Books in the Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature (HUP) series

Offers a comparatist defense of hyperbole in the Baroque period. Focusing on Spanish and Mexican lyric, English drama, and French philosophy, this title reads Baroque hyperbole as a sophisticated, often sublime, frequently satiric means of making sense of worlds and selves in crisis and transformation.

This book examines the intersection of jokes, laughter, insults, and poetry in a collection of 13th- and 14th-century medieval Iberian songs. Liu shows how these jokes operate in such varied cultural contexts as the arts of augury and divination, pilgrimage, prostitution, interfaith sexuality, and medical malpractice.

First published in 1960, The Singer of Tales remains the fundamental study of the distinctive techniques and aesthetics of oral epic poetry-from South Slavic epic songs to the Iliad, Odyssey, Beowulf, and beyond. This edition offers a corrected text and is supplemented by an open-access website with audio recordings.