Covers writers from the ancient Greeks to 20th-century authors. Includes biographical-bibliographical entries on nearly 500 writers and approximately 550 entries focusing on significant works of world literature. Each author entry provides a detailed overview of the writer's life and works. Work entries cover a particular piece of world literature in detail.

Despite her chronic illness, the French composer Lili Boulanger (1893-1918) was able to overcome great obstacles and to achieve an unusual degree of both artistic success and public acclaim during her very short lifetime. This phenomenon is the more remarkable in that her chosen field is one in which, even today, women find it difficult to be evaluated solely on artistic merits. At the age of nineteen she was the first woman to win the prestigious Premier Grand Prix de Rome in composition, an award carrying with it extended residence at the famous Villa Medici in Rome. Even before this recognition was accorded her, some of her compositions had been performed by outstanding artists of the day and had received critical praise. This first full-length study of the life and works of Lili Boulanger is based almost entirely on sources that have hitherto been unavailable, such as family photographs, records, and documents in the possession of her only surviving relative, the eminent music pedagogue Mlle Nadia Boulanger, as well as on personal reminiscences both of Nadia Boulanger and of friends of the Boulanger family. Further information was secured from newly discovered library and archival sources in addition to the young composer's personal memorabilia, correspondence, and manuscript scores, which have never before been made available for study. In order to describe accurately the ambience of the places visited by Lili Boulanger during her life, the author not only undertook the necessary archival research, but also personally retraced the travels of the composer through six European countries, using the same means of transportation that the young composer had used. Born into a family with a long tradition of artistic accomplishment, surrounded during her twenty-four years by a devoted family and friends, Lili Boulanger became a creative, productive human being. The best of her works--especially those she wrote after winning the Prix de Rome in 1913--display firmness, delicacy, strength, and mastery of compositional technique. Lili Boulanger's musical style ranges from impressionism, to a Wagnerian vocabulary, to post-impressionism and growing chromaticism in her last compositions. As Debussy observed, her music "undulates with grace." The author's analysis of the 91 musical examples from the oeuvre of Lili Boulanger, and the 53 illustrations, many drawn from among old family photographs and other privately held manuscript sources, provide two of the many highlights of this superior biography.

The First World War was the first modern, total war, one requiring the mobilisation of both civilians and combatants. Particularly in Europe, the main theatre of the conflict, this war demanded the active participation of both men and women. Women and the First World War provides an introduction to the experiences and contributions of women during this important turning point in history. In addition to exploring women’s relationship to the war in each of the main protagonist states, the book also looks at the wide-ranging effects of the war on women in Africa Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and North America. Topical in its approach, the book highlights: the heated public debates about women’s social, cultural and political roles that the war inspired their varied experiences of war women’s representation in propaganda their roles in peace movements and revolutionary activity that grew out of the war the consequences of the war for women in its immediate aftermath Containing a document section providing a wide range of sources from first-hand accounts, a Chronology and Glossary, Women and the First World War is an ideal text for students studying the First World War or the role of women in the twentieth century.

An impassioned, funny, probing, fiercely inconclusive, nearly-to-the-death debate about life and art—beers included. Caleb Powell always wanted to become an artist, but he overcommitted to life (he’s a stay-at-home dad to three young girls), whereas his former professor David Shields always wanted to become a human being, but he overcommitted to art (he has five books coming out in the next year and a half). Shields and Powell spend four days together at a cabin in the Cascade Mountains, playing chess, shooting hoops, hiking to lakes and an abandoned mine; they rewatch My Dinner with André and The Trip, relax in a hot tub, and talk about everything they can think of in the name of exploring and debating their central question (life and/or art?): marriage, family, sports, sex, happiness, drugs, death, betrayal—and, of course, writers and writing. The relationship—the balance of power—between Shields and Powell is in constant flux, as two egos try to undermine each other, two personalities overlap and collapse. This book seeks to deconstruct the Q&A format, which has roots as deep as Plato and Socrates and as wide as Laurel and Hardy, Beckett’s Didi and Gogo, and Car Talk’s Magliozzi brothers. I Think You’re Totally Wrong also seeks to confound, as much as possible, the divisions between “reality” and “fiction,” between “life” and “art.” There are no teachers or students here, no interviewers or interviewees, no masters in the universe—only a chasm of uncertainty, in a dialogue that remains dazzlingly provocative and entertaining from start to finish. James Franco's adaptation of I Think You're Totally Wrong into a film, with Shields and Powell striving mightily to play themselves and Franco in a supporting role, will be released later this year.