Series: Princeton Legacy Library

The ancient land and the modern nation of Afghanistan are the subject of Louis Dupree's book, Afghanistan. Both in the text and in over a hundred illustrations, he identifies the major patterns of Afghan history, society, and culture as they have developed from the Stone Age to the present. Originally published in 1973, the Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest...

Bismarck and the Development of Germany, Volume II: "The Period of Consolidation, 1871-1880" opens at a time when Bismarck had become the dominant figure in German and European politics, and the new German Reich was the most formidable power on the continent. Questions arose. What new goals would the "man of blood and iron" now pursue? What new conquests might...

An excellent presentation of the many complex factors which stem from the Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan. The author, as the original Czech member of the United Nations Commission for India and Pakistan, brings to his narrative first-hand experience. Originally published in 1954, Danger in Kashmir is part of the Princeton Legacy Library, which uses the latest print-on-demand technology...

The German Empire of 1871, although unified politically, remained deeply divided along religious lines. In German Nationalism and Religious Conflict, Helmut Walser Smith offers the first social, cultural, and political history of this division. He argues that Protestants and Catholics lived in different worlds, separated by an "invisible boundary" of culture, defined as a community of meaning. As these worlds...

This is the first systematic attempt to compare Herodotus and Thucydides as contemporaries, that is, as pre-Socratic thinkers who employed rather similar concepts and intellectual tools and who worked within the same theoretical framework or space. The work also brings to the study of the ancient historians widely accepted and recognisable concepts derived from contemporary historiography and the methodology of...

Alan Ritter examines the writings of Proudhon with a focus on the theme that, although Proudhon was a radical, he was also a realist and a moralist. Ritter explores the notion that the difficulties Proudhon faced are those encountered by any radical who confronts reality and has a conscience. Political Thought of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was originally published in 1969. The...

Though conditioned by the specific circumstances of eleventh-century Europe, the launching of the crusades presupposed a long historical evolution of the idea of Christian knighthood and holy war. Carl Erdmann developed this argument first in 1935 in a book that is still recognised as basic to an understanding of how the crusades came about. This first edition in English includes...

Although Mill regarded Considerations on Representative Government as a mature statement of his theory of democracy, critics have tended to treat it less seriously than most of his other major works. Dennis Thompson argues that this neglect has led to inadequate interpretations of Mill's thought on democracy. Drawing where appropriate on other writings by Mill, the author restores a balanced...

This book provides and defends an analysis of our concept of the meaning of a literary work. Interpretation challenges a number of widely held views concerning the role of an author's intention, the distinction between the "real" and the "implied" author, and the question of whether a work has not one correct, but many acceptable interpretations. Originally published in 1981,...

Written to replace and extend Torr's Ancient Ships, this generously illustrated "underwater Bible" traces the art and technology of Mediterranean ships and seamanship from their first crude stages (about 3000 B.C.) to the heyday of the Byzantine fleets. Originally published in 1971, the book provides a comprehensive insight into the development of ancient maritime practices. The Princeton Legacy Library uses...

The Sovereignty of Reason is a survey of the rule of faith controversy in seventeenth-century England. It examines the arguments by which reason eventually became the sovereign standard of truth in religion and politics, and how it triumphed over its rivals: Scripture, inspiration, and apostolic tradition. Frederick Beiser argues that the main threat to the authority of reason in seventeenth-century...

The two studies, Indivisible Magnitudes and Aristotle and Epicurus on Voluntary Action, explain two doctrines in the philosophy of Epicurus. This is achieved first by a detailed examination of the ancient Greek and Latin texts which describe them, and second by showing how earlier Greek philosophy gave rise to the problems Epicurus tackled. Originally published in 1967, the Princeton Legacy...

A penetrating analysis of the life and doctrines of the Spanish-born Arab theologian. Originally published in 1969, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi by Henry Corbin explores the profound insights of this influential figure. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press....

Stephen Dunning examines Kierkegaard's theory of stages in terms of his dialectic of inwardness, shown here to be the Ariadne's thread uniting all the major pseudonymous works. Originally published in 1985, Kierkegaard's Dialectic of Inwardness is a significant contribution to the study of Kierkegaard's philosophical approach. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously...

An award-winning account of the importance of semiotic play in Classic instrumental music, including that of Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven. Of all the repertories of Western Art music, none is as explicitly listener-oriented as that of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Yet few attempts to analyse the so-called Classic Style have embraced the semiotic implications of this fact....

C.P. Cavafy (1863-1933) is now considered by many to be the most original and influential Greek poet of this century. The qualities of his poetry that were unfashionable during his lifetime are the very ones that make his work endure: his sparing use of metaphor; his evocation of spoken rhythms and colloquialisms; his use of epigrammatic and dramatic modes; his...

This book explores the dynamic interaction between art and the sign language of the deaf in France from the philosophers to the introduction of the sound motion picture. Nicholas Mirzoeff shows how the French Revolution transformed the ancient régime metaphor of painting as silent poetry into a nineteenth-century school of over one hundred deaf artists. Painters, sculptors, photographers, and graphic...

We are often told that Shakespeare is our contemporary, yet we insist just as often on the Elizabethan quality of his work as it reflects a culture remote from our own. Beginning with this paradox, Howard Felperin explores the question of modernity in literature. He directs his attention toward several older poets and examines Shakespeare in particular to show how...

In Piccolo's poems, we meet a Sicily latent in the country of the tourist guides and the history books, but it was Piccolo far more than, say, his cousin Lampedusa, who was destined to draw out the latencies, read the signatures, crack the code. These brilliant translations will serve to introduce a whole new sensibility to Anglo-American readers. --Anthony Burgess...

Kierkegaard claimed that the gods created man because they were bored, and Baudelaire predicted that the "delicate monster" of boredom would one day swallow up the whole world in an immense yawn. Between these two statements lies the undefined expanse of ennui, whose manifestations in European literature form the fascinating subject of this book. Reinhard Kuhn's aim is to define...

Jerome Mazzaro examines Dante's Vita Nuova as an artistic correlative to what Dante conceived as an image of himself. Specifically, he explores the structure of the work in relation to medieval views of memory, self, music, form, and interpretation, and against the facts of Dante's life and culture as we have come to know them. Originally published in 1981, the...

Foremost among Japanese literary classics and one of the world's earliest novels, The Tale of Genji was written around the year A.D. 1000 by Murasaki Shikibu, a woman from a declining aristocratic family. For sophistication and insight, Western prose fiction was to wait centuries to rival her work. Norma Field explores the shifting configurations of The Tale of Genji, showing...

Interpreting the monuments of Athens in light of literature, R. E. Wycherley brings before us the city the ancients knew. Philosophers, statesmen, travelers, dramatists, poets, private citizens—the words of all these suggest how the city looked at various periods, how its monuments came to be built, and how they served the people in daily life. Professor Wycherley concentrates on the...

Invaluable... [What] comes across in these translations is the verve and immediacy of the poems' occasions. Seamus Heaney A groundbreaking translation of the brilliant first book by one of the twentieth century's most important poets. Stone, Osip Mandelstam's 1913 debut, marked the arrival of perhaps the greatest Russian poet of the twentieth century, one whose refusal to bow to Soviet...

Perhaps Greece's most important poet, Yannis Ritsos follows such eminent predecessors as Cavafy, Sikelianos, and Seferis in the dramatic and symbolic expression of a tragic sense of life. The three volumes of Ritsos's poetry translated here, Parentheses, 1946-47, Parentheses, 1950-61, and The Distant, 1975, represent a thirty-year poetic journey and a developing sensibility that link the poet's subtler perceptions at...