Religious Narratives in Contemporary Culture: Between Cultural Memory and Transmediality analyses the meaning and role of religion in western cultural practices in the twenty-first century. This inquiry situates itself at the intersection between cultural memory studies and the transmedial study of narrative and art. Contributors focus on genres which have yet to receive significant critical attention within the field, including speculative fiction films and television series, autobiographical prose and poetry, and action-adventure video games. In this time of crisis, where traces of religious thinking still persist in the presence or absence of religious faith, this volume's collective look into some of their cultural embodiments is necessary and timely. The volume is addressed primarily to scholars and students interested in intersections between religious and cultural studies, revisions of traditional religious narratives, literature as a space of reflection on today's world, contemporary media studies and remediation. Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru's editing work in the last stages of this volume was supported by a grant of the Romanian Ministry of Education and Research, CNCS - UEFISCDI, project number PN-III-P3-3.6-H2020-0035.

Beauty is a central concept in the Italian cultural imagination throughout its history and in virtually all its manifestations. It particularly permeates the domains that have governed the construction of Italian identity: literature and language. The Idea of Beauty in Italian Literature and Language assesses this long tradition in a series of essays covering a wide chronological and thematic range, while crossing from historical linguistics to literary and cultural studies. It offers elements for reflection on cross-disciplinary approaches in the humanities, and demonstrates the power of beauty as a fundamental category beyond aesthetics.

The SLF Album is the first comprehensive story of the University of Notre Dame's Sophomore Literary Festival. This portrait focuses primarily on the literary giants whose presence has made this festival one of the nation's most esteemed. It also gives us a fascinating, behind-the-scenes look at this thirty year-old phenomenon which has always been organized, coordinated, and managed by students. Established in 1967 as a week-long Faulknerian festival, in 1968 the Sophomore Literary Festival came into its own with a series of readings and workshops by some of the country's most prestigious writers, including Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, and Ralph Ellison. The precedent set in 1968 became a legacy which has carried through to 1996, and DeCicco's portrait presents each year as its own chapter. equal on importance and prestige to all previous years. In addition to providing excerpts from the writers' readings and lectures, DeCicco describes the sophomore committee's author selection process and events which shed light ion the fame and foibles of many literary greats. DeCicco's success in portraying the participating internationally acclaimed authors, who include Margaret Atwood, Allen Ginsberg, Arthur Miller, Robert Bly, Tennessee Williams, Joyce Carol Oates, Edward Albee, Susan Sontag, Gloria Naylor, is uniquely tied to the intimacy of the Notre Dame setting. Her record encompasses the mythical images of these world-renowned authors in the context of a modest student-run festival at a midwestern private university. This comprehensive history is important and fascinating reading for all who have experienced the magic of Notre Dame's Sophomore Literary Festival, as well as for anyone interested in the arts.

In "The Turk" in the Czech Imagination (1870s-1923), Jitka Maleckova describes Czechs' views of the Turks in the last half century of the existence of the Ottoman Empire and how they were influenced by ideas and trends in other countries, including the European fascination with the Orient, images of "the Turk," contemporary scholarship, and racial theories. The Czechs were not free from colonial ambitions either, as their attitude to Bosnia-Herzegovina demonstrates, but their viewpoint was different from that found in imperial states and among the peoples who had experienced Ottoman rule. The book convincingly shows that the Czechs mainly viewed the Turks through the lenses of nationalism and Pan-Slavism - in solidarity with the Slavs fighting against Ottoman rule.

The Long Quarrel: Past and Present in the Eighteenth Century examines how the intellectual clashes emerging from the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns continued to reverberate until the end of the eighteenth century. This extended Quarrel was not just about the value of ancient and modern, but about historical thought in a broader sense. The tension between ancient and modern expanded into a more general tension between past and present, which were no longer seen as essentially similar, but as different in nature. Thus, a new kind of historical consciousness came into being in the Long Quarrel of the eighteenth century, which also gave rise to new ideas about knowledge, art, literature and politics. Contributors are: Jacques Bos, Anna Cullhed, Hakon Evju, Vera Fasshauer, Andrew Jainchill, Anton M. Matytsin, Iain McDaniel, Larry F. Norman, David D. Reitsam, Jan Rotmans, Friederike Vosskamp, and Christine Zabel.

The School Story: Young Adult Narratives in the Age of Neoliberalism examines the work of contemporary writers, filmmakers, and critics who, reflecting on the realm of school experience, help to shape dominant ideas of school. The creations discussed are mostly stories for children and young adults. David Aitchison looks at serious novels for teens including Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak and Faiza Guene's Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow, the light-hearted, middle-grade fiction of Andrew Clements and Tommy Greenwald, and Malala Yousafzai's autobiography for young readers, I Am Malala. He also responds to stories that take young people as their primary subjects in such novels as Sapphire's Push and films including Battle Royale and Cooties. Though ranging widely in their accounts of young life, such stories betray a mounting sense of crisis in education around the world, especially in terms of equity (the extent to which students from diverse backgrounds have fair chances of receiving quality education) and empowerment (the extent to which diverse students are encouraged to gain strength, confidence, and selfhood as learners). Drawing particular attention to the influence of neoliberal initiatives on school experience, this book considers what it means when learning and success are measured more and more by entrepreneurship, competitive individualism, and marketplace gains. Attentive to the ways in which power structures, institutional routines, school spaces, and social relations operate in the contemporary school story, The School Story offers provocative insights into a genre that speaks profoundly to the increasingly precarious position of education in the twenty-first century.

The Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries Since 1975 is the final volume of the four-volume series of cultural histories of the avant-garde movements in the Nordic countries. This volume carries the avant-garde discussion forward to present-day avant-gardes, challenged by the globalisation of the entertainment industries and new interactive media such as the internet. The avant-garde can now be considered a tradition that has been made more widely available through the opening of archives, electronic documentation and new research, which has spurred both re-enactments, revisions and continuations of historical avant-garde practices, while new cultural contexts, political, technological and ecological conditions have called for new strategies.

The qasidah and the qit'ah are well known to scholars of classical Arabic literature, but the maqtu', a form of poetry that emerged in the thirteenth century and soon became ubiquitous, is as obscure today as it was once popular. These poems circulated across the Arabo-Islamic world for some six centuries in speech, letters, inscriptions, and, above all, anthologies. Drawing on more than a hundred unpublished and published works, How Do You Say "Epigram" in Arabic? is the first study of this highly popular and adaptable genre of Arabic poetry. By addressing this lacuna, the book models an alternative comparative literature, one in which the history of Arabic poetry has as much to tell us about epigrams as does Greek.

Das ganze Studium der Anglistik und Amerikanistik in einem Band. Ob englische und amerikanische Literatur, Sprachwissenschaft, Literatur- und Kulturtheorie, Fachdidaktik oder die Analyse von Filmen und kulturellen Phanomenen fuhrende Fachvertreter geben in englischer Sprache einen ausfuhrlichen UEberblick uber alle relevanten Teildisziplinen. BA- und MA-Studierende finden hier die wichtigsten Grundlagen und Wissensgebiete auf einen Blick. Durch die ubersichtliche Darstellung und das Sachregister optimal fur das systematische Lernen und zum Nachschlagen geeignet.

This book is the final volume of a four-volume set on modern Chinese complex sentences, assessing the key attributes, related sentence structures, and semantic and pragmatic relevance of complex sentences. Complex sentences in modern Chinese are unique in formation and meaning. Following on from analysis on coordinate, causal, and adversative types of complex sentences, the ten chapters in this volume review the characteristics of complex sentences as a whole. The author discusses the constituents, related structures, semantic and pragmatic aspects of complex sentences, covering topics such !!as the constraints and counter-constraints between sentence forms and semantic relationships, six type crossover markers, distinctions between simple sentences and complex sentences, clauses formed by a noun/nominal phrase followed by le, the shi structure, subject ellipsis or tacit understanding of clauses, as well as double-subject sentences, alternative question groups and their relationships with complex sentences. The book will be a useful reference for scholars and learners of the Chinese language interested in Chinese grammar and language information processing.