Now available in English for the first time, this collection brings together some of noted poet Czeslaw Milosz's early essays and letters, composed in German-occupied Warsaw during the winter of 1942-43.

What made art modern? What is modern art? The Legends of the Modern demystifies the ideas and "legends" that have shaped our appreciation of modern art and literature. Beginning with an examination of the early modern artists Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and Cervantes, Didier Maleuvre demonstrates how many of the foundational works of modern culture were born not from the legendry of expressive freedom, originality, creativity, subversion, or spiritual profundity but out of unease with these ideas. This ambivalence toward the modern has lain at the heart of artistic modernity from the late Renaissance onward, and the arts have since then shown both exhilaration and disappointment with their own creative power. The Legends of the Modern lays bare the many contradictions that pull at the fabric of modernity and demonstrates that modern art's dissatisfaction with modernity is in fact a vital facet of this cultural period.

: Indian English Drama explores significant myths from Indian culture. The present book studies the significant socio-cultural crisis of contemporary society depicted by Tagore with help of historical characters from the great Indian epic. Tagore as a visionary and philosopher dealt with some crucial problems of the society of present time and comments on these issues of the society. The book significantly highlights various socio-cultural practices in Tagore’s plays from modern perspective. The first chapter deals with the playwright Rabindranath Tagore’s early life and literary contribution. Tagore depicts various myth and legends in his dramatic works from great Indian epics like Ramayana and Mahabharata.

This holistic study demonstrates the interconnected nature of early medieval origin legends and traces their growth over time.

While vampire stories have been part of popular culture since the beginning of the nineteenth century, it has been in recent decades that they have become a central part of American culture. Vampire Legends in Contemporary American Culture looks at how vampire stories -- from Bram Stoker's Dracula to Blacula, from Bela Lugosi's films to Love at First Bite -- have become part of our ongoing debate about what it means to be human. William Patrick Day looks at how writers and filmmakers as diverse as Anne Rice and Andy Warhol present the vampire as an archetype of human identity, as well as how many post-modern vampire stories reflect our fear and attraction to stories of addiction and violence. He argues that contemporary stories use the character of Dracula to explore modern values, and that stories of vampire slayers, such as the popular television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, integrate current feminist ideas and the image of the Vietnam veteran into a new heroic version of the vampire story.

A provocative study that explores medical, social, cultural, and aesthetic customs and practices of treating the dead body in Sweden in an era of modernization.

Andrzej Franaszek’s award-winning biography of Czeslaw Milosz—the great Polish poet and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980—offers a rich portrait of the writer and his troubled century, providing context for a larger appreciation of his work. This English-language edition, translated by Aleksandra Parker and Michael Parker, contains a new introduction by the translators, along with historical explanations, maps, and a chronology. Franaszek recounts the poet’s personal odyssey through the events that convulsed twentieth-century Europe: World War I, the Bolshevik revolution, the Nazi invasion and occupation of Poland, and the Soviet Union’s postwar dominance of Eastern Europe. He follows the footsteps of a perpetual outsider who spent much of his unsettled life in Lithuania, Poland, and France, where he sought political asylum. From 1960 to 1999, Milosz lived in the United States before returning to Poland, where he died in 2004. Franaszek traces Milosz’s changing, constantly questioning, often skeptical attitude toward organized religion. In the long term, he concluded that faith performed a positive role, not least as an antidote to the amoral, soulless materialism that afflicts contemporary civilization. Despite years of hardship, alienation, and neglect, Milosz retained a belief in the transformative power of poetry, particularly its capacity to serve as a source of moral resistance and a reservoir of collective hope. Seamus Heaney once said that Milosz’s poetry is irradiated by wisdom. Milosz reveals how that wisdom was tempered by experience even as the poet retained a childlike wonder in a misbegotten world.