Peter De Bolla: 4 books

A history of the holiday and an “elegant, ironic, brief but deeply researched meditation on what makes America America” (Financial Times). Holidays of all sorts are celebrated in the United States, many rooted in the country’s great diversity of ethnicities, religions, and cultures. But...

In this volume of essays, scholars of the interdisciplinary field of law and literature write about the role of emotion in English law and legal theory in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The law’s claims to reason provided a growing citizenry that was beginning to establish its...

The Architecture of Concepts proposes a radically new way of understanding the history of ideas. Taking as its example human rights, it develops a distinctive kind of conceptual analysis that enables us to see with precision how the concept of human rights was formed in the eighteenth century. The...

Since the 1960s, the literary critic Harold Bloom has been producing some of the most powerful criticism in the United States. This large body of work has, since the publication of The Anxiety of Influence in 1973, increasingly distanced itself from all critical vogues, be they psychoanalytic, post-structuralist...