This book contains the memoirs of Stendahl or in his own words the 'chatter about his private life' between 1821 and 1830. It was between these dates that he moved to Paris and here looks back on his life as an eccentric bachelor. 'As well as Beyle the clairvoyant self-investigator, the sardonic analyst of Parisian salon society and deliberate cultivator of wit, here emerges Beyle the despairing lover, the shakespearean enthusiast, whose romantic sentiment run always parallel with his eighteenth-century logic'. Marie-Henri Beyle - better-known by his pen name, Stendhal - was born in Grenoble, France in 1783. He turned to writing after the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815, notable works include A Life of Rossini (1824), A Life of Napoleon (1929) and The Red and the Black published in 1830. A number of works were published posthumously, including Lamiel (1889), Memoirs of an Egotist (1892) and Lucien Leuwen (1894). Stendhal is now regarded as one of the earliest and foremost practitioners of literary realism.

Alexander the Great, according to Plutarch, carried on his campaigns a copy of the Iliad, kept alongside a dagger; on a more pronounced ideological level, ancient Romans looked to the Aeneid as an argument for imperialism. In this major reinterpretation of epic poetry beginning with Virgil, David Quint explores the political context and meanings of key works in Western literature. He divides the history of the genre into two political traditions: the Virgilian epics of conquest and empire that take the victors' side (the Aeneid itself, Camoes's Lusíadas, Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata) and the countervailing epic of the defeated and of republican liberty (Lucan's Pharsalia, Ercilla's Araucana, and d'Aubigné's Les tragiques). These traditions produce opposing ideas of historical narrative: a linear, teleological narrative that belongs to the imperial conquerors, and an episodic and open-ended narrative identified with "romance," the story told of and by the defeated. Quint situates Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained within these rival traditions. He extends his political analysis to the scholarly revival of medieval epic in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and to Sergei Eisenstein's epic film, Alexander Nevsky. Attending both to the topical contexts of individual poems and to the larger historical development of the epic genre, Epic and Empire provides new models for exploring the relationship between ideology and literary form.

It is my hope that this publication of a "lost" work by Galiani will interest scholars of many nations and disciplines. Few writers could make a more compelling claim upon such a cosmopolitan audience. An Italian with deep roots in his homeland, Galiani achieved celebrity in the salons of Paris. An ecclesiastic, his most notable concerns were worldly, to say the least. An erudite classicist, Galiani was passionately concerned about economics and technology. A philosophe and ostensibly something of a subversive, he was enthralled by power and he served for many years as a government agent and adviser at home and abroad. Galiani embodied many of the preoccupations and paradoxes of the Enlightenment. His torians and literary analysts devoted to the study of the lumie'res through out Europe are bound to find Galiani's work important. In recent years there has been an efflorescence of interest in the history of political economy and its relationship not only to the history of ideas but also to the history of social structure, economic development, admin istrative institutions, collective mentalities, and political mobilization. Galiani's work helps to crystalize many of these connections which scholarly specialization has tended to obscure. Galiani had a leading voice in one of the most significant debates in the eighteenth century on the implications of radical economic, social, and institutional change.

Ethnographic study of cultural politics in the contemporary Egyptian art world, examining how art-making is a crucial aspect of the transformation from socialism to neoliberalism in postcolonial countries.