Francophone Women: Between Visibility and Invisibility underscores the writing of authors who foreground the female body and who write across geographical borders, as part of a global literary movement that has the French language as its common denominator. This edited collection exposes how female authors portray the tensions that exist between visibility and invisibility, public and private, presence and absence, and excess and restraint when it is linked to femininity and the female body.

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.

What does it mean to read Greek tragedy in a pandemic, a global crisis? How can Greek tragedy address urgent contemporary troubles? One of the outstanding and most widely read theorists in the discipline, Mario Telò, brings together a deep understanding of Greek tragedy and its most famous icons with contemporary times. In close readings of plays such as Alcestis, Antigone, Bacchae, Hecuba, Oedipus the King, Prometheus Bound, and Trojan Women, our experience is precariously refracted back in the formal worlds of plays named after and, to an extent, epitomized by tragic characters. Structured around four thematic clusters – Air Time Faces, Communities, Ruins, and Insurrections – this book presents timely interventions in critical theory and in the debates that matter to us as disaster becomes routine in the time-out-of-joint of a (post-)pandemic world. Violently encompassing all pre-existing and future crises (relational, political and ecological), the pandemic coincides with the queer unhistoricism of tragedy, and its collapsing of present, past, and future readerships.

Pedro Salinas (1892-1951), one of the greatest modern poets of any country, is unquestionably the preeminent love poet of twentieth-century Spain. Memory in My Hands includes an ample selection of his three books of love poetry - The Voice I Owe to You [La voz a ti debida], A Reason for Love [Razon de amor], and Long Lament [Largo lamento] in English translation alongside the Spanish original. This trilogy of love poems, the last (posthumous) of which has never been translated before, are of a nature to win a large and devoted audience: they are at once passionate, eloquent, and whimsical. The introduction to Memory in My Hands sets the poems in context, providing the story of the love affair that inspired the poems. It also raises the question of the nature of autobiographical poetry and considers this collection in the tradition of poetic sequences such as Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella.

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.

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).

This Festschrift for Ronald Speirs, Professor of German at the University of Birmingham, contains twenty-four original essays by scholars from Great Britain, Germany, Austria, and Norway. Between them they encompass the entire modern period from the later eighteenth century onwards, and focus on a wide range of German-speaking environments. Several essays throw new light on authors to whom Professor Speirs himself has devoted particular attention (such as Brecht, Thomas Mann, Nietzsche, and Fontane), whilst others discuss writers such as Lenz, Buchner, B¨ohlau, C. F. Meyer, Keyserling, Jahnn, and Huch. Above all, however, the contributions address the complexities of writing in ideologically diverse contexts, including the Third Reich and the former German Democratic Republic. This interplay between text and context is the cornerstone which links all the essays, as it has consistently informed Ronald Speirs's own work - which combines a scrupulous attention to textual detail with an acute awareness of the socio-political milieux and philosophical influences that shape creative 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.

This book offers a new reading of Miguel de Cervantes's play La destruccion de Numancia (c. 1583), analysing the work in relation to theories of empire in sixteenth-century Spain, in the context of plays written immediately before the rise in popularity of Lope de Vega and the comedia nueva, and the playwright's innovative use of dramatic techniques in this transitional period of Spanish drama. Dramatic writers have always used the stage as a medium through which they could comment on current events involving politics, religion, philosophy, and society; Cervantes was no exception. His discourse concerning imperial expansion in La Numancia has resulted in many conflicting interpretations of the play's meaning. This book explores the drama's thematic and generic ambiguities, as well as Cervantes's representation and interpretation of the historical record in the creation of his characters and his portrayal of the fall of Numancia in 133 BC to the Roman army of Scipio Aemilianus. Finally, this study addresses the significance of seemingly intentionally unclear discourse in reference to La Numancia and the turbulent political and religious environment of late sixteenth-century Spain.

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.

Ann Banfield - professor in the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley - is best known for her groundbreaking contributions to narrative theory. Working within the paradigm of generative linguistics, she argued that the language of fiction is characterized by two "unspeakable sentences", i.e., sentences that do not properly occur in the spoken language: the sentence of "pure narration" and the sentence of "represented speech and thought" (style indirect libre or erlebte Rede). More recently, Banfield offered a major reconsideration of the novels of Virginia Woolf and modernism in light of the philosophy of knowledge developed by G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, and appropriated by Roger Fry in his critical analyses of impressionism and post-impressionism. The essays gathered here pay tribute to Banfield by addressing those disciplines and topics most closely related to her work, including: narrative theory and pragmatics, the philosophy of language and knowledge, generative syntax, meter and phonology, and modernism.

This book explores the issue of love and its place in the reproduction of gender asymmetry in Nicaragua. The theme is discussed in the context of specific religious and work practices, living arrangements, gender values and norms, and the gender practices and legislation of the Sandinista revolution. The study uses lifeworld phenomenology as its theoretical approach, placing people's own experience center stage. Therefore, a case study of the Esperanza sewing cooperative is presented, built on life stories, interview materials and participant observation with the cooperative women and their husbands. The material and discursive practices and emotional experiences of men and women are examined in this particular socio-cultural setting. How do we account for the highly unequal bargains the women strike with their husbands, accepting large material responsibilities and «time-share love even if they experience this as emotionally hurtful? The study testifies to women's autonomy in family maintenance and religious practices, an autonomy which seems to falter in the fields oflove and sexuality; some of the men and women, however, negotiate subtle changes in gender norms and values.

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?

Hafid Bouazza is a highly influential and celebrated author in the Netherlands today. In the context of contemporary Dutch literature, Bouazza's Moroccan background still marks a divergence from the born-and-bred Dutch norm. Authors with a bi- or multicultural background are still often cast in the role of 'exotic outsider'. Bouazza both challenges and uses this position to the full. His writing demonstrates that the perceived us-them or self-other positions are questionable ideological constructs. He undermines the concept of a unified culture and the wholeness of the self. He explores and exploits stereotypical beliefs held on both sides of the East-West divide. The result is a magical realist setting that both puzzles and enchants. This book offers a reading of Bouazza's literary prose that responds to the interpretative opportunities offered by an author who skilfully and creatively explores his peculiar freedom in his Homeless Entertainment.

This book analyses the relationship between literature, history and politics in post-Soviet Russia. It explores the impact of the collapse of the USSR on Russian literature and culture and the changing content and reception of fiction on historical themes under Presidents Yeltsin and Putin. It discusses the value of various theoretical concepts, such as postmodernism, trauma, nostalgia, and the notion of discourse as power, in analysing post-Soviet historical fiction. The book shows that Russian society's confrontation with its past has remained one of the main themes of Russian culture during the period 1991-2006. Notwithstanding the gradual decline of the literature of sensational disclosure associated with Gorbachev's peresiroika, a more oblique investigation of many aspects of Russian and Soviet history and an interest in the philosophy of history have continued to be significant preoccupations of post-Soviet culture. Individual and family history continue to be explored in memoirs and autobiographical writings, while the history and destiny of Russia have been passionately debated in literary journals and the media, as Russians search for a new 'national idea' to fill the vacuum left by the collapse of communism. This study suggests that there is a remarkable continuity between post-Soviet literature and pre-revolutionary Russian literature and thought.

This book examines the present-day distribution and diachronic evolution of a set of infinitival structures in Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian, making use of extensive corpus data and investigating how pragmatic factors and usage patterns interact with syntax. After a contrastive account of the patterns of clausal subordination in Latin and Romance, the rise of prepositional infinitives is traced through the documented history of the three languages, revealing astonishing parallels in their development. The analysis of the data shows how cognitive principles such as reanalysis and entrenchment combine with parameters such as relevance and usage frequency to cause syntactic change. Beyond providing a genuine explanation for the observed processes in the Romance languages, this study offers new evidence for the existence of language-independent, cross-linguistically applicable principles and mechanisms in language change.

This collection of essays looks at the most recent work of Juan Goytisolo from a variety of perspectives and critical stances. The contributors, all specialists in the work of the Spanish author, employ theories of intertextuality, postmodernist irony, queer ethics and even the esoteric science of Hurufism to uncover the complexities of Goytisolo's creative practice, in particular his radical blurring of the generic boundaries between fiction, autobiography and literary criticism. Such challenging of genre conventions is seen as both integral to the author's own questioning of his identity as an expression of his radical dissidence and essential to the response his work evokes in the reader. Life and writing, autobiography and fiction, constitute the interconnecting poles of Goytisolo's artistic universe. The essays included in this volume explore the varying patterns of confluence of these twin strands in the writer's later work as a whole, but particularly in novels such as Las semanas del jardin (1997) and Carajicomedia (2000). The essays are set in context by a contribution from Juan Goytisolo himself in which he sums up his philosophy of life and writing as a pursuit of 'non-profitable knowledge'.

Plato of Athens, who laid the foundations of the Western philosophical tradition and in range and depth ranks among its greatest practitioners, was born to a prosperous and politically active family circa 427 BC. In early life an admirer of Socrates, Plato later founded the first institution of higher learning in the West, the Academy, among whose many notable alumni was Aristotle. Traditionally ascribed to Plato are thirty-five dialogues developing Socrates' dialectic method and composed with great stylistic virtuosity, together with the Apology and thirteen letters. The three works in this volume, though written at different stages of Plato's career, are set toward the end of Socrates' life (from 416) and explore the relationship between two people known as love (eros) or friendship (philia). In Lysis, Socrates meets two young men exercising in a wrestling school during a religious festival. In Symposium, Socrates attends a drinking party along with several accomplished friends to celebrate the young tragedian Agathon's victory in the Lenaia festival of 416: the topic of conversation is love. And in Phaedrus, Socrates and his eponymous interlocutor escape the midsummer heat of the city to the banks of the river Ilissus, where speeches by both on the subject of love lead to a critical discussion of the current state of the theory and practice of rhetoric. This edition, which replaces the original Loeb editions by Sir Walter R. M. Lamb and by Harold North Fowler, offers text, translation, and annotation that are fully current with modern scholarship.

This monograph examines the contributions of landscape design to authority and to organization of public life in imperial Russia. Analyzing how tsars and nobles inscribed their political aspirations in the gardens they designed or inhabited, this study maps out a distinct trajectory in the meaning of landscape design. Based partly on archival documents, it explores the reasons for Catherine the Great's keen interest in landscape design. It reconstructs Grigorii Potemkin's attempts to transform the Crimea physically and symbolically into the garden of the empire. And it reveals the centrality of the garden for noblemen such as Andrei Bolotov and Alexander Kurakin, who expressed their political philosophy and their anxieties about unstable social relations through landscaping. The book follows the destiny of western aesthetic categories, notably of the picturesque, as they are first adopted, then transformed, and ultimately rejected. It analyzes the historical role and mythological representations of the country estate, along with Leo Tolstoy's fraught commitment to Yasnaya Polyana and his critique of estate mythology in War and Peace. Finally, this study exposes how the current fashion for gardening in Russia, in particular among New Russians, alludes to imperial landscaping culture in order to justify a retreat from the public sphere.

Critical responses to Jeanne Hyvrard have generally categorised her as a writer of 'ecriture feminine' and/or autobiography, due to salient features of her oeuvre such as the use of first-person narrative, a cyclic writing style, and the quest for a 'female' language. Within these broader considerations, however, a recurrent motif throughout Hyvrard's writing is that of the body, specifically the female body, represented as suffering from different forms of physical/mental illness and emotional/social malaise. It is this primordial aspect of Hyvrard's work, on which surprisingly little critical analysis has been written, that this monograph explores. It has been demonstrated that Hyvrard's works can be studied as a unity as well as individually, given that all of her texts form part of her wider theory. While this theory is often referred to in abstract terms as 'pensee ronde', 'pensee globale' or 'pensee-femme', this study shows that it can be more specifically highlighted as a theory of dis(-)ease (i.e. the intertwining of physical malady and social malaise, medical terms and metaphor), and, particularly, as a social theory of the dis(-)eased female body.

This book is the first critical attempt made in any language to re-examine the entire oeuvre of Bruno Jasień ski (1901-1938). It takes into account the writer's lifelong concerns but places them in the context of the universal value of his writing, generated by his modernist passions and his fascination with the grotesque - an artistic device that was consonant with his need to portray life in all its complexities. The author relies on the grotesque as an element that unifies Jasień ski's futuristic poetry with his prose. Especially important in this regard is the close reading of Jasień ski's satiric grotesques written in the Soviet Union. The author does not avoid the intricacies and difficult questions of Jasień ski's ideological commitment but focuses mainly on the consequences that the highly ambivalent and ambiguous nature of the grotesque has on the interpretation of his work.

A rigorously and imaginatively researched anthology of classical literature, bringing together one hundred stories from the rich diversity of the literary canon of ancient Greece and Rome. Striking a balance between the 'classic classic' (such as Dryden's translation of the Aeneid) and the less familiar or expected, Of Gods and Men ranges from the epic poetry of Homer to the histories of Arrian and Diodorus Siculus and the sprawling Theogony of Hesiod; from the tragedies of Aeschylus and Euripides to the biographies of Suetonius and Plutarch and the pen portraits of Theophrastus; and from the comedies of Plautus to the fictions of Petronius and Apuleius. Of Gods and Men is embellished by translations from writers as diverse as Queen Elizabeth I (Boethius), Percy Bysshe Shelley (Plato), Walter Pater (Apuleius's Golden Ass), Lawrence of Arabia (Homer's Odyssey), Louis MacNeice (Aeschylus's Agamemnon) and Ted Hughes (Ovid's Pygmalion), as well as a number of accomplished translations by Daisy Dunn herself.

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.

Can female-authored French and German crime novels be read as part of an international phenomenon of feminist revisions of the crime genre? This book examines the status of female crime writers and their female investigators in France and Germany, focusing on four novels of the 1990s and their reception. In Germany the rise of the Frauenkrimi has been accompanied by fears of ghettoization on the part of women writers, and hostile reactions from critics to perceived feminist ideology, while in France the encroachment of women on the masculine terrain of the roman noir has given rise to retrenchments and defensive redefinitions. Far from being a simple source of pleasure, female-authored crime novels in France and Germany are a site of conflict; this study exposes the terms of this conflict and demonstrates the continued centrality of gender issues in literary studies.

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.