Seamus Heaney's version of Sophocles's Philoctetes tells of the wounded hero marooned upon an island by the Greeks during the Siege of Troy. As the conflict comes to a climax, the Greeks begin to realise they cannot win the Trojan war without Philoctetes's invincible bow, and turn back to seek his help.

The Cure at Troy dramatises the conflict between personal integrity and political expediency, and explores ways in which the victims of injustice can become as devoted to the contemplation of their wounds as the perpetrators are to the justification of their system. Responsive to the Greek playwright's understanding of the relations between public and private morality, The Cure at Troy is a sharp, fast-paced retelling of the Greek original, shot through with Heaney's own Irish speech and context.

History says, Don't hope

On this side of the grave.

But then, once in a lifetime

The longed-for tidal wave

Of justice can rise up,

And hope and history rhyme.

National Trauma in Postdictatorship Latin American Literature: Chile and Argentina examines the traumatic experiences of Chile and Argentina under authoritarian regimes and argues that in order for postdictatorship countries to successfully implement transitions to democracy, they must confront the past. This book employs the research of psychologists Bessel van der Kolk, Judith Herman, Donald Dutton, Elizabeth Loftus, and Cathy Caruth, in order to better understand the emotional and psychological effects of national trauma in the works of Chileans Diamela Eltit and Ariel Dorfman, and Argentines Ricardo Piglia and Griselda Gambaro. The themes and characters transcend national boundaries - the abuse, torture, paranoia, anguish, and shame are common to all human beings oppressed by tyranny. The inclusion of theater is necessary in global times for the art of drama has the power to ignite a repressed consciousness to emerge and contribute to progress and change. National Trauma in Postdictatorship Latin American Literature: Chile and Argentina proceeds with the reality that it is possible to heal from past trauma and become - once again - dignified citizens of the world.

This book addresses the problems of the nature of the category of aspect, its formal expression and its relation to Action modes, to the Aorist/Imperfect and Perfect/Non-Perfect distinctions. The discussion is largely based on data from Bulgarian -- a Slavonic language where aspect as a grammatical category systematically coexists not only with verbal prefixation, but also with temporal boundedness, correlation and, in the nominal sphere, definiteness. Cross-language parallels with English and French data and the mapping of Bulgarian structures to notions drawn from the «western tradition of aspectual study result in the outline of a framework for an integrated study of the expression of aspectuality in languages belonging to different language groups. Refuting existing views of aspect as a «compensatory phenomenon for nominal definiteness, the book presents arguments in favour of a systematic relation between verbal prefixation and NP quantification in Slavonic languages and of a compositional, syntactic dimension of aspectual analysis.

Inspired by the work of their colleague David Gascoigne, a group of scholars from the UK and France examine in this book the narrative strategies of some of the most interesting and important French writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Stretching chronologically from 1905 to 2005, the volume examines a wide variety of prose genres, from pornography to Bildungsroman to magic realism, as well as poetry. Michel Tournier figures in several of the contributions, emerging as something of a touchstone for many of the thematic preoccupations that are common throughout the period: values and authority, self and other, identity, spirituality, migration and exile, sexuality, the body, violence and war, and language. The authors also examine the flourishing of intertextuality, as well as the use of traditional forms, such as mythical structures and the 'robinsonade', to undermine authoritative 'metarecits'. Probing these themes and forms, and their metamorphoses across 100 years, the essays demonstrate a striking degree of continuity, linking writers as different as Apollinaire and Houellebecq or Valery and Fleutiaux, and highlight the difficulty of dividing the period neatly into chronologically ordered categories labelled 'modern' or 'postmodern'.

The notion of « exposure underlies much modern thinking about identity, representation, ethics, desire and sexuality. This provocative notion is explored in a collection of essay selected form, and inspired by, the proceedings of a conference held in the Department of French at the University of Cambridge in 2002. The authors engage with exposure as both object and mode of representation in a range of cultural media: literature, critical theory, visual art and film. They analyse a variety of works from the medieval, early-modern, and modern periods, examining not only canonical texts such as Montaigne's Essais but also lesser-studied works such as the psychoanalytic theory of Didier Anzieu, the photomontage self-portraits of Claude Cahun, and the novel La Nouvelle Pornographie by Marie Nimier. This volume thus both illustrates and, more importantly, interrogates the richness of the term « exposure, in a way that is stimulating for students and researchers alike.

Against Those in the Disciplines (Pros Mathematikous, also known by the abbreviated title M 1-6) deals with six specialized fields of study: grammar, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, astrology, and music. In sceptical fashion, it questions the credentials of those who claim to have expert knowledge in these fields. It is the least well known of Sextus Empiricus' works, mainly because its subject-matter is not directly philosophical; some of its arguments require knowledge of these fields as they existed in the ancient world, which philosophers (Sextus' main readership) tend not to have. But it is a good specimen of Sextus' usual sceptical method of inducing suspension of judgement about the topics under consideration, and it contains much that is of philosophical interest. This volume aims to bring this work to a wider philosophical audience and to make the technicalities of the fields discussed understandable to non-specialists. It contains a translation of the work into clear modern English, accompanied by extensive explanatory notes. For ease of comprehension, the text is broken down into named sections and subsections, and these are also listed separately before the translation (the Outline of Argument). An introduction discusses the place of Against Those in the Disciplines in the totality of Sextus' work, and examines certain features that are distinctive to it. Other aids to the reader are a list of persons referred to in the work, with brief information about each; an English-Greek and Greek-English glossary of key terms; and a list of passages in other works of Sextus that are parallel to passages in this work.

During the late 1920s and the 1930s, the Italian government sought various commercial and politically oriented solutions to cope with the advent of new sound technologies in cinema. The translation of foreign-language films became a recurrent topic of ongoing debates surrounding the use of the Italian language, the rebirth of the national film industry and cinema's mass popularity. Through the analysis of state records and the film trade press, The Politics of Dubbing explores the industrial, ideological and cultural factors that played a role in the government's support for dubbing. The book outlines the evolution of film censorship regulation in Italy and its interplay with film translation practices, discusses the reactions of Mussolini's administration to early Italian-language talkies produced abroad and documents the state's role in initiating and encouraging Italians' habit of watching dubbed films.

This book examines Duras's contribution to contemporary cinema. The 'dark room' in the collection's title refers to one of Duras's metaphors for the writing process, la chambre noire, as the solitary space of literary creation, the place where she struggles to project her 'internal shadow' onto the blank page. The dark room is also a metaphor for the film theater and, by extension, for the filmic experience. Duras rejected conventional forms of cinematic address that encourage the spectator to develop a positive identification with the film's diegesis and narrative. Her films create unusual rapports between image and sound, diegetic and extra-diegetic elements, and textual and intertextual dimensions of cinematic representation. In doing so, they allow the film spectator to establish new connections with the screen. This collection focuses on the aesthetic, conceptual, and political challenges involved in Duras's innovative approach to cinematic representation, from an interdisciplinar perspective including film and literary theory, psychoanalytic analysis, music theory, gender studies, and post-colonial criticism. The book opens with a theoretical introduction to Duras's cinematic practice and its peculiar position in contemporary cinema and contemporary film theory and is divided into five parts, each one devoted to a specific aspect of Duras's films: the interaction between literature and cinema (Part One); the reconfiguration of the cinematic gaze (Part Two) and of the image/sound relation (Part Three); the representation of history and memory (Part Four) and of cultural identity (Part Five).

The Batrachomyomachia (Battle of the Frogs and Mice) is a Hellenistic pastiche of Homer's Iliad which was often attributed to Homer himself by later commentators. As a parody of epic battle narrative it is quite unlike anything else that survives in full from antiquity; however, despite its popular and influential reception throughout much of history from the Roman period onwards, the advent of the twentieth century saw it largely dismissed and overlooked as a curio. This volume presents a new critical edition of the poem, comprising an introduction, Greek text and English verse translation, and line-by-line commentary, which aims to rehabilitate its image and return it to the centre of scholarly attention by mapping out the wide range of metaliterary jokes, references, and parodies concealed within the apparently simple and childish story. The Greek text is entirely new, based on a fresh collation of the nine most important early manuscripts as well as on the work of previous editors. All verses which appear in these manuscripts are included - those which do not belong in the main text are presented separately at the foot of each page - and are accompanied by a full apparatus criticus and a new facing verse translation, which aims to strike a balance between precision and readability. A comprehensive introduction thoroughly orients readers in the poem's historical and literary context, covering its (highly uncertain) date and disputed authorship, its relationship with the wider genre of 'parody', its language and metre, and its reception and influence up to the present day, among other topics. The commentary forms the largest part of the volume, offering detailed discussion of linguistic, stylistic, and thematic questions, as well as guiding readers through the complex network of references to Homer and Hellenistic poetry and breaking down the textual problems for which the poem is so notorious.

Drama Classics: The World's Great Plays at a Great Little Price The story of the mythical Greek king of Thebes, the archetypal tragic hero who accidentally fulfills a prophecy that he will end up killing his father and marrying his mother, thereby bringing disaster down upon his city and family. This volume, in the Nick Hern Books Drama Classics series, contains two plays by Sophocles, Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonos, in English translations by Kenneth McLeish. It also includes an introduction to the plays.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

"Oedipus Tyrannos is the first Greek play many readers encounter, and this version is their ideal gateway. Emily Wilson's verse line is effortlessly graceful, whether in taut, tense dialogue exchanges or in the lyrical choral odes." -JAMES ROMM, Bard College

Perhaps no classical writer has been so consistently in vogue as Horace. Famous in his own lifetime as a close associate of the Emperor Octavian, to whom he dedicated several odes, Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65-8 BC) has never really been out of fashion. Petrarch, for example, modelled his letters on Horace's innovative Epistles, while also borrowing from his Roman forebear in composing his own Italian sonnets. The echo of Horace's voice can be found in almost every genre of medieval literature. And in later periods, this influence and popularity if anything increased. Yet, as Paul Allen Miller shows, while Horace may justifiably be called the poet for all seasons he is also in the end an enigma. His elusive, ironic contrariness is perhaps the true secret of his success. A cultured man of letters, he fought on the losing side of the Battle of Philippi (42 BC). A staunch Republican, he ended up eagerly (some said too eagerly) promoting the cause of Julio-Claudian imperialism. Viewed as the acme of Roman literary civilization, he was shaped by his Athens education at Plato's famous Academy. This new introduction reveals Horace in all his paradoxical genius and complexity.

This book was the winner of the 2011 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in German Studies. The post-war landscape of Europe is unthinkable without the voices of the Austrian writers Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) and Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989). Their work, coming after the devastation wrought by the Second World War and the Holocaust, is rooted in a specifically Austrian context of repression of this traumatic historical legacy. In post-war Austria, discourse on the recent past may have been dominated by silence, but the legacy of this past was all too apparent in the country's ruined and speedily reconstructed cityscapes. This book investigates Bachmann's and Bernhard's treatment of two fundamental aspects of the Austrian historical legacy: the trauma of the war and the desire to return to an ideal homeland, known as 'Haus OEsterreich'. Following a methodology based on Freud and Benjamin, this comparative study demonstrates that the confrontation with Austria's troubled history occurs through the protagonists' ambivalent encounter with the landscape or cityscape that they inhabit, travel or return to. The book demonstrates the centrality of topography on both thematic and structural levels in the authors' prose works, as a mode of confronting the past and making sense of the present.

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.

This book offers a stimulating analysis of three non-canonical texts in different genres written by British women who lived in Sicily in the second half of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. These texts cover a series of crucial political events as well as social and cultural changes which affected the history of Sicily during the period in question, all seen through the direct and indirect experiences of the authors. The book offers a historical perspective on the late-Victorian and Edwardian representations of post-Unification Italy. At the same time the author challenges current critical literature on travel writing which tends to analyse travel texts without making substantial distinction between works written during a brief visit to a foreign country and those produced during a long-term or permanent residence. The book adopts an interdisciplinary, comparative approach. The three texts are studied by looking at patterns of connection in other written and visual works produced during, or after, an experience in Italy. By drawing on theories of travel writing, genre and gender, along with visual and cultural studies, the author aims to verify how the three texts respond to being analysed as a distinct group, and hence define the specific roles and functions of expatriate women's writing.

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.

When one considers issues that are crucial to the evolution of French and Irish culture and behaviour, it is doubtful if there is anything more pertinent than globalisation and secularisation. Clearly, the experience of these concepts in both countries varies greatly: for example, while the French demonstrate a certain 'mefiance' - even 'mepris' - towards the globalistion project, which they associate with Hollywood, Microsoft, McDonalds and very little that is positive, the Irish, particularly during the Celtic Tiger years, were enthused by the possibilities it offered in terms of material gain and liberation from the excessive control of the Roman Catholic Church. In relation to the latter, many commentators argue that globalisation brought a more secular mindset to Ireland in recent decades, whereas in France the term 'laicite' is strongly identified with the Republican ideology that dates back to the French Revolution. Clearly, therefore, the theme is a revealing one. Cet ouvrage, qui contient des articles rediges en anglais et en francais, est compose des Actes du 4e Colloque franco-irlandais qui a eu lieu a l'universite Rennes 2 en mai 2008 sous l'egide du NCFIS.

Despite the numerous studies of the politics, economy, culture, and society of the Estado Novo, the relations established between publishers, authors, and governmental institutions and their contribution to the making of the literary canon are still marginal subjects of analysis. Based on the systems theories developed by Bourdieu, Dubois and Even-Zohar, this study focuses on the cultural production produced during the Estado Novo (1933-1974) and after the Revolution (1974-2004), within their political, economic and social framework. The chapters on Jose Saramago and Jose Luis Peixoto show them as examples of literary consecration that confirm the systemic relations in the Portuguese literary field. This research makes use of a survey on habits of purchase of Portuguese fiction, interviews with publishers, original statistical analyses, and takes a new approach to the study of Portuguese literature.

This book examines the relevance of the concepts of space and place to the work of Jorge Luis Borges. The core of the book is a series of readings of key Borges texts viewed from the perspective of human spatiality. Issues that arise include the dichotomy between 'lived space' and abstract mapping, the relevance of a 'sense of place' to Borges's work, the impact of place on identity, the importance of context to our sense of who we are, the role played by space and place in the exercise of power, and the ways in which certain of Borges's stories invite us to reflect on our 'place in the universe'. In the course of this discussion, crucial questions about the interpretation of the Argentine author's work are addressed and some important issues that have largely been overlooked are considered. The book begins by outlining cross-disciplinary discussions of space and place and their impact on the study of literature and concludes with a theoretical reflection on approaches to the issue of space in Borges, extrapolating points of relevance to the theme of literary spatiality generally.

George Bernard Shaw is commonly regarded as one of the most controversial intellectuals of the first half of the twentieth century. Known for the ambiguity of his statements and the seeming inconsistency of his views, there was, nevertheless, one idea to which the British dramatist remained constant throughout his life: his long-term enthusiasm for Russia and his firm belief that the Russians would 'give the world back its lost soul'. Moved by the Russian cultural tradition, he found inspiration in the morally charged writings of Tolstoy and Gorky, and sent a copy of his Back to Methuselah to Lenin. The Soviet utopia fascinated him, and he made a much-publicised journey to the USSR to see the results of socialist construction, remaining for the rest of his life an unrepentant advocate of Stalin's policies. Focusing on detailed textual analysis, this book traces the Russian sources that contributed to the formation of Shaw's literary style. By reflecting on these parallels, as well as by drawing on archive reports in the Russian and Western media, the authors attempt to establish the extent to which Shaw's obsession with the socialist cause affected the evolving character of his dramatic output. The book also explores the enduring positive reception of Shaw's plays on the Russian stage.

Slovenia gained its independence in 1991, and joined the European Union in 2004. This book, with its substantial introduction and four Slovene plays in translation, makes a unique contribution to an understanding of both the dramatic and theatrical history of this period of enormous political change in Slovenia. The Great Brilliant Waltz (1985) by Drago Janč ar was written and produced when Slovenia was still part of the former Yugoslavia. This black comedy is set in the mental hospital 'Freedom Sets Free', a metaphor for the totalitarian society of the communist era. Draga Potoč njak is foremost among the few female playwrights in Slovenia. Based on real events, The Noise Animals Make is Unbearable (2003) shows a mentally retarded and severely autistic Bosnian boy after soldiers kill his whole family in front of his eyes, leaving only his grandmother. Critics have seen the play as the best tribute that Slovene drama has offered to the victims of the Bosnian war. The fabric of Duş an Jovanović 's comedy The Boozski Clinic (1999) is the transition into capitalism. Losers on the edge of society, examples of the collateral damage of a newly capitalist society whose rules of operating they do not wish to obey, congregate in a small bar in a small town which used to be the pride of the communist government. Matjaz Zupancic's play The Corridor (2004) is set in the corridor outside a television studio where the 'reality' programme 'Big Brother' is being filmed. The ever-present television camera in the studio represents current invisible but nonetheless totalitarian power, with its technical interference and controlling of individuals' lives.

Introduzione al commercio italiano: An Introduction to Business Italian, now in its second edition, represents a new approach in teaching Italian with a focus. Readings are prepared or selected for their emphasis on business and social life. Comprehension questions and communicative exercises of a functional nature present the student with a situation that he or she must resolve. The exercises are varied and stimulating, hence fostering progressive and positive development of oral and written skills. This text meets the needs of today's communication-oriented student and offers materials which will enhance student interaction. Introduzione al commercio italiano will provide the student with the necessary skills to enter the business world of today.

This book is the outcome of a successful workshop held in Leeds in September 2003 and explores the effects of World War II on the representation of gender in post-war literature, film and popular culture, juxtaposing Western European experience with US, Soviet and Japanese. It aims to outline the different ways in which these representations evolved in post-war attempts both to re-establish social order and reconstruct national identity. It gives the reader an overview of the similarities and differences that have emerged in the representation of war and gender in different cultures and media, as a result of social expectations, political change and individual artistic innovation. The essays are linked by their concern with three key questions: how are emotion and gender represented in relation to the experience of war; what is the impact of war on the dynamic between the genders; and, as the memory of war recedes, is it possible to identify chronological shifts in the artistic response to the conflict?