An authoritative English translation of one of the most important works in the history of the novel Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1795–1796), Goethe's second novel, is a foundational work in the history of the genre-perhaps the first Bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story focusing on the growth and self-realization of the main character. The story centers on Wilhelm, a young man living in the mid-1700s who strives to break free from the restrictive...

Siegfried Kracauer (1889–1966) was a film critic and independent sociologist and theorist. He is the author of The Mass Ornament and Theory of Film (Princeton). Leonardo Quaresima is professor of film history and criticism and director of cinema studies at the University of Udine. An essential work of the cinematic history of the Weimar Republic by a leading figure of film criticism First published in 1947, From Caligari to Hitler remains an...

The origins and history of consciousness draws on a full range of world mythology to show how individual consciousness undergoes the same archetypal stages of development as human consciousness as a whole. Erich Neumann was one of C.G. Jung's most creative students and a renowned practitioner of analytical psychology in his own right. In this influential book, Neumann shows how the stages begin and end with the symbol of the Uroboros, the tail-eating...

Henri Pirenne (1862–1935) was professor emeritus at Ghent University and one of the world's leading historians. His books include Mohammed and Charlemagne and Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe. Michael McCormick is the Francis Goelet Professor of Medieval History at Harvard University. Nearly a century after it was first published in 1925, Medieval Cities remains one of the most provocative works of medieval history ever written....

R. R. Palmer (1909–2002) was professor emeritus of history at Yale University and a guest scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His books include Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of the Terror in the French Revolution (Princeton). The first volume of The Age of the Democratic Revolution won the Bancroft Prize in 1960. David Armitage is the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History at Harvard University. For the Western world, the period...

One of the most important books of the twentieth century, Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies is an uncompromising defense of liberal democracy and a powerful attack on the intellectual origins of totalitarianism. Popper was born in 1902 to a Viennese family of Jewish origin. He taught in Austria until 1937, when he emigrated to New Zealand in anticipation of the Nazi annexation of Austria the following year, and he settled in England in...

Heinrich Zimmer (1890–1943) was an Indologist, linguist, and historian of South Asian art. Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) was the author of many books on comparative mythology, including The Hero with a Thousand Faces and The Masks of God. A Princeton Classics edition of an essential work of twentieth-century scholarship on India Since its first publication, Philosophies of India has been considered a monumental exploration of the foundations...

The foundational work on shamanism now available as a Princeton Classics paperback Shamanism is an essential work on the study of this mysterious and fascinating phenomenon. The founder of the modern study of the history of religion, Mircea Eliade surveys the tradition through two and a half millennia of human history, moving from the shamanic traditions of Siberia and Central Asia-where shamanism was first observed-to North and South America, Indonesia,...

"F.E. Peters, a scholar in the comparative study of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, revisits his pioneering work after twenty-five years. Peters has rethought and thoroughly rewritten his classic The Children of Abraham for a new generation of readers - at a time when the understanding of these three religious traditions has taken on a new and critical urgency." "Peters traces the three faiths from the sixth century B.C. when the Jews returned to...

Anne Carson was born in Canada and now lives partly in Iceland. She is an acclaimed poet, essayist, translator, and classicist, and has won numerous awards, including a MacArthur, the PEN/Nabokov Award, the T. S. Eliot Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her books Autobiography of Red and Nox were both finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. Named one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time by the Modern Library Anne...