During the early modern period, regional specified compendia - which combine information on local moral and natural history, towns and fortifications with historiography, antiquarianism, images series or maps - gain a new agency in the production of knowledge. Via literary and aesthetic practices, the compilations construct a display of regional specified knowledge. In some cases this display of regional knowledge is presented as a display of a local cultural identity and is linked to early modern practices of comparing and classifying civilizations. At the core of the publication are compendia on the Americas which research has described as chorographies, encyclopeadias or - more recently - 'cultural encyclopaedias'. Studies on Asian and European encyclopeadias, universal histories and chorographies help to contextualize the American examples in the broader field of an early modern and transcultural knowledge production, which inherits and modifies the ancient and medieval tradition.

Special Focus: "Omission", edited by Patrick Gill Throughout literary history and in many cultures, we encounter an astute use of conspicuous absences to conjure an imagined reality into a recipient's mind. The term 'omission' as used in the present study, then, demarcates a common artistic phenomenon: a silence, blank, or absence, introduced against the recipient's generic or experiential expectations, but which nonetheless frequently encapsulates the tenor of the work as a whole. Such omissions can be employed for their affective potential, when emotions represented or evoked by the text are deemed to be beyond words. They can be employed to raise epistemological questions, as when an omission marks the limits of what can be known. Ethical questions can also be approached by means of omissions, as when a character's voice is omitted, for instance. Finally, omission always carries within it the potential to reflect on the media and genres on which it is brought to bear: as its efficacy depends on the recipient's generic expectations, omission is frequently characterized by a high degree of meta-discursiveness. This volume investigates the various strategies with which the phenomenon of omission is employed across a range of textual forms and in different cultures to conclusively argue for its status as a highly effective and near-universal form of artistic signification.

This accessible introduction to the structure of English, general theories in linguistics, and important issues in sociolinguistics, is the first text written specifically for English and Education majors. This engaging introductory language/linguistics textbook provides more extensive coverage of issues of particular interest to English majors and future English instructors. It invites all students to connect academic linguistics to the everyday use of the English language around them. The book's approach taps students' natural curiosity about the English language. Through exercises and discussion questions about ongoing changes in English, How English Works asks students to become active participants in the construction of linguistic knowledge.

Scholarship often presumes that texts written about the Shoah, either by those directly involved in it or those writing its history, must always bear witness to the affective aftermath of the event, the lingering emotional effects of suffering. Drawing on the History of Emotions and on trauma theory, this monograph offers a critical study of the ambivalent attributions and expressions of emotion and "emotionlessness" in the literature and historiography of the Shoah. It addresses three phenomena: the metaphorical discourses by which emotionality and the purported lack thereof are attributed to victims and to perpetrators; the rhetoric of affective self-control and of affective distancing in fiction, testimony and historiography; and the poetics of empathy and the status of emotionality in discourses on the Shoah. Through a close analysis of a broad corpus centred around the work of W. G. Sebald, Dieter Schlesak, Ruth Kluger and Raul Hilberg, the book critically contextualises emotionality and its attributions in the post-war era, when a scepticism of pathos coincided with demands for factual rigidity. Ultimately, it invites the reader to reflect on their own affective stances towards history and its commemoration in the twenty-first century.

Sounding the Margins is the second of two publications to emerge from the highly successful AFIS conference hosted by the Universite de Lille in 2019. Concentrating on the literary manifestations of marginality in Ireland and France, the essays treat of various texts that demonstrate the extent to which marginality is a recurring trope. This may well be because writers tend to situate themselves at a distance from the centre or status quo in their desire to maintain a certain degree of artistic objectivity. But it is also the case that literary practitioners tend to identify more easily with others living on the margins, either through choice or circumstances. The collection is a mixture of comparative studies and essays on individual authors but, in all cases, marginality is presented as a liberating experience once it is freely chosen and embraced.

"Compressed Utterances brings focused attention to collage in a Germanic context, whose contours and impact are still so little appreciated. As this stunning volume shows, collage serves as a key medium not only for understanding art historical developments but social and political transformations as well, often embodying the dynamic forces of avant-garde criticality." (Thomas O. Haakenson, Associate Professor, History of Art and Visual Culture, California College of the Arts) "A deep dive into the paradigmatic medium of the twentieth century, Compressed Utterances is the foundational text of the growing field of collage studies. The book's established and emerging authors investigate an astonishing range of previously unknown collage work to explore German artists' and writers' deployment of this medium as appropriative, intertextual, alienating, and temporally slippery." (Elizabeth Otto, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, The University at Buffalo, State University of New York) Composite pictures create narratives and images from many fragments. They turn often disparate and juxtaposing images and text into a singular image or message. Collage makes from the broken and, arguably, no other country has reflected the fractious nature of its history more than Germany. The collage form is one of the best expressive forms to be taken up and experimented with by German artists since 1912. Compressed Utterances: Collage in a Germanic Context after 1912 brings together essays by scholars, students and curators to examine the use of collage by German-speaking artists, making in their homeland and abroad, whose works are closely connected to the tumultuous histories of Germany and neighbouring German-speaking nations since 1912 to the late 2000s.

This volume is written in the context of trauma hermeneutics of ancient Jewish communities and their tenacity in the face of adversity (i.e. as recorded in the MT, LXX, Pseudepigrapha, the Deuterocanonical books and even Cognate literature. In this regard, its thirteen chapters, are concerned with the most recent outputs of trauma studies. They are written by a selection of leading scholars, associated to some degree with the Hungaro-South African Study Group. Here, trauma is employed as a useful hermeneutical lens, not only for interpreting biblical texts and the contexts in which they were originally produced and functioned but also for providing a useful frame of reference. As a consequence, these various research outputs, each in their own way, confirm that an historical and theological appreciation of these early accounts and interpretations of collective trauma and its implications, (perceived or otherwise), is critical for understanding the essential substance of Jewish cultural identity. As such, these essays are ideal for scholars in the fields of Biblical Studies-particularly those interested in the Pseudepigrapha, the Deuterocanonical books and Cognate literature.