"This is a stunning collection . . . elegant, magisterial, and persuasive. Visions of Community in the Pre-Modern World contains new and impeccable scholarship in beautifully written and structured essays." —Roberta Frank, Douglas Tracy Smith Professor of English, Yale University   Visions of Community in the Pre-Modern World contains original essays by five leading scholars in the fields of history, art history, and literature on the ways in which communities were imagined and built between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries. These essays, which function as case studies, range geographically from Europe to Africa, the Near East to regions of Latin America. While acknowledging major factors that affect community—such as religious belief, imperial expansion, and warfare—these studies focus on precise examples and moments in the pre-modern world. The contributors reveal the inherent complexity and variety of communities within pre-modern Europe. They offer a powerful argument against sweeping generalizations about the ways in which humans form themselves into groups, and encourage further scholarly research into the ways in which communities are formed and shaped.   (view table of contents)

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A revisionist interpretation of Anglo-Saxon England. Nicholas Howe proposes that the Anglo-Saxons fashioned a myth out of the 5th-century migration of their Germanic ancestors to Britain. Through the retelling of this story, the Anglo-Saxons ordered their complex history and identified their destiny as a people. Howe traces the migration myth throughout the literature of the Anglo-Saxon period, in poems, sermons, letters and histories from the sixth to the eleventh centuries. (view table of contents)

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A collection of essays on fiction explore the concepts of character, style, tone, and genre, commenting on such literary giants as, Fielding, Sterne, Dickens, George Eliot, Tolstoy, and Kipling