a collective philosophy of cultural decline and a fear that the human has extricated itself permanently from the earth as a system. The central problems addressed in the book are the overlap of nationalism and ecology, the political uses of genealogy and etymology, the literalization of metaphors, and the overwhelming sense of alienation brought about by globalization and technological modernity.

The poet Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) has been labeled the very icon of modernity, the scribe of the modern city, and an observer of an emerging capitalist culture. This book reconsiders this iconic literary figure and his fraught relationship with the nineteenth-century world by examining the way in which he viewed the increasing dominance of modern life. In doing so, it revises some of our most common assumptions about the unresolved tensions that emerged in Baudelaire's writing during a time of political and social upheaval. The book argues that Baudelaire did not simply describe the contradictions of modernity, but that his work instead embodied and recorded them, leaving them unresolved and often less than comprehensible. Baudelaire's penchant for looking simultaneously backward to an idealized past and forward to an anxious future, while suspending the tension between them, is part of what the book calls his “double vision”—a way of seeing which produces encounters that are doomed to fail, poems that cannot advance, and communications that always seem to falter.

The cultural battle known as the quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns served as a sly cover for more deeply opposed views about the value of literature and the arts. One of the most public controversies of early modern Europe, the quarrel has most often been depicted as pitting antiquarian conservatives against the insurgent critics of established authority. This book turns the canonical vision of those events on its head by demonstrating how the defenders of Greek literature—rather than clinging to an outmoded tradition—celebrated the radically different practices of the ancient world. At a time when the constraints of decorum and the politics of French absolutism quashed the expression of cultural differences, the ancient world presented a disturbing face of otherness. This book explores how the authoritative status of ancient Greek texts allowed them to justify literary depictions of the scandalous. The book surveys the diverse array of aesthetic models presented in these ancient works and considers how they both helped to undermine the rigid codes of neoclassicism and paved the way for the innovative philosophies of the Enlightenment.