André Bazin (1918-58) was renowned for almost single-handedly establishing the study of film as an accepted intellectual pursuit, as well as for being the spiritual father of the French New Wave. In 1951, Bazin co-founded and became editor-in-chief of Cahiers du Cinéma, the most influential critical periodical in the history of cinema. Five of the film critics whom he mentored at that magazine later became the most acclaimed directors of the postwar French cinema: François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Éric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, and Claude Chabrol.

The classics used to be the seminal texts of Western civilization and education. From Homer down through the Greek poets and philosophers, including the Roman poets and early Christian writers, the classics were indispensable in shaping the hearts, minds, and souls of Westerners toward the Good, True, and Beautiful. Today, however, the classics are under attack as nothing but a relic of racism, misogyny, and sexism that have no place in the modern world.

This is the first major work to present a political, legal, theological, philosophical, and missiological view - validated by ancient Jewish Rabbinical hermeneutical strategies - of the current maelstrom affecting Western society. The author employs a conservative Judeo-Christian and political standpoint in evaluating the challenge to accepted values, morals, and precepts underpinning Western civilization.

Courtly love and feminism are strange bedfellows, the one a controversial literary concept, and the other a continuing crusade. Both can be taken seriously or ridiculed. In this incisive book, Antonia Southern tries to do both with both. Courtly Love focuses a feminist lens on fourteen authors, some well-known and some less so. They aimed variously to entertain, amuse, instruct, make money, or please themselves. Marie de France is the supreme example of the last category. Sir Thomas Malory wrote in prison and needed to pass the time.

This book discusses the eight novels by American expatriate author W. B. Trites, who, although highly praised by such contemporaries H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, W. B. Maxwell, Max Beerbohm, L. P. Hartley, and Frank Harris, among others, remains curiously unknown today. His spare style, which pre-dated Hemingway’s by several decades, did not impress publishers accustomed to more expansive prose.

Ernest Hemingway pioneered the short story genre by prioritizing economy of prose. He also wrote the shortest short story: his famous six-word “For Sale: Baby Shoes Never Worn!” The whole story embodies these words, which are semantically meaningful. Influenced by Edgar Allan Poe’s “single-effect” theory, each story drives the reader to concentrate on a substantial controlling idea that directs the story from beginning to end.

The Partition of the Indian Subcontinent in 1947 unleashed unprecedented violence. In Feminist Fiction and the Indian Partition of 1947, Indian scholar Priyanka Gupta explores how women were doubly suppressed and victimized before and after the partition. The violence, and the displacement of large populations, made this historical episode of separation more and more significant for women. Novels set during the Partition offer unique viewpoints and perspectives that have not previously been explored.

Folktales of Mizoram is a translated collection of sixty-six short stories from northeast India taken up for a critical evaluation. The stories depict a typical Mizo culture in spirit and practice. This study focuses on the transformation of oral literature into written narratives. Folk practices, folk medicine, folk narratives, traditional songs, and received wisdom dominate these stories. A more insightful approach into folk narratives and songs emphasizes the world of new hermeneutics.

Hemingway and Ecocriticism focuses on the famous author’s short stories from ecocritical perspectives, which are concerned with the relationship between humans and the landscape and plead for a better understanding of nature. Of Hemingway’s first 49 short stories, 22 exhibit ecological concerns in some form or other. They reveal great damage caused to nature and human beings alike. G. Srilatha holds that while Hemingway was an unabashed hunter, fisher, and sportsman, he was also a conservationist and conveyed this attitude in most of his stories.

A group of mostly Jewish German-speaking writers, the Prague Circle included some of the most significant figures in modern Western literature. Its core members, Franz Kafka, Max Brod, Franz Werfel, Paul Kornfeld, and Egon Erwin Kisch, are renowned for their seminal dramas, lyric poetry, novels, short stories, and essays on aesthetics. The writers of the Prague Circle were bound together not by a common perspective or a particular ideology, but by shared experiences and interests.