This Companion offers a comprehensive introduction to the thought of the highly influential twentieth-century critic and theorist Walter Benjamin. The volume provides examinations of the different aspects of Benjamin's work that have had a significant effect on contemporary critical and historical thought. Topics discussed by experts in the field include Benjamin's relation to the avant-garde movements of his time, his theories on language and mimesis, modernity, his significance and relevance to modern cultural studies, and his autobiographical writings. Additional material includes a guide to further reading and a chronology.

Seven decades after his death, German Jewish writer, philosopher, and literary critic Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) continues to fascinate and influence. Here Uwe Steiner offers a comprehensive and sophisticated introduction to the oeuvre of this intriguing theorist. Acknowledged only by a small circle of intellectuals during his lifetime, Benjamin is now a major figure whose work is essential to an understanding of modernity. Steiner traces the development of Benjamin’s thought chronologically through his writings on philosophy, literature, history, politics, the media, art, photography, cinema, technology, and theology. Walter Benjamin reveals the essential coherence of its subject’s thinking while also analyzing the controversial or puzzling facets of Benjamin’s work. That coherence, Steiner contends, can best be appreciated by placing Benjamin in his proper context as a member of the German philosophical tradition and a participant in contemporary intellectual debates. As Benjamin’s writing attracts more and more readers in the English-speaking world, Walter Benjamin will be a valuable guide to this fascinating body of work.

No field of Latin literature has been more transformed over the last couple of decades than that of the Roman historians. Narratology, a new receptiveness to intertextuality, and a re-thinking of the relationship between literature and its political contexts have ensured that the works of historians such as Livy, Sallust, and Tacitus will be read as texts with the same interest and sophistication as they are used as sources. In this book, topics central to the entire tradition, such as conceptions of time, characterization, and depictions of politics and the gods, are treated synoptically, while other essays highlight the works of less familiar historians, such as Curtius Rufus and Ammianus Marcellinus. A final section focuses on the rich reception history of Roman historiography, from the ancient Greek historians of Rome to the twentieth century. An appendix offers a chronological list of the ancient historians of Rome.

This first comparative study of the philosophers and literary critics, Walter Benjamin and Mikhail Bakhtin, focuses on the two thinkers' conceptions of experience and form, investigating parallels between Bakhtin's theories of responsibility, dialogue, and the novel, and Benjamin's theories of translation, montage, allegory, and the aura.

A historical overview of autobiography from the works of Augustine, Montaigne, and Rousseau to the Romantic, Victorian, and modern eras.

Walter Benjamin is often viewed as a cultural critic who produced a vast array of brilliant and idiosyncratic pieces of writing with little more to unify them than the feeling that they all bear the stamp of his "unclassifiable" genius. Eli Friedlander argues that Walter Benjamin's corpus of writings must be recognized as a unique configuration of philosophy with an overarching coherence and a deep-seated commitment to engage the philosophical tradition. Friedlander finds in Benjamin's early works initial formulations of the different dimensions of his philosophical thinking. He leads through them to Benjamin's views on the dialectical image, the nature of language, the relation of beauty and truth, embodiment, dream and historical awakening, myth and history, as well as the afterlife and realization of meaning. Those notions are articulated both in themselves and in relation to central figures of the philosophical tradition. They are further viewed as leading to and coming together in The Arcades Project. Friedlander takes that incomplete work to be the central theater where these earlier philosophical preoccupations were to be played out. Benjamin envisaged in it the possibility of the highest order of thought taking the form of writing whose contents are the concrete time-bound particularities of human experience. Addressing the question of the possibility of such a presentation of philosophical truth provides the guiding thread for constellating the disparate moments of Benjamin's writings.

Satire as a distinct genre of writing was first developed by the Romans in the second century BCE. Regarded by them as uniquely 'their own', satire held a special place in the Roman imagination as the one genre that could address the problems of city life from the perspective of a 'real Roman'. In this Cambridge Companion an international team of scholars provides a stimulating introduction to Roman satire's core practitioners and practices, placing them within the contexts of Greco-Roman literary and political history. Besides addressing basic questions of authors, content, and form, the volume looks to the question of what satire 'does' within the world of Greco-Roman social exchanges, and goes on to treat the genre's further development, reception, and translation in Elizabethan England and beyond. Included are studies of the prosimetric, 'Menippean' satires that would become the models of Rabelais, Erasmus, More, and (narrative satire's crowning jewel) Swift.

This book reconstructs the lines of nihilism that Walter Benjamin took from Friedrich Nietzsche that define both his theory of art and the avant-garde, and his approach to political action. It retraces the eccentric route of Benjamin's philosophical discourse in the representation of the modern as a place of “permanent catastrophe”, where he attempts to overcome the Nietzschean nihilism through messianic hope. Using conventions from literary criticism this book explores the many sources of Benjamin's thought, demonstrating that behind the materialism which Benjamin incorporates into his Theses on the Concept of History is hidden Nietzsche's nihilism. Mauro Ponzi analyses how Benjamin’s Arcades Project uses figures such as Baudelaire, Marx, Aragon, Proust and Blanqui as allegories to explain many aspects of modernity. The author argues that Benjamin uses Baudelaire as a paradigm to emphasize the dark side of the modern era, offering us a key to the interpretation of communicative and cultural trends of today.

Walter Benjamin was perhaps the twentieth century's most elusive intellectual. His writings defy categorization, and his improvised existence has proven irresistible to mythologizers. In a major new biography, Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings present a comprehensive portrait of the man and his times, as well as extensive commentary on his work.

H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) was one of the central figures in literary modernism in the 1910s. She collaborated with Ezra Pound and others and played an important role in the early development of modernist poetry. This Cambridge Companion is a critical introduction to H. D. containing essays on all her major works. The first part explores the author's initial exclusion from the canon and her subsequent reinstatement; her tendency to merge fact with fiction in her autobiographical texts; her contribution to the little magazines; her relation to modernism; her representation of gender; and her influence on later generations of writers. The second part offers close and accessible critical analyses of H. D.'s style, her poems Hymen and Trilogy, her novels HERmione and Majic Ring, her understanding of translation as literary practice and of her notion of history in Tribute to Freud and The Gift.