Till Eulenspiegel is the most famous German folk hero, a roving jester whose exploits, translated into dozens of languages, and influencing composers such as Richard Strauss, have fascinated and delighted millions for nearly five hundred years. This is the first translation of the earliest known complete edition of 1515, with interpolations from previous fragments. Its introduction recreates the historical context of the tales, while exploring their meanings and considering the controversial question of their authorship. This edition also includes the entire set of sixteenth-century woodcuts, which perfectly illustrate Till Eulenspiegel's piercing and bawdy wit.

Till Eulenspiegel: His Adventures (The ^AWorld's Classics)

Literature & Fiction

OPPENHEIMER, Paul

History & Criticism

Oxford University Press

This revolutionary study presents new facts and an original theory about the origin of the thought and literature that may be considered "modern." Using fifty-one new translations of sonnets from four languages spanning seven centuries, Oppenheimer argues that "modern" thought and literature were born with the invention of the sonnet in 13th-century Italy. In revealing the sonnet as the first lyric form since the fall of the Roman Empire meant not for music or performance but for silent reading, the book demonstrates that the sonnet was the first modern literary form deliberately intended to portray the self in conflict and to explore self-consciousness. The wide-ranging essay of Part I traces the influences of the sonnet, as invented by Giacomo da Lentino, combining historical fact with the history of ideas and literary criticism. Part II illustrates, in bilingual format, the sonnet's growing appeal and variety during the centuries that followed with translations from Italian, German, French, and Spanish. The selection presents sonnets by more than thirty-five poets, among them Dante, Petrarch, Goethe, Rilke, Ronsard, Valéry, Ibarbourou, and Lorca. The concluding section discusses previous scholarship, offers proofs of the sonnet's introspective and silent inventions, and for the first time establishes the source of the form, in Platonic-Pythagorean mathematics.

The Birth of the Modern Mind: Self, Consciousness, and the Invention of the Sonnet

Business & Money

Management & Leadership

Evil and the Demonic: A New Theory of Monstrous Behavior

The notion of evil- does it exist? what forms does it take? -has always fascinated humankind. The evil underlying such atrocities as the Holocaust, Communist China's Tibetan abattoir, and the murderous ethnic cleansing undertaken by the Serbs and Croats seems beyond explanations or analysis. In this powerfully original work, Oppenheimer analyzes the phenomenon of evil in a mental behavior that emerges in particular conditions. Oppenheimer argues that evil contains specific, predictable ingredients. By understanding its nature, we can diagnose its specific manifestations in mass murder, genocide, and serial killings. Utilizing a variety of cinematic and literary genres in developing its evidence, the book considers such familiar films as The Silence of the Lambs and Brazil, and draws upon such literary works as Richard III, Oedipus the King and the Picture of Dorian Gray. Evil and the Demonic takes a bold first step, providing a framework in which to place the horrors of human existence.

NYU Press

The notion of evil- does it exist? what forms does it take? -has always fascinated humankind. The evil underlying such atrocities as the Holocaust, Communist China's Tibetan abattoir, and the murderous ethnic cleansing undertaken by the Serbs and Croats seems beyond explanations or analysis. In this powerfully original work, Oppenheimer analyzes the phenomenon of evil in a mental behavior that emerges in particular conditions. Oppenheimer argues that evil contains specific, predictable ingredients. By understanding its nature, we can diagnose its specific manifestations in mass murder, genocide, and serial killings. Utilizing a variety of cinematic and literary genres in developing its evidence, the book considers such familiar films as The Silence of the Lambs and Brazil, and draws upon such literary works as Richard III, Oedipus the King and the Picture of Dorian Gray. Evil and the Demonic takes a bold first step, providing a framework in which to place the horrors of human existence.

Humor & Entertainment

Movies

New York University Press

The most popular painter of his day, yet an artist whose reputation has fluctuated among art scholars and critics of the succeeding centuries, Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) is chiefly remembered today for his large canvases of sensual gardens, religious scenes, and voluptuous "Rubenesque" women. In Oppenheimer's account of his life, Rubens emerges not only as a talented painter but also as an intellectual with a unique conception of beauty that proved very influential and ahead of his time. Oppenheimer explores Rubens' ideas as he tells the story of his life, which included years as a diplomat, and illuminates his response to the humanism of the Renaissance in which he lived.

Rubens: A Portrait

Arts & Photography

Individual Artists

Cooper Square Press

From Belsen to Buckingham Palace

History

Military

Quill Press

This unorthodox look at the modern obsession with guilt is the first to offer a variety of literary, philosophical, and psychological perspectives on contemporary guilt from such sources as Kafka, Dostoyevski, Maupassant, Shakespeare, Newton, Descartes, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Byron, and Shelly.

Infinite Desire: A Guide to Modern Guilt

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

UNKNO

Poetry and Freedom: Discoveries in Aesthetics, 1985–2018 (Anthem Studies in South Asian Literature, Aesthetics and Culture)

This book offers a ground-breaking exploration of the aesthetics of poetic freedom. The range is broad, from antiquity to the present and from Europe and the Middle East into the poetry of the English-speaking world. Silent reading is shown as developing for the first time since the fall of the Roman Empire into a fashionable way of reading, starting with the invention of the sonnet in the High Middle Ages. The social use of the word "we," as when a society generalizes about itself, first appears in poetry in T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." In Goethe's "Roman Elegies" anachronism becomes a literary device--also, it seems, for the first time--introducing a novel timelessness essential to modern affirmations of infinity. Revealing questions about the elusiveness of poetic freedom--what does the term actually mean?--are repeatedly tested against the accomplishments of major poets such as Whitman, Dickinson, Rilke, Dante and Virgil, and their public yet intensely private originality. The result is a fresh, and well-nigh revolutionary, way of seeing literary and modern history, or an initiation into the more striking gift of aesthetic freedom.

Anthem Press

Niccolò di Bernardo Machiavelli is not only one of the most fascinating figures of the Italian Renaissance, an outstanding author and statesman, but indisputably one of its most influential political theorists, whose fundamental contributions to ideas of political power - as well as to the history of modern drama - remain astonishingly pertinent. His adventurous life led him to notable heights as a diplomat and reformer of the Florentine military, with his replacement of mercenaries by a citizen-militia. His fall, exile and eventual rehabilitation followed as briskly as his rise.
Unlike many innovative thinkers about politics, he developed his radical theories of treachery and social transformation, here explored in terms of their originality, in an atmosphere of violence. Based on his experience of government, his insights led to a shift from understanding statehood, war and society as forms of finitude and stasis to those of process.
All this unfolds in Paul Oppenheimer's compelling recreation of Machiavelli's life as he actually lived it. Niccolò di Bernardo Machiavelli is not only one of the most fascinating figures of the Italian Renaissance, an outstanding author and statesman, but indisputably one of its most influential political theorists, whose fundamental contributions to ideas of political power - as well as to the history of modern drama - remain astonishingly pertinent. His adventurous life led him to notable heights as a diplomat and reformer of the Florentine military, with his replacement of mercenaries by a citizen-militia. His fall, exile and eventual rehabilitation followed as briskly as his rise.
Unlike many innovative thinkers about politics, he developed his radical theories of treachery and social transformation, here explored in terms of their originality, in an atmosphere of violence. Based on his experience of government, his insights led to a shift from understanding statehood, war and society as forms of finitude and stasis to those of process.
All this unfolds in Paul Oppenheimer's compelling recreation of Machiavelli's life as he actually lived it.

Machiavelli: A Life Beyond Ideology

Biographies & Memoirs

Historical

Continuum

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Books by OPPENHEIMER, Paul