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.

Known in her lifetime primarily as a literary scholar, Lydia Ginzburg (1902-1990) has become celebrated for a body of writing at the intersections of literature, history, psychology, and sociology. In highly original prose, she acted as a chronicler of the Soviet intelligentsia, a philosopher-cum-ethnographer of the Leningrad Blockade, and an author of powerful non-fictional narratives. She was a humanistic thinker with deep insights into psychological and moral dimensions of life and death in difficult historical circumstances. The first part of this book is a collection of essays by a distinguished set of scholars, shedding new light on Ginzburg's contributions to Russian literature and literary studies, life-writing, subjectivity, ethics, the history of the novel, and trauma studies. The second part is comprised of six works by Ginzburg that are being published for the first time in English translation. They represent a cross-section of her great themes, including Proustian notions of memory and place, the meaning of love and rejection, literary politics, ethnic and sexual identities, and the connections between personal biography and Soviet history. Both parts of the volume aim to explore, and make accessible to new readers, the gripping contribution to a broad set of disciplines by a profoundly intelligent writer and observer of her times.

This is the first book-length study devoted to the work of Marie Darrieussecq, one of France's leading contemporary writers, whose work has proved fascinating to both critics and readers for its diversity, the author's seeming ability to evade established literary categories and the changes in focus of her trajectory. This volume focuses on this ambivalence, highlighting the capacity of Darrieussecq's texts both to confront contemporary social issues, such as national identity and the role of women, and examine the complex relationship between language and reality. Focusing on the mid-section of her oeuvre (Bref sejour chez les vivants, Le Bebe and Le Pays), the author of this study brings together Darrieussecq's social realism, her emphasis on the productive and creative roles of language and narrative, and her interest in the role of social discourse in the formation of identity. The analysis in this book highlights the significant questions that Darrieussecq's texts raise about the ways in which we perceive and narrate the world and makes clear the original and essential nature of Darrieussecq's continuing literary project.

In Exile and Identity in Autobiographies of Twentieth-Century Spanish Women, Karla P. Zepeda studies the experience of exile and its effects on identity in three autobiographies: In Place of Splendor by Constancia de la Mora, Memoria de la melancolia by Maria Teresa Leon, and Seis anos de mi vida by Federica Montseny. These three prominent Spanish women of the Second Republic became exiles at the conclusion of the Spanish Civil War due to the onset of the Francisco Franco regime. The political expatriation caused their relocation into various countries: the United States, France, Argentina, and Italy. The repositioning initiated a process of self-reinvention, as the women come in contact with social circumstances prompting new versions of self. Through their works, these women negotiate their identity in relation to the lost homeland and the new locale. Exile and Identity in Autobiographies of Twentieth-Century Spanish Women examines the diverse character of diaspora, the social transactions deployed in a variety of circumstances, and the self-negotiations elicited in social interactions. Identity proves to be an intentional re-creation of self, enacted in particular circumstances, and negotiated as a response to social conditions.

This book offers a significant, original and timely contribution to the study of one of the most important and notorious Latin American authors of the twentieth century: Reinaldo Arenas. The text engages with the many extraordinary intersections created between Arenas' writing, the autobiographical construction of the literary subject and the exilic condition. Through focusing on texts written on the island of Cuba and in exile, the author analyses the ways in which Arenas' writing emblemises a complex process of identification with, and rejection of, his homeland - always an imagined place and which is, as the place of his origins, intrinsically related to the maternal. She examines how the maternal and the motherland are conflated and how the narrator-protagonists' identification is always in relation to, and dependent upon, this dominant motif. The book also explores the extent to which Arenas' writing is a tortuous attempt to escape from this dominance and to free himself and his writing from the ties that bind him to the mother and the motherland, and shows that Arenas suffered the exilic condition long before his move to the United States in 1980 as part of the Mariel exodus.

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.

Miron Bialoszewski: Radical Quest Beyond Dualisms is an innovative and challenging work of literary scholarship that examines Bialoszewski's artistic praxis as a certain philosophical proposition. It differs from the earlier critical approaches to the writings of this writer in as much as it attempts to examine his mature poetry from a non-dualistic perspective. The study demonstrates in detail how Bialoszewski's radical approach to poetry evolves into a consistent life-writing and life-philosophy (life-writing-philosophy). The poet disregards binary oppositions and he approaches life and reality without any universal method. In the poet's mature poetry, the context is identified as life and not as reality, and Bialoszewski's writing is described as his life project which is not searching but rather researching, since it has no pre-established goal to reach except for being continued.

Giorgio Vasari's Prefaces: Art and Theory provides students and scholars alike with the opportunity to study and understand the art, theory, and visual culture of Giorgio Vasari and sixteenth century Italy. For the first time all of Vasari's Prefaces from the Lives of the Artists (1568) are included translated into English as well as in the original Italian. Also included is an English translation of Giovanni Battista Adriani's letter to Giorgio Vasari enlightening Vasari on the art of the ancient masters. Through the eyes of Vasari, this book captures the creative achievements of his fellow artists - how they adopt nature and the classical tradition as their muses and how they ingeniously interpret the secular and religious themes of the past and present. Vasari himself is lauded for the transformation of the artist from one of being a mere laborer to one who imbues his work with intellectual depth and is recognized as a creator of beautiful visual myths.

Questioning the traditional association between machismo and Hispanic culture, this collection of essays focuses on revisiting archetypes of masculinity from medieval Iberia to the present by placing them in the context of the divergent counter-images that have always existed below the radar. The essays in this volume investigate both the construction and de-construction of masculinity in Iberian cultures and literatures from different genres and historical periods and from different disciplines (literary studies, film studies, art, religion, visual culture, etc.) and methodological perspectives (masculinity studies, feminist theory, queer studies, cultural studies, etc.). Queering Iberia is particularly concerned with exploring alternative models that examine or challenge canonical models of manhood, placing special emphasis upon re-visions of Iberian masculinities, especially as they are manifested in Catalonia, the Basque country, Galicia, and the Americas. This book starts off from the critical assumption that rethinking masculinities from these counterpoints will contribute different perspectives on the topic, and that by exploring Iberian cultures through masculinities new aspects of the relationships among these cultures can be understood. Queering Iberia will be of interest to courses on queer, gender, and masculinity studies as well as Hispanic cultures and literatures.

Homer and the Poetics of Gesture is the first book of its kind to consider the epic formula in terms that are gestural as well as verbal. Drawing on studies from multiple disciplines, including movement theory, dance studies, phenomenology, and early film, it suggests new approaches for interpreting the relationship between repetition and embodiment in Homer. Through a series of dynamic close readings, Purves argues that the deep-seated habits and gestures of epic bodies are instrumental to our understanding of the Iliad and Odyssey, especially insofar as they attune us to the kinetic structures and sensibilities that shape the meaning of the poems. Each of the chapters isolates a scene in which a specific action, posture, or gesture (falling, running, leaping, standing, and reaching) emerges from the background of its other iterations in order to make larger claims about its poetic significance within the epics as a whole. Beginning from the premise that gestures are shared between characters and often identically repeated within the poems' formulaic system, the book reconsiders long-standing arguments about Homeric agency and character by focusing on those moments when a gesture diverges from its expected course, redirecting the plot or drawing the poem in new and surprising directions. Homer and the Poetics of Gesture not only affords new insights into the nature of epic repetition and poetic originality but also reveals unnoticed connections between Homeric structure and technique and the embodied habits and movements of the characters within the poems.

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.

What are the points of contact between the study of language and the study of history? What are the possibilities for collaboration between linguists and historians, and what prevents it? This volume, the proceedings of an international conference held at the University of Bristol in April 2009, presents twenty-two articles by linguists and historians, exploring the relationship between the fields theoretically, conceptually and in practice. Contributions focus on a variety of European and American languages, in historical periods from the Middle Ages to the present day. Key themes at the intersection of these two disciplines are the standardization and classification of languages, the social and demographic history of medieval and early modern Europe, the study of language and history 'from below', and the function of language in modern politics. The value of interdisciplinary collaboration is demonstrated in a wide-ranging set of case studies, on topics including language contact in Northern and Central Europe, the relationship between peninsular and transatlantic Spanish, and new approaches to the recent histories of Nicaragua, Luxembourg and Bulgaria. The volume seeks out the interdependencies between the two fields and asks why exchanges between linguists and historians remain the exception rather than the rule.

This book focuses on Cuban and Cuban-American crime fiction of the 1990s and early twenty-first century. Contemporary authors, writing in both English and Spanish, have created new hybrid forms of the crime fiction genre that explore the problematic cultural interaction between Cuba and the United States. Through an analysis of the work of writers such as Leonardo Padura Fuentes, Jose Latour and Carolina Garcia-Aguilera, the author investigates issues which include the oppression of the individual by the state within Cuba, constructions of masculinity and femininity, and the problems facing Cuban immigrants entering the United States. The author demonstrates how contemporary writers have been influenced both by the American hard-boiled crime fiction genre and by the legacy of the socialist detective fiction that was promoted in Cuba by the Castro regime in the 1970s. By focusing on works produced both within and outside of Cuba, the book taps into wider debates concerning the concept of post-nationality. The cultural fluidity that characterizes these new variants of crime fiction calls into question traditional boundaries between national literatures and cultures.

This multi-authored volume offers the first extensive exploration of cultural memory in Portugal and Spain, two countries that are normally studied in isolation from one another due to linguistic divergences. The book contains an important theoretical survey of cultural memory today and a comparative analysis of the historical background influencing studies of memory in the Iberian Peninsula. It includes the work of eleven specialists on contemporary Spanish and Portuguese history, culture and literature and establishes a series of parallel themes that lace the chapters together: resistance; literary and popular representations of the figure of the dictator; gender; intergenerational links and changing paradigms of war stories; and the performance of memory. The essays gathered here will be of interest to scholars of both national cultures as well as those concerned with issues of memory, trauma and the historical legacy of war and dictatorship.

Narrating the Portuguese Diaspora presents a variety of perspectives on the Portuguese diaspora, from literature to identity discourse to biography and autobiography. The book is divided into three parts: reading literary identities within and without borders; constructing/constructed extra-literary identities at home and abroad; and literary ethnic voices from the North American diaspora and beyond. The 22 texts presented in this volume highlight the diasporic themes and backgrounds upon which the scope of the scholarly texts - as well as the personal contributions of short stories, poetry, interviews, and autobiographical memory - can be interwoven in a narrative identity construction.

This book is a collection of essays developed from the meetings of the 'Poetics of Resistance' network in Leeds (2008) and Santiago de Compostela (2009). The volume contains contributions from an international group of researchers and cultural producers, who are committed to the activation, promotion and analysis of counter-hegemonic practices both in the development and transmission of knowledge and in the emancipatory tools of cultural production. The essays in the collection are written by scholars, activists and artists from around the world and concern subjects as diverse as poetry, film, philosophy, literary theory, plastic arts and television. The relationship between cultural production and resistance lies at the heart of the book's concerns. Creativity and its manifestations in art, cultural production and knowledge production are a vital resource for a type of resistance that draws upon the resolve and contribution of the individual to the same degree that it emphasizes the importance of collective reflection and action. The interaction between artistic production, emancipation and resistance therefore cannot be reduced to a commitment to particular ideologies as expressed in art or writing. Rather, the poetics of resistance and emancipation are produced through the negotiation of the subjective and the collective, of reflection and action, and of cultural practices and ideologies. The volume contains contributions in English and in Spanish.

The Fifth International Workshop on Balto-Slavic Accentology took place in 2009 at the Silesian University in Opava (Czech Republic). This volume contains papers presented at the workshop. The papers treat thematically various aspects of Baltic and Slavic prosodic development as well as provide synchronic descriptions of individual Baltic and Slavic languages and their dialects.

This book brings together twelve specially commissioned essays that showcase current research on Spanish Republican exile theatre and performance, including work by some of the foremost scholars in the field. Covering a range of periods, geographical locations and theatrical phenomena, the essays are united by the common question of what it means to 'stage exile', exploring the relationship between space, identity and performance in order to excavate the place of theatre in Spanish Republican exile production. Each chapter takes a particular case study as a starting point in order to assess the place of a particular text, practitioner or performance within Hispanic theatre tradition and then goes on to examine the case study's relationship with the specific sociocultural context in which it was located and/or produced. The authors investigate wider issues concerning the recovery and performability of these documentary traces, addressing their position within the contemporary debate over historical and cultural memory, their relationship to the contemporary stage, the insights they offer into the experience and performance of exile, and their contribution to contemporary configurations of identity and community in the Hispanic world. Through this commitment to interdisciplinary debate, the volume offers a new and invigorating reimagination of twentieth-century Hispanic theatre from the margins.

The 2006 discovery of the Old Saxon Heliand manuscript fragment (MS L) in Leipzig is conspicuous. Besides its proximity to Wittenberg, the Leipzig University Library - site of the discovery - was first dedicated by Martin Luther in 1545. Given this relationship between the Reformer and the discovery location, it seems possible that the Reformer once had access to an original version of the Old Saxon Heliand, perhaps as an aid in his efforts to render Biblical Hebraisms into vernacular German idioms at a time of budding German nationalism. Indeed, long before the Old Saxon epic received the name by which it is currently known, rumors arose about Luther's possession of an ancient vernacular Germanic Bible with a Latin preface. Even so, the source and age of these rumors are enigmatic. Were these rumors merely a myth created by later Protestants to counter Rome's denunciation of Luther as a heretic? Following the trail of the rumors' sources, Luther's Heliand untangles historical relationships between the builders of the Leipzig University Library and several of their students - all men who comprised Luther's innermost circle of Reformation thinkers. In their student notes, letters to colleagues, and printed diatribes against the Church and the Empire, these men recorded vital hints regarding the timing and location of their own discovery of the ancient Germanic Bible. Dating of these published accounts indicates that already several years prior to its dedication by Luther, the fledgling Leipzig University Library housed a medieval codex with features identical to those of the extant Old Saxon Heliand manuscripts, in particular MS L.

(Re)Considering Blackness in Contemporary Afro-Brazilian (Con)Texts critically interrogates the issue of Blackness in Brazil under the lens of cultural studies - broadly defined to include utterances on transnationalism and cosmopolitanism. From a multidisciplinary perspective, this collection of scholarly articles queries the notions of national and racial identity and ambivalence, through critical analysis of contemporary (mid-twentieth century to the present) Brazilian cultural materiality, including literature, religion, film/video and theatrical production, and cultural anthropological manifestations. The book's purpose is to understand how multiethnic nations, such as Brazil, negotiate issues of Blackness in contemporary contexts. All of the contributing authors are leading Brazilian scholars in the areas of race, gender, theatre, music, literature, film, and religion studies. By concentrating on how these disciplines and ideologies relate to matters concerning Blackness in the construction of identities in Brazil, this book will be of significant value to scholars in the areas of Brazilian studies, Latin American studies, interdisciplinary studies, cultural studies, and African Diaspora studies.

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.

Il presente volume contiene una raccolta di saggi dedicati alla figura e all'opera di Piergiuseppe Scardigli (Altopascio 1933 - Firenze 2008), insigne docente di filologia germanica e geniale studioso del mondo germanico antico e medievale, apprezzato in Italia e all'estero. Il libro comprende una serie di contributi che trattano aspetti e problematiche delle letterature e delle lingue germaniche antiche, medievali e moderne, prescelti tra quelli cari al dedicatario. Alcuni di questi saggi traggono spunto da indicazioni fornite dallo stesso Scardigli, altri seguono le linee di pensiero da lui tracciate o fanno un bilancio della ricerca in campi nei quali egli ha profuso il suo impegno scientifico, come la lingua, la letteratura e la civilta gotica, i longobardismi in italiano e il germanico nell'ambito dell'indeuropeo. Il libro contiene 16 contributi in italiano, quattro in tedesco e tre in inglese ed e corredato da una bibliografia completa e particolareggiata di tutti gli scritti di Piergiuseppe Scardigli, anche di ambiti diversi da quello germanico.

This volume presents a number of close readings of Latin American literary and cultural phenomena. The overarching theme of the collection is the revision of the accepted view of Latin American national identities as represented in twentieth-century Latin American literature and culture. The book examines the complexity of national identities forged among political crises, economic upheaval and intercultural influences. The essays included here focus upon internal contradictions of national identity and the factors contributing to this discord. Among these are the nature of the Latin American intellectual, Latin American modernity and exile, and the psychological underpinning of the re-creation of history. Some of the chapters challenge the existing theoretical framework for Latin American literary analysis by employing non-literary theories to analyse hitherto overlooked textual anomalies. The book is a Festschrift for Professor Peter R. Beardsell, reflecting the importance of his contribution to Latin American literary and cultural studies.

One of the most outstanding properties of Russian postmodernist fiction is its reliance on metafictional devices which foreground aspects of the writing, reading or structure, and draw attention to the constructed nature of fiction writing. Some common metafictional strategies include overt commentary on the process of writing, the presence of an obtrusive narrator, dehumanization of character, total breakdown of temporal and spatial organization and the undermining of specific literary conventions. This book examines the most representative postmodernist texts and addresses the following questions: How widespread is the use of metafiction in contemporary Russian literature? What are its most pronounced forms? What is the function of metafictional devices? How innovative are Russian postmodernist writers in their use of metafictional techniques? This study reveals the unique contribution of postmodernist writers to the development of Russian literature through their systematic use of metafiction and their bold experimentation with new metafictional devices on all the principal levels of the text, including narration, plot, characterization, setting and language.

A stunning new translation of the classic tale of the fall of Troy from one of the world's finest translators. If you enjoyed THE SONG OF ACHILLES, discover the original and the best... Man seduces another's wife then kidnaps her. The husband and his brother get a gang together to steal her back and take revenge. The woman regrets being seduced and wants to escape, whilst the man's entourage resent the position they have been placed in. Yet the battle lines have been drawn and there is no going back... Not the plot of the latest Hollywood thriller, but the basis of the ILIAD - the Greek classic that details the war between the Greeks and the Trojans after the kidnapping of Helen of Sparta. Based on the recent, superb, M.L. West edition of the Greek, this ILIAD is more readable and moving than any previous version. Thanks to the scholarship and poetic power of the highly acclaimed Stephen Mitchell, this new translation recreates the energy and simplicity, the speed, grace, and continual thrust and pull of the original, while the ILIAD's ancient story bursts vividly into life. This edition also includes book 10 as an appendix, making it indispensible for students and lay readers alike.