In this beautifully nuanced dark comedy, a 9/11 widow and her son, Hamlet, have retreated from Brooklyn to the idyllic rural countryside upstate, where for nearly eight years they have run a sustainable farm. Unfortunately, their outrageously obese neighbors, who prefer the starchy products of industrial agriculture, reject their elitist ways (recycling, eating healthy, reading).Hamlet, who is now eighteen, is beginning to suspect that something is rotten in the United States of America, when health, happiness, and freedom are traded for cheap Walmart goods, Paxil, endless war, standard curriculum, and environmental degradation. He becomes very depressed when, on the very day of the 8th anniversary of his father's death, his mother marries a horrid, boring bureaucrat named Claudius.Things get even more depressing for Hamlet when he learns from Horatio, a conspiracy theorist, that Claudius is a fraud. The deceptions, spying, and corruption will ultimately lead, as in Shakespeare's play, to tragedy.

Published just after the Second World War, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages is a sweeping exploration of the remarkable continuity of European literature across time and place, from the classical era up to the early nineteenth century, and from the Italian peninsula to the British Isles. In what T. S. Eliot called a "magnificent" book, Ernst Robert Curtius establishes medieval Latin literature as the vital transition between the literature of antiquity and the vernacular literatures of later centuries. The result is nothing less than a masterful synthesis of European literature from Homer to Goethe. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages is a monumental work of literary scholarship. In a new introduction, Colin Burrow provides critical insights into Curtius's life and ideas and highlights the distinctive importance of this wonderful book.

The legacy of ancient Greece and Rome has been imitated, resisted, misunderstood, and reworked by every culture that followed. In this volume, some five hundred articles by a wide range of scholars investigate the afterlife of this rich heritage in the fields of literature, philosophy, art, architecture, history, politics, religion, and science.

This volume contains 18 papers derived from presentations by Dutch linguists at the Eighth International Congress of Slavists.

Ovid was one of the greatest writers of classical antiquity, and arguably the single most influential ancient poet for post-classical literature and culture. In this Cambridge Companion, chapters by leading authorities from Europe and North America discuss the backgrounds and contexts for Ovid, the individual works, and his influence on later literature and art. Coverage of essential information is combined with exciting critical approaches. This Companion is designed both as an accessible handbook for the general reader who wishes to learn about Ovid, and as a series of stimulating essays for students of Latin poetry and of the classical tradition.

The Musical Topic discusses three tropes prominently featured in Western European music: the hunt, the military, and the pastoral. Raymond Monelle provides an in-depth cultural and historical study of musical topics -- short melodic figures, harmonic or rhythmic formulae carrying literal or lexical meaning -- through consideration of their origin, thematization, manifestation, and meaning. The Musical Topic shows the connections of musical meaning to literature, social history, and the fine arts.

Organised within historical, thematic, and contextual frameworks, this collection of essays examines the psychological, rhetorical, and philological complexities of sensory perception from the classical period to the late Midddle Ages.