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?

La Romanistica, una disciplina sometida a un constante proceso de autorreflexion, manifiesta la vitalidad y la variedad de su investigacion linguistica a traves de los trabajos recogidos en este homenaje a Carmen Pensado. Un grupo de sus colegas y amigos repartidos por Europa y America le ofrecen el testimonio de su amistad y admiracion con ocasion de su jubilacion. En los articulos se tratan problemas que ilustran la amplitud tematica de la Romanistica y que coinciden en buena medida con los puntos centrales de la investigacion llevada a cabo por Carmen Pensado acerca de los motivos y el funcionamiento del cambio fonetico y los procesos de gramaticalizacion. La amplitud de los contactos intelectuales de la homenajeada se refleja en la presencia de trabajos de fonetica experimental, historia del lexico iberorromance, teoria de la morfologia, formacion de palabras de varias lenguas romances, teoria sintactica y cambio sintactico. Junto a articulos que discuten problemas del rumano, italiano, frances o gallego, predominan los dedicados al espanol o a las lenguas romanicas en su conjunto.

Epic and tragedy, from Homer's Achilles and Euripides' Pentheus to Marlowe's Tamburlaine and Milton's Satan, are filled with characters challenging and warring against the gods. Nowhere is the theme of theomachy more frequently and powerfully represented, however, than in the poetry of early imperial Rome, from Ovid's Metamorphoses at the beginning of the first century AD to Statius' Thebaid near its end. This book - the first full-length study of human-divine conflict in Roman literature - asks why the war against god was so important to the poets of the time and how this understudied period of literary history influenced a larger tradition in Western literature. Drawing on a variety of contexts - politics, religion, philosophy, and aesthetics - Pramit Chaudhuri argues for the fundamental importance of battles between humans and gods in representing the Roman world. A cast of tyrants, emperors, rebels, iconoclasts, philosophers, and ambitious poets brings to life some of the most extraordinary artistic products of classical antiquity. Based on close readings of the major extant epics and selected tragedies, the book replaces a traditionally Virgiliocentric view of imperial epic with a richer dialogue between Greek and Roman texts, contemporary authors, and diverse genres. The renewed sense of a tradition reveals how the conflicts these works represent constitute a distinctive theology informed by other discourses yet peculiar to epic and tragedy. Beginning with the Greek background and ending by looking ahead to developments in the Renaissance, this book charts the history of a theme that would find its richest expression in a time when men became gods and impiety threatened the very order of the world. Covering a wide range of literary and historical topics - from metapoetics to the sublime, from divination to Epicureanism, and from madness to apotheosis - the book will appeal to all readers interested in Latin literature, Roman cultural history, poetic theology, and the epic and tragic traditions from antiquity to modernity.

The definitive global anthology of writings about dragons, from Ancient Egypt to the modern day Since the earliest moments of human history, dragons have occupied a place in our imaginations. Bringer of night in Ancient Egypt; mortal enemy of the elephant in South Asia; slain by a god in Sanskrit hymn. In the Book of Revelation, there is the Leviathan; in Loch Ness, a monster. Their crushing coils and their treasure hoards are found throughout literature and language: in the Old English of Beowulf, in the Elvish of Tolkien, in the far-flung travels of Marco Polo. The Penguin Book of Dragons is the definitive collection of all this and more: two thousand years of legend and lore about the menace and majesty of dragons.

This volume, which takes its title from an international conference held at the University of Cambridge in November 2006, aims to shed new light on Schnitzler's oeuvre and his period by focusing on his as yet largely unpublished literary remains, his 'hidden manuscripts'. Among the key topics covered in this collection are: the reconstruction of the adventurous rescue of the manuscripts from Vienna in 1938 and a description of their current locations; an overview of the author's life, in its historical context, on the basis of such private documents as his diaries and letters; the plethora of existing variants, both published and unpublished, and their usefulness for our understanding of Schnitzler's work, from the Anatol cycle to the 'scandalous' Reigen - in the light of the discovery of its original manuscript - and Schnitzler's planned (but never completed) work on the historical figure of Emperor Joseph II; Schnitzler's difficult relationship with one of the most influential journalists of his time, Karl Kraus, and his literary friendship with a close but hitherto neglected contemporary, Gustav Schwarzkopf; the network of intertextual references 'hidden' in the revolutionary monologue novella Lieutenant Gustl against the background of Hermann Bahr's modernist theory of literature; and finally, Schnitzler's 'hidden legacy' in our own epoch. This book contains contributions in both English and German.

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 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.

Published in 1991 The Tragedye of Solyman and Perseda is a late Elizabethan romantic tragedy by Thomas Kyd, author of The Spanish Tragedy. It dramatises the triangular relationship of the Turkish emperor Soliman, his captive Perseda and her beloved Erastus against the fictionalised backdrop of the Turkish invasion of Rhodes in the early sixteenth century. This volume contains the original text along with textual and critical notes.

Ramon del Valle-Inclan (1866-1936) was undoubtedly the most controversial literary figure of his generation. Whilst his genius was recognised by fellow writers, the reading public was slow to accept his work, and his theatre taxed directors and audiences alike. One of the harshest criticisms levelled against him concerned his use of repetition. This study shows how the reuse, recycling and development of material becomes one of the hallmarks of Valle-Inclan's writing during the first three decades of his literary career, linking one genre with another and blurring the borders between different aesthetics. The repetition of themes and motifs, characters and stylistic devices reveals an underlying interdependence among works that on the surface appear unconnected or even contradictory. Many of Valle-Inclan's works have been studied in isolation, rather than as pieces of a whole. This book examines the elements that provide significant links in his writing between 1889 and 1922, most of which shares the common backdrop of Galicia, and demonstrates that apparently unrelated works are part of a larger picture. Despite changes in perspective and genre, there are constants that relate individual works to those that precede and follow, creating a unifying pattern of continuity.

First published in 1987, this is a critical edition of the 1647 text by the Scottish author Alexander Ross which offered the Renaissance reader not only a wealth of factual information concerning the gods, goddesses, heroes and monsters of ancient myth and legend, but also served as a treasury of interpretation and commentary ingeniously explaining the facts in terms moral, theological, historical and scientific. The critical edition brought this text alongside its counterparts, Cartari's Imagini and Comes' Mythologia, which had in recent years begun to receive the scholarly recognition they deserve. It constituted a preliminary essay at defining a distinctively English approach to mythological studies by focusing on the only original myth handbook produced in Renaissance England which in scope and intent may be placed next to the great compilations of the Continent.

An incisive exploration of the way Greek myths empower us to defeat tyranny. As tyrannical passions increasingly plague twenty-first-century politics, tales told in ancient Greek epics and tragedies provide a vital antidote. Democracy as a concept did not exist until the Greeks coined the term and tried the experiment, but the idea can be traced to stories that the ancient Greeks told and retold. From the eighth through the fifth centuries BCE, Homeric epics and Athenian tragedies exposed the tyrannical potential of individuals and groups large and small. These stories identified abuses of power as self-defeating. They initiated and fostered a movement away from despotism and toward broader forms of political participation. Following her highly praised book Enraged: Why Violent Times Need Ancient Greek Myths, the classicist Emily Katz Anhalt retells tales from key ancient Greek texts and proceeds to interpret the important message they hold for us today. As she reveals, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Aeschylus's Oresteia, and Sophocles's Antigone encourage us-as they encouraged the ancient Greeks-to take responsibility for our own choices and their consequences. These stories emphasize the responsibilities that come with power (any power, whether derived from birth, wealth, personal talents, or numerical advantage), reminding us that the powerful and the powerless alike have obligations to each other. They assist us in restraining destructive passions and balancing tribal allegiances with civic responsibilities. They empower us to resist the tyrannical impulses not only of others but also in ourselves. In an era of political polarization, Embattled demonstrates that if we seek to eradicate tyranny in all its toxic forms, ancient Greek epics and tragedies can point the way.

Aelred (1110-1167), abbot of Rievaulx Abbey in Yorkshire, has always been a controversial figure. He was beloved by his monks and widely admired, but also sharply criticized for his frankness about his own sinfulness and what some considered his favoritism and excessive leniency. Writings on Body and Soul includes a selection of the prolific abbot's theological, historical, and devotional works. Each contains autobiographical elements, showing Aelred at turns confident and fearful, tormented and serene. In A Pastoral Prayer, he asserts his unworthiness and pleads for divine aid in leading his monks wisely and compassionately. Spiritual Friendship adapts Cicero's dialogue on friendship for Christian purposes. A Certain Marvelous Miracle offers a riveting account of a pregnant teenage nun, the bloody vengeance wreaked on her seducer, and the miracle of her release from her fetters. Finally, Teachings for Recluses, addressed to Aelred's sister, is a guide for women pursuing solitary religious perfection. Freshly revised editions of the Latin texts appear here alongside new English translations.

Universally proclaimed as the most important Spanish playwright of the last half of the twentieth century, Antonio Buero Vallejo was deemed by a Madrid theater critic to be the greatest author of theater since Calderon de la Barca. This book explores ten of Buero's thirty plays, utilizing literary approaches ranging from the traditional to the radical. It breaks new ground by indicating how contemporary analyses can extrapolate vital interpretations in addition to what has been previously observed in Buero's theater. Simultaneously, the study metonymically evokes the depth and breadth of the plays not studied herein, suggesting they hold unexplored treasures for prospective explorers of the playwright's work.

This collection of new essays by scholars from across Europe focuses on the key theoretical and historical questions within the rapidly growing field of Iberian studies, which is taken by the authors to mean the methodological consideration of the Iberian peninsula as a complex and multilingual cultural and literary system. Dealing with a wide range of issues and cultural output from a comparative European perspective, the essays question the concept of 'Iberian' itself, query its suitability as a starting point for academic research and consider it in relation to other more established concepts and identities, such as Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Basque and Galician, as well as wider European and Western identities. The contributors examine the relationship between the reality of 'Iberia' and the mythical, historical and artistic narratives created to support or represent this collective identity, with a particular focus on the period from the nineteenth century to the present day.

In the last year of his life, Ted Hughes completed translations of three major dramatic works: Racine's Phedre, Euripedes' Alcestis, and the trilogy of plays known as at The Oresteia, a family story of astonishing power and the background or inspiration for much subsequent drama, fiction, and poetry.

The Oresteia--Agamemnon, Choephori, and the Eumenides--tell the story of the house of Atreus: After King Agamemnon is murdered by his wife, Clytemnestra, their son, Orestes, is commanded by Apollo to avenge the crime by killing his mother, and he returns from exile to do so, bringing on himself the wrath of the Furies and the judgment of the court of Athens.

Hughes's "acting version" of the trilogy is faithful to its nature as a dramatic work, and his translation is itself a great performance; while artfully inflected with the contemporary, it has a classical beauty and authority. Hughes's Oresteia is quickly becoming the standard edition for English-language readers and for the stage, too.

King Agamemnon is long dead and his murderers rule at Argos. His son Orestes returns from exile to kill themuhis own mother Clytemnestra and her seducer Aegisthus. Thus he will release his sister Electra from oppression and reclaim his home and kingdom. This is the only episode from Greek legend treated in surviving plays by all three of the great Athenian tragedians of the fifth century B.C.uAeschylus in his Libation-bearers (part of the Oresteia trilogy), Sophocles and Euripides each in plays called Electra. Together these plays give us a unique opportunity to compare and contrast the very different treatments by the three playwrights of a central Greek legend. In SophoclesAE hands the focus of the play is on Electra herself: her endurance and loyalty to the dead Agamemnon while oppressed and persecuted by Clytemnestra and Aegistus; her intense grief when she believes Orestes dead; her equally intense joy when she discovers him actually at her side; her final deliverance through his triumphant execution of vengeance on the murderers. But is there more to the play than this story of triumphant revenge and restorations? The introduction of this book includes a survey of the main interpretative issues, as well as a summary of other treatments of the myth and a discussion of the problematic question of dating. The commentary, which is based on the translation, elucidates the action.

Excess Baggage investigates how we read modern theory, how we apprehend Latin American culture through that theory, why this approach is flawed, and how our reading could be different. It is a study of modernity's supersessive, paradoxical attempts to outthink thought. This methodology, never autochthonous to any context despite its claims, is traced through one of its more extreme moments, the Enlightenment, and then through the work of Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx (and their more recent postmodern acolytes) to the Reformation. Although these thinkers are self-differentiating, the divisions are artificial, for each, even in present formats, references a preternatural origin that is subsequently projected into the future, disavowing history's ability to perceive itself as anything other than revolutionary. This book traces post-1960 Latin Americanism through readings by its critics-cum-theorists, as dictatorially assigning a univocal reading to a continent's cultural production, regardless of how ethical the theory may itself seem. Though predominantly a metacritical work, a reading of philosophy and its Latin Americanist manifestations, there is also comparative reading of European, North American, and Latin American literature. Meaning has always existed in all such contexts, but is either eradicated or misread by the premises of our critical equipment. In fact or fiction, Excess Baggage appeals for an admission of contextualized mnemotechny, inevitable in thought regardless, and the real danger in the present milieu.

This book offers a discussion of the trope of madness in twentieth-century French women's writing, focusing on close readings of the following texts: Violette Leduc's L'Asphyxie (1946), Marguerite Duras's Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein (1964), Simone de Beauvoir's 'La Femme rompue' (1967), Marie Cardinal's Les Mots pour le dire (1975), Jeanne Hyvrard's Les Prunes de Cythere (1975) and Mere la mort (1976). The discussion traces the evolution in the way madness is taken up by women authors from the key period starting just prior to the emergence of second-wave feminism and culminating at the height of the ecriture feminine project. This study argues that madness offers itself up to these authors as a powerful means to convey a certain ambivalence towards changing contemporary ideas on the authority of authorship. On the one hand a highly enabling means to figure transgression, the madwoman is equally the repository for a twentieth-century 'anxiety of authorship' on the part of the woman writer.

What impact did Cardinal's texts have on the 1970s feminist movement? What is her position in relation to French women's writing and the French literary tradition today? This volume brings together a series of papers given at the first international conference on the influential feminist author Marie Cardinal. Leading critics of Cardinal's oeuvre engage in analysis alongside new commentators in the field. The collection provides an extensive yet cohesive overview of Cardinal's writing, including original commentaries on earlier works like

This volume represents the most ambitious project of distinguished poet David Ferry's life: a complete translation of Virgil's Aeneid. Ferry has long been known as the foremost contemporary translator of Latin poetry, and his translations of Virgil's Eclogues and Georgics have become standards. He brings to the Aeneid the same genius, rendering Virgil's formal, metrical lines into an English that is familiar, all while surrendering none of the poem's original feel of the ancient world. In Ferry's hands, the Aeneid becomes once more a lively, dramatic poem of daring and adventure, of love and loss, devotion and death. The paperback and e-book editions include a new introduction by Richard F. Thomas, along with a new glossary of names that makes the book even more accessible for students and for general readers coming to the Aeneid for the first time who may need help acclimating to Virgil's world.

This timeless collection brings together three hundred of the most enduringly popular of Aesop's fables in a volume that will delight young and old readers alike. Here are all the age-old favourites - the wily fox, the vain peacock, the predatory cat and the steady tortoise - just as endearingly vivid and relevant now as they were for their very first audience. This elegant Macmillan Collector's Library edition of Aesop's Fables features illustrations by Arthur Rackham, the leading decorative illustrator of the Edwardian period, which have been beautifully and sensitively coloured by Barbara Frith. With an afterword by publisher and editor Anna South. Designed to appeal to the booklover, the Macmillan Collector's Library is a series of beautiful gift editions of much loved classic titles. Macmillan Collector's Library are books to love and treasure.

William Morris had a lifelong fascination with illuminated books. He collected thirteenth- and fourteenth-century manuscripts and became one of the foremost experts on the art of bookmaking and calligraphy. Aiming to resurrect a tradition that had fallen into abeyance with the invention of printing, he made eighteen illuminated books, using a variety of texts, during the course of his life. One of these, now held in the Bodleian Library, is a handmade edition of the Odes of Horace. The pages of this book, reproduced here in high-quality facsimile, are among the most intricate and ambitious that Morris ever created. Using a Renaissance italic style of calligraphy, he illuminated letters with delicate shades of gold and silver, and adorned them with floral decoration and miniature faces and figures. The openings to each of the four books of the Odes are stunning display pages on which Morris collaborated with the artists Edward Burne-Jones and Charles Fairfax Murray. The Roman poet Horace (65-8 BCE) wrote four books of lyric poetry in Latin which have subsequently been translated many times and have had an ongoing influence on Western literature. He combined descriptions of the everyday with the poetry of politics, patriotism, love and friendship, producing lines of beauty and wisdom which were very popular in Morris's day and continue to appeal in the twenty-first century. This facsimile edition is presented in a blind embossed slipcase featuring a detail from one of Burne-Jones' paintings in the book with a companion volume containing an introduction to William Morris's manuscript and an English translation of the Odes.

First published in 1987, this is a critical edition of the 1647 text by the Scottish author Alexander Ross which offered the Renaissance reader not only a wealth of factual information concerning the gods, goddesses, heroes and monsters of ancient myth and legend, but also served as a treasury of interpretation and commentary ingeniously explaining the facts in terms moral, theological, historical and scientific. The critical edition brought this text alongside its counterparts, Cartari's Imagini and Comes' Mythologia, which had in recent years begun to receive the scholarly recognition they deserve. It constituted a preliminary essay at defining a distinctively English approach to mythological studies by focusing on the only original myth handbook produced in Renaissance England which in scope and intent may be placed next to the great compilations of the Continent.

Aeschylus (ca. 525-456 BCE), the dramatist who made Athenian tragedy one of the world's great art forms, witnessed the establishment of democracy at Athens and fought against the Persians at Marathon. He won the tragic prize at the City Dionysia thirteen times between ca. 499 and 458, and in his later years was probably victorious almost every time he put on a production, though Sophocles beat him at least once.

Of his total of about eighty plays, seven survive complete. The second volume contains the complete Oresteia trilogy, comprising "Agamemnon," "Libation-Bearers," and "Eumenides," presenting the murder of Agamemnon by his wife, the revenge taken by their son Orestes, the pursuit of Orestes by his mother's avenging Furies, his trial and acquittal at Athens, Athena's pacification of the Furies, and the blessings they both invoke upon the Athenian people.