This interdisciplinary study, situated at the cross-section of music, literature and gender, examines the woman singer and her song as a literary motif in French and German prose fiction from the 1790s to the mid-nineteenth century. Through selected case studies, this diachronic history of motifs offers a fresh perspective on canonical singer archetypes, such as Goethe's child singer Mignon and Madame de Stael's ground-breaking artist Corinne. The volume also examines lesser known narratives by authors including Caroline Auguste Fischer, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Hector Berlioz and Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, some of which have not been considered critically in this regard before. This allows for a re-evaluation of the significance of the singer motif in musical narratives from the Romantic era to the July Monarchy. The sometimes polemic, often ambivalent, yet always nuanced and multi-layered reflection on the woman singer in literature bears testimony to the complexity of the nineteenth-century musical-literary discourse and its fluid negotiation of gender relations and female performance, fitting well with that ineffable, enigmatic essence of the woman singer herself who, as a literary motif and a cultural icon, continues to resonate and fascinate well beyond the nineteenth century.

This anthology presents the writings of Lydia Pasternak Slater (1902-1989), sister of Boris Pasternak. Lydia Pasternak Slater lived successively in Russia, Germany and England, and wrote in all three languages. Her poetry is largely lyrical, occasionally humorous and always original and striking. She also wrote a number of short stories and later in life became widely known as a translator of Boris Pasternak's poems. The anthology includes her critical articles about her brother's work and about the art of translation.

This study analyzes the indicative and subjunctive da-complements in the Serbian language while comparing and contrasting them with similar finite constructions in other Slavic and Balkan languages. In complex structures, semantic properties of the matrix verb, homophonous da, and aspectual and tense properties of the embedded verb all contribute to interpretations of the morphologically unmarked subjunctive and indicative moods in the Serbian language. Merging Giannakidou's theory of mood and veridicality with Progovac's clausal structure, the author suggests that the choice of the indicative or subjunctive complement determines negation interpretation and implies that clitics in Serbian are not always restricted to the second position.

The book offers a view of national self-identification in the literary culture of twentieth century Romania with a special focus on the postcolonial paradigm. Romanian identity narratives downplay the colonial setup of the country's past and the colonial past goes unmentioned in the country's historiography and popular culture. However, the postcolonial paradigm helps readers grasp national self-identification in modern Romanian culture. The author analyses how Anglo-American reporting on interwar Romania and later Romanian historical fiction establish notions such as hybridity and cultural overlap as conducive to the making of modern Romanian culture.

Voix et silence se considerent traditionnellement comme deux phenomenes opposes, s'excluant l'un l'autre. Les contributions contenues dans ce volume se proposent de depasser une telle conception, en se centrant non seulement sur la valeur et les fonctions que les deux concepts peuvent recouvrir, mais aussi sur la relation complexe qui existe entre eux en linguistique et en litterature. Outre les deux poles constitues par la voix et le silence, on peut reperer dans le domaine des langues romanes une grande variete de voix silencieuses ou de silences expressifs : la communication non verbale et son interaction avec le langage verbal, les differentes voix (plus ou moins silencieuses) donnant expression a ce qui ne peut pas etre dit, ou bien la representation graphique - et donc apparemment " muette " - d'un phenomene potentiellement acoustique. Le cri silencieux de Daphne, rendu visible dans la sculpture de Gian Lorenzo Bernini illustrant la couverture, est la manifestation figurative de cette rencontre oxymorique entre la voix et le silence.

Gustaw Herling's A World Apart is one of the most important books about Soviet camps and communist ideology in the Stalinist period. First published in English in 1951 and translated into many languages, it was relatively unknown till Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago in the 1970s. However, the narrative of the author's experience in the Jertsevo gulag was highly appreciated by Bertrand Russell, Albert Camus, Jorge Semprun and others. In this first monograph on Herling's fascinating life, Bolecki discusses hitherto unknown documents from the writer's archive in Naples. His insight into the subject and poetics of Herling's book and the account of its remarkable reception offer readers an intriguing profile of one of the most compelling witnesses of the 20th century.

With the Trojan War won, the Greeks' last great hero, Arias, has suddenly become obsolete. The world is changing - as he witnesses when the armor of his fallen cousin Achilles is awarded not to him but to his crafty comrade Odysseus. When Aias swears vengeance, the goddess Athena clouds his mind with madness - and when his senses clear, he discovers that men he believed he fought and murdered were only the helpless animals and defenseless herdsmen seized by his own army as spoils of war. Shamed beyond redemption, Aias takes his own life, an act that leaves his friends and fellows to cope with the realities of his burial, the shock of his downfall, and the questions of whether a warrior can ever return from the wars that define his life. In "Aias", Sophocles challenges his society's ideals of heroism, exposing the unseen costs of war upon those who fight and those who are left behind. In this masterful translation, James Scully brings readers and actors inside the drama, enabling an exploration of these same issues within our modern cultural context - and offering a text that allows the emotions and arguments of Sophocles' era to strike a chord with a contemporary audience.

Dispelling widespread views that female same-sex desire is virtually absent from Italian literature and cultural production in the modern era, this groundbreaking study demonstrates that narratives of lesbianism are significantly more numerous than has been previously asserted. Focusing on texts published between 1860 and 1939, the author traces and analyses the evolution of discourses on female same-sex desire in and across a wide variety of genres, whether popular bestsellers, texts with limited distribution and subject to censorship, or translations from other languages. All the works are considered in relation to broader socio-cultural contexts. The analysis uncovers a plurality of different sources for these narratives of lesbianism and desire between women, showing how different layers of discourse emerge from or are reworked in and across several genres. From scientists who condemned the immoral and degenerate nature of "Sapphic" desire, to erotic publications that revelled in the pleasures of female same-sex intimacy, to portrayals of homoerotic desire by female writers that call (more or less obliquely) for its legitimization, these texts open up important new perspectives on discourses of sexuality in modern Italy.

The Tale of Princess Fatima - the only Arabic epic named for a woman - recounts the thrilling adventures of a legendary warrior known throughout the Middle East. After being abandoned at birth, Princess Fatima, otherwise known as Dhat al-Himma, must rely on strength and cunning to take her to the head of a powerful army. Bitter tribal warfare, stealthy ambushes and globetrotting pursuits will eventually lead Fatima back to face her father, and to confront another fierce warrior woman in a mighty showdown . . . Published in English for the first time, The Tale of Princess Fatima wonderfully recreates medieval Arabia and introduces a formidable new feminist icon.

In Poetics, Aristotle sets about laying the foundations of critical thought about the arts. One of the most influential books in Western civilization, Poetics reveals not only a great intellect analyzing the nature of poetry, music, and drama, but also a down-to-earth understanding of the practical problems facing the poet and playwright.

A timely book for today's world, Marcus Aurelius's Meditations explores how to endure hardship, how to cope with change and how to find something positive out of adversity. Part of the Macmillan Collector's Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket-sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition is translated by A. S. L. Farquharson and features an introduction by John Sellars. The Meditations are a set of personal reflections by Marcus Aurelius. He writes about the vicissitudes of his own life and explores how to live wisely and virtuously in an unpredictable world. He was a follower of the Stoic tradition of philosophy, and one of its finest advocates, both in the clarity of his writing and in the uprightness of his life. The aphorisms show how for him, as perhaps for us all, the answer to life lies in keeping a calm and rational mind, and in refusing to be cast down or alarmed by things over which we have no control.

The Intellectual as a Detective: From Leonardo Sciascia to Roberto Saviano offers a fresh perspective on both Italian crime fiction and the role of the intellectual in Italian society. By analyzing the characterization of men of culture as investigators, this book addresses their social commitment in a period that goes from the Sixties to today. The connection it establishes between fiction and real life makes this book an interesting addition to the debate on crime literature and its social function in Italy. The detectives created by Sciascia, Eco, Pasolini, Saviano and other novelists foster a reflection on how the narrative aspect of characterization has been used in connection with a historical perspective. Thanks to its broad scope, not limited to a single author, this book can be studied in undergraduate and graduate classes on the Italian detective novel, and it can be a helpful resource for scholars interested in characterization and the transforming figure of the intellectual in Italian society.

The figure of the child has long been a mainstay of Italian cinema, conventionally interpreted as a witness of adult shortcomings, a vessel of innocence, hope and renewal, or an avatar of nostalgia for the (cinematic) past. New Visions of the Child in Italian Cinema challenges these settled categories of interpretation and reconsiders the Italian canon as it relates to the child. The book draws on a growing body of new work in the history and theory of children on film and is the first volume to bring together and to apply some of these new approaches to Italian cinema. Chapters in the book address aspects of industry and spectatorship and the varied film psychology of infancy, childhood and adolescence, as well as genres as diverse as silent cinema, contemporary teen movies, melodrama and film ethnography. The contributors engage with a wide range of modes and theories including neorealism, auteurism and contemporary postfeminism. The book maps out new roles for gender, the transnational, loss and mourning, and filmmaking itself, leading to a revised understanding of the child in Italian cinema.

This volume brings together interviews on the topic of the postcolonial nation and its narrations with prominent writers from Angola and Mozambique. The interviewees offer personal insights into the history of post-independence Angola and Mozambique and into the role of the intellectual elite in the complex processes of deconstructing colonial heritage and (re)constructing national identity in a multinational or multiethnic state. Their testimonies provide a parallel narrative that complements the many fictional narrators found in Angolan and Mozambican novels, short stories and poems. The authors interviewed in the book are Luandino Vieira, Ana Paula Tavares, Boaventura Cardoso, Jose Eduardo Agualusa, Ondjaki and Pepetela from Angola; and Joao Paulo Borges Coelho, Marcelo Panguana, Mia Couto, Paulina Chiziane, Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa and Luis Carlos Patraquim from Mozambique.

The essays collected in this volume look at the way that Mozambican and Angolan literary works seek to narrate, re-create and make sense of the postcolonial nation. Some of the studies focus on individual works; others are comparative analyses of Angolan and Mozambican works, with a focus on the way they enter into dialogue with each other. The volume is oriented by three broad themes: the role of history; the recurring image of the voyage; and discursive/narrative strategies. The final section of the book considers the postcolonial in a broader Lusophone and international context.

Disabusing Women in the Old French Fabliaux provides a much-needed reevaluation of the role of women in the fabliaux. Spanning the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the fabliaux are short, ribald tales written in verse by mostly anonymous male authors. Their varied portrayals of female characters have traditionally been considered simply misogynistic. Despite recent scholarship contending that the fabliaux are not as anti-feminist as previously thought, there has been until now no full-length study of women in the fabliaux. Serving as critics of medieval institutions such as courtly love and knighthood, women in diverse roles affirm their agency as subjects through the manipulation of language. The depiction of these women asserting their subjectivity within medieval literary and cultural conventions often distorts the normal relations between the sexes, putting into question the very gender framework within which the fabliaux operate. Written by men for men, the closing moral frequently serves to reassert traditional male dominance, thereby reducing any uneasiness the audience may have felt. Thus the fabliaux cast women as powerful users of language all the while acknowledging the limits of their subversion.

This book contains a dramatic and revealing translation of this ancient classic into English. The Chinese original is set side-by-side with the translation. Two things set this work apart from other translated versions. First, archeological findings are used to uncover the meaning of passages obscured for thousands of years. Second, it preserves the flavor of the original in a poetic rendition. An introductory part of this book provides the historical and philosophical background to the I Ching. The story is told of the ancient Chinese civilization, pointing out events and figures mentioned in the I Ching. The undisguised face of the I Ching will appeal to the modern reader, who will read it in his or her own individual way, as poetry, as discoverer of self, or as soothsayer. It is in the grand tradition of the I Ching for different people to see different things. To Confucius, who was born in 550 B.C., it was a source of ethics. To Leibnitz, the eighteenth-century inventor of calculus, it was the essence of binary mathematics. To Jung Freud's rival in psychology, it was an explorer of the unconscious. To some Wall Streeters, it predicts the stock market. This second edition includes a new chapter on a historical perspective, and other additions, changes and minor reformatting.

This book examines the many facets of the work of Pierre Klossowski (1905-2001). Klossowski first established himself as a writer and was known and admired by peers such as Bataille, Blanchot, Gide, Foucault, Deleuze and Lacan. But in 1972 he gave up writing to devote himself to his 'mutism': painting made up of large coloured drawings. In time he became as famous a painter as he had been a writer and theorist. Klossowski now has two separate groups of commentators: those concerned with his writings and those with his painting, with little overlap between the two. Here, this separation is explicitly removed. Klossowski's entire oeuvre revolved around the concept of the gaze. Rarely has the gaze been so radically interpreted - as an active, mobile, evanescent object that breaks down the connections between representation and the visible. How is one to see the invisible divinity? This question plagued Klossowski, and he displaced it onto pornographic rituals. The pantomime of spirits is the scene, fixed in silence, where bodies meet - a knotting of desiring body and dogmatic theology. A creator of simulacra, Klossowski attempted to exorcise the 'obsessive constraint of the phantasm' that subjugated him in all these scenes. Translated from the French by Adrian Price in collaboration with Pamela King.

Developments: Encounters of Formation in the Latin American and Hispanic/Latino Bildungsroman, a notable contribution for students and scholars of Latin American, Brazilian, Hispanic and Latino literature, explores a significant but overlooked area in the literary production of the twentieth century: the connections between development and the narrative of formation after World War II. Recognizing development as a discursive construction that shapes significantly modern national identity in Latin America, Alejandro Latinez argues that its ideals and narrative relate to the Bildungsroman genre - the narrative of formation or development. The study presents a historical background of similar ideals of development in Latin America as well as reflects on a seminal philosophical interplay about youth and modern national identity between the Mexican authors Samuel Ramos and Octavio Paz. Furthermore, it examines Mario Vargas Llosa's 1963 La ciudad y los perros, Jose Lezama Lima's 1966 Paradiso, a selection from Clarice Lispector's 1960 and 1964 short narratives, and Elena Poniatowska's 1971 testimony La noche de Tlatelolco. The narrative experience in the United States is analyzed in Sandra Cisnero's 1984 The House on Mango Street and Esmeralda Santiago's 1993 When I Was Puerto Rican.

Jorge Semprun is a leading writer from the first generation of Spanish Civil War exiles, yet studies of his work have often focused solely on his literary testimony to the concentration camps and his political activities. Although Semprun's work derives from his incarceration in Buchenwald and his expulsion from the Spanish Communist Party in 1964, limiting the discussion of his works to the autobiographical details or to the realm of Holocaust studies is reductive. The responses by many influential writers to his recent death highlight that the significance of Semprun's work goes beyond the testimony of historical events. His self-identification as a Spanish exile has often been neglected and there is no comprehensive study of his works available in English. This book provides a global view of his oeuvre and extends literary analysis to texts that have received little critical attention. The author investigates the role played by memory in some of Semprun's works, drawing on current debates in the field of memory studies. A detailed analysis of these works allows related concepts, such as exile and nostalgia, the Holocaust, the interplay between memory and writing, politics and collective memory, and postmemory and identity, to be examined and discussed.

This volume sets out to re-imagine the theoretical and epistemological presuppositions of existing scholarship on identities. Despite a well-established body of scholarly texts that examine the concept from a wide range of perspectives, there is a surprising dearth of work on multiple, heterogeneous forms of identity. Numerous studies of ethnic, linguistic, regional and religious identities have appeared, but largely in isolation from one another. Rethinking 'Identities' is a multi-authored project that is original in providing - in distributed and granular mode - a hyper-contemporary and wide-ranging applied analysis that questions notions of identity based on nation and region, language, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion or even 'the human'. The volume achieves this by mobilizing various contexts of identity (gender, ethnicity, sexuality, nation) and medium (art, cinema, literature, music, theatre, video). Emphasizing the extreme contemporary (the twenty-first century) and the challenges posed by an increasingly global society, this collection of essays builds upon existing intellectual investigations of identity with the aim of offering a fresh perspective that transcends cognitive and geographical frontiers.

This volume of essays, which originated in the inaugural Dublin Gastronomy Symposium held in the Dublin Institute of Technology in June 2012, offers fascinating insights into the significant role played by gastronomy in Irish literature and culture. The book opens with an exploration of food in literature, covering figures as varied as Maria Edgeworth, James Joyce, Charles Dickens, Enid Blyton, John McGahern and Sebastian Barry. Other chapters examine culinary practices among the Dublin working classes in the 1950s, offering a stark contrast to the haute cuisine served in the iconic Jammet's Restaurant; new trends among Ireland's 'foodie' generation; and the economic and tourism possibilities created by the development of a gastronomic nationalism. The volume concludes by looking at the sacramental aspects of the production and consumption of Guinness and examining the place where it is most often consumed: the Irish pub.

Cet ouvrage propose une etude de la question du genre dans l'oeuvre d'Agota Kristof, ecrivaine suisse francophone d'origine hongroise. La preponderance des narrateurs masculins dans sa prose suggere la superiorite du masculin; ceci se reflete aussi sur le plan du contenu de son oeuvre, car les personnages feminins sont plutot marginalises et relegues a la sphere domestique. Neanmoins, les themes de la violence contre les femmes, de leur folie et de la prostitution demontrent un souci de presenter leur condition dans la societe. Pour elucider cette contradiction, l'analyse detaillee des textes rend compte des differentes strategies que l'auteure emploie pour representer les personnages et leurs relations sexuees. Notamment, mettre l'accent sur la voix narrative permet d'etudier l'acces des personnages a la parole et leurs attitudes a l'egard de l'ideologie du genre. L'etude se concentre non seulement sur la fameuse trilogie mais egalement sur le roman Hier, les nouvelles, les pieces de theatre et l'autobiographie. Premiere analyse de ce type, ce livre propose d'elargir l'approche interpretative des oeuvres de Kristof et d'apporter une nouvelle perspective a l'etude des oeuvres litteraires de l'espace francophone europeen.

Languages of Exile examines the relationship between geographic and linguistic border crossings in twentieth-century literature. Like no period before it, the last century was marked by the experience of expatriation, forcing exiled writers to confront the fact of linguistic difference. Literary writing can be read as the site where that confrontation is played out aesthetically - at the intersection between native and acquired language, between indigenous and alien, between self and other - in a complex multilingual dynamic specific to exile and migration. The essays collected here explore this dynamic from a comparative perspective, addressing the paragons of modernism as well as less frequently studied authors, from Joseph Conrad and Peter Weiss to Agota Kristof and Malika Mokeddem. The essays are international in their approach; they deal with the junctions and gaps between English, French, German, Hungarian, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and other languages. The literary works and practices addressed include modernist poetry and prose, philosophical criticism and autobiography, DADA performance, sound art and experimental music theatre. This volume reveals both the wide range of creative strategies developed in response to the interstitial situation of exile and the crucial role of exile for a renewed understanding of twentieth-century literature.