Charlotte Bronte: A Passionate Life
by Lyndall Gordon
Paperback/418pp/W. W. Norton
HBS Price: $7.99

"[The] contradictions in [Bronte's] life are not only fully chronicled by Lyndall Gordon's splendid new biography, but also gracefully explicated to give the reader a vivid and emotionally detailed portrait of the novelist and her work...[Gordon] chooses to use her imaginative sympathies - honed to precision with earlier biographies of Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot - to delineate her subject's rich interior life." -Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

Writing Wrongs: The Work of Wallace Shawn
by W.D. King
Hardcover/242pp/Temple University Press
HBS Price: $4.99

In works such as "My Dinner with Andre" and "The Designated Mourner," playwright Wallace Shawn wrenches out of place all of the usual, comfortable mechanisms by which we operate as audiences. "Writing Wrongs" is a close and personal look into the life and literary work of the man whom Joseph Papp called "a dangerous writer." W.D. King's incisive critiques of the plays and inquiry into the life and times of their author develop a portrait of Shawn as a major figure in contemporary theater.

Medievalism and the Modernist Temper
edited by R. Howard Bloch and Stephen G. Nichols
Paperback/496pp/Johns Hopkins University Press
HBS Price: $7.99

"The institutional signs of a New Medievalism are everywhere," proclaim Bloch and Nichols in their introduction. Medievalism and the Modernist Temper brings major outstanding young medievalists into confrontation with the notion of medievalism itself in order to chart the directions the field has taken in the past and may take in the future. The collection not only explores modern conceptions of cultural patterns in the Middle Ages, but also makes a significant contribution to the wider field of sociology of knowledge in the humanities. In its largest sense, it is a study of the institution of modern scholarship, using medieval literature as a focus.

Modern Theories of Drama: A Selection of Writings on Drama and Theatre, 1840-1990
by George W. Brandt
Paperback/334pp/Oxford University Press
HBS Price: $3.99

From Richard Wagner's "The Work of Art of the Future" to Umberto Eco's "Semiotics of Theatrical Performance," Modern Theories of Drama is a kaleidoscope of critical dramatic theory, drawn from the most recent 150 years of writing about this ancient art form. Different audience profiles and new performance venues, innovative methods of presentation, a changing sense of the purposes of drama and of its philosophical content have all resulted in the striking instability of theory which confronts us today. This collection is a strong sampling of the variety of ideas in circulation, with essays by Bergson, Strindberg, Durrenmatt, Shaw, O'Neill, Yeats, Brecht, and others.

Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture, 1096-1996
edited by Sander L. Gilman and Jack Zipes
Hardcover/864pp/Yale University Press
HBS Price: $10.99

This magisterial book is the first to provide a history of Jewish writing and thought in the German-speaking world. Written by 119 of the most distinguished scholars in the field, the book is arranged chronologically (with heavy emphasis on the last 200 years) and depicts the unique contribution that Jewish writers have made to German culture and, at the same time, explores what it means to be the "other" within that mainstream culture. "An extraordinary work that will be a classic reference for Jewish and German cultural studies." --Maria Tatar, Harvard University