Literature ─ A World of Writing Stories, Poems, Plays and Essays

David L. Pike is Professor of Literature at American University, where he teaches courses on urban culture and the underground, cinema, modernism, Dante, Roman literature, and the novel. He is the author of Canadian Cinema since the 1980s: At the Heart of the World (U of Toronto P, 2012); Metropolis on the Styx: The Underworlds of Modern Urban Culture, 1800 —2001(Cornell UP, 2007); Subterranean Cities: The World beneath Paris and London 1800—1945 (Cornell UP), shortlisted for the 2006 Modernist Studies Association book prize; Passage through Hell: Modernist Descents, Medieval Underworlds (Cornell UP), recipient of the 1997 Gustave O. Arlt Award in the Humanities from the Council of Graduate Schools and a Choice Outstanding Academic Book for 1997; and articles on urban culture, subterranean studies, film, and medieval literature. He is co-general editor of the Longman Anthology of World Literature.

Ana M. Acosta is Associate Professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. Her book, Reading Genesis in the Long Eighteenth Century: From Milton to Mary Shelley, was published by Ashgate in 2006. She has published articles on religion, science and Enlightenment and is currently at work on a book-length project entitled “Theaters of Enlightenment: Imagined Encounters between Science and Religion in 18^th-century Culture.” She has twice been the recipient of a Whiting Fellowship, has received two PSC-CUNY awards, and was chosen in 2008 by the students at Brooklyn College as a Role Model in the conference “Standing on the Shoulders of Others.”