Pietro Bembo was both witness and participant at the centre of the Italian Renaissance. A celebrated writer, an antiquarian, a man of exquisite taste ...

Although best known internationally for his 'allegorical' novels such as Blindness (1995), in his native Portugal, José Saramago remains ...

The Italian critic Francesco De Sanctis (1817-1883) identified Italianness with backwardness in order to oppose it to European modernity and promote a ...

John Ruskin's training as an interdisciplinary polymath started in childhood. He learned to memorise the Bible at his mother's knee and published ...

Parental profligacy and the dishonesty of his guardian meant that when Edmund Spencer came of age in 1732 he inherited only a fragment of the estates ...

The Rhetoric of Exile explores the rhetorical construction of force in indirect exile and in literary responses to it. Between banishment, a compulsory ...

In her ever-evolving career, the legendary filmmaker Agnès Varda has gone from being a photographer at the Avignon festival in the late 1940s, ...

The relationship between the made and the found is one of the most fertile tensions in modern French literature. This collection of critical and creative ...

Throughout the centuries, the Italian peninsula has played an important role as a crossroads where different cultures met, transformed and continued their ...

In 1935, 230 writers from 38 countries converged on Paris to consider ways of countering the fascist threat to culture. Held against a background of a ...