What if Romeo and Juliet had not died? What if their plan had succeeded and they had run away together? Sweet Sorrow, Bitter Joy, set in Edwardian England, shows the young couple, with the help of a well-meaning but imprudent local vicar, escaping to start their new life together. With their feuding families reeling over the relationship between the two youngsters and the abrupt killing of another young man in the heat of the moment, circumstances are stacked against the adolescent couple from the start of their union. The shocking reaction of the feuding families leaves a bitter aftertaste in the wake of the departure of the two young people, revealing the hypocrisy of those who care more for reputation than for relationships. The two women of Stonewick Park, the lady of the house and the nurse, share the tale of young love overshadowed by recklessness and the pressure of outside influences. It is not a story of the star-crossed lovers, but of the star-crossed mothers who must cope with the loss of their children. In the end, it is the unconditional, eternal love of mother and child that conquers all.

Frontiers of Pleasure calls into question a number of influential modern notions regarding aesthetics by going back to the very beginnings of aesthetic thought in Greece and raising critical issues regarding conceptions of how one responds to the beautiful. Despite a recent rebirth of interest in aesthetics, extensive discussion of this key cluster of topics has been absent. Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi argues that although the Greek language had no formal term equivalent to the "aesthetic," the notion was deeply rooted in Greek thought. Her analysis centers on a dominant aspect of beauty--the aural--associated with a highly influential sector of culture that comprised both poetry and instrumental music, the "activity of the Muses," or mousikê. The main argument relies on a series of close readings of literary and philosophical texts, from Homer and Plato through Kant, Joyce, and Proust. Through detailed attention to such scenes as Odysseus' encounter with the Sirens and Hermes' playing of his lyre for his brother Apollo, she demonstrates that the most telling moments in the conceptualization of the aesthetic come in the Greeks' debates and struggles over intense models of auditory pleasure. Unlike current tendencies to treat poetry as an early, imperfect mode of meditating upon such issues, Peponi claims that Greek poetry and philosophy employed equally complex, albeit different, ways of articulating notions of aesthetic response. Her approach often leads her to partial or total disagreement with earlier interpretations of some of the most well-known Greek texts of the archaic and classical periods. Frontiers of Pleasure thus suggests an alternative mode of understanding aesthetics in its entirety, freed from some modern preconceptions that have become a hindrance within the field.

This edited collection explores the image of the wound as a ‘cultural symptom’ and a literary-visual trope at the core of representations of a new concept of selfhood in Early Modern Italian and English cultures, as expressed in the two complementary poles of poetry and theatre. The semantic field of the wounded body concerns both the image of the wound as a traumatic event, which leaves a mark on someone’s body and soul (and prompts one to investigate its causes and potential solutions), and the motif of the scar, which draws attention to the fact that time has passed and urges those who look at it to engage in an introspective and analytical process. By studying and describing the transmission of this metaphoric paradigm through the literary tradition, the contributors show how the image of the bodily wound—from Petrarch’s representation of the Self to the overt crisis that affects the heroes and the poetic worlds created by Ariosto and Tasso, Spenser and Shakespeare—could respond to the emergence of Modernity as a new cultural feature.

Editorial Board: Karl P. Ameriks (Notre Dame University, West Bend, USA), Margaret Atherton (University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, USA), Frederick Beiser (Syracuse University, Syracuse, USA), Fabien Capeillères (Université de Caen, France), Faustino Fabbianelli (Universitá di Parma, Italia), Daniel Garber (Princeton University, Princeton, USA), Rudolf A. Makkreel (Emory University, Atlanta, USA), Steven Nadler (University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA), Alan Nelson (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA), Christof Rapp (LMU München, D), Ursula Renz (Universität Klagenfurt, Österreich), Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann (FU Berlin, D), Denis Thouard (HU Berlin, D), Paul Ziche (Universiteit Utrecht, NL), Günter Zöller (LMU München, D) The series publishes monographs and essay collections devoted to the history of philosophy as well as studies in the theory of writing the history of philosophy. A special emphasis is placed on the contextualization of philosophical historiography into the areas of the history of science, culture, and the wider scope of intellectual history.

Continental Philosophy: A Contemporary Introduction looks at the development of the tradition, tracing it back from Kant to the present day.