This monograph examines three aesthetic emotions in AElfric's Lives of Saints. Drawing on recent research on emotional communities, this research combines methods from Cognitive Sciences and other studies on early Medieval English language and literature in order to explore AElfric's usage of the terms in the lexical domain of amazement. The main aim of this study is to identify preferred modes of expression that would reveal a series of emotional rules in the context of AElfric's emotional community. Looking into AElfric's usage of this lexical domain and how he depicts emotion dynamics in these texts, this monograph shows how the emotion family of amazement is central to the hagiographical genre, and it highlights important emotion-regulation scripts that operate in these texts.

In this book, Sharada Balachandran Orihuela examines property ownership and its connections to citizenship, race and slavery, and piracy as seen through the lens of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literature. Balachandran Orihuela defines piracy expansively, from the familiar concept of nautical pirates and robbery in international waters to post-revolutionary counterfeiting, transnational slave escape, and the illegal trade of cotton across the Americas during the Civil War. Weaving together close readings of American, Chicano, and African American literature with political theory, the author shows that piracy, when represented through literature, has imagined more inclusive and democratic communities than were then possible in reality. The author shows that these subjects are not taking part in unlawful acts only for economic gain. Rather, Balachandran Orihuela argues that piracy might, surprisingly, have served as a public good, representing a form of transnational belonging that transcends membership in any one nation-state while also functioning as a surrogate to citizenship through the ownership of property. These transnational and transactional forms of social and economic life allow for a better understanding the foundational importance of property ownership and its role in the creation of citizenship.

Literary theory flourished in Central and Eastern Europe throughout the twentieth century, but its relation to Western literary scholarship is complex. This book sheds light on the entangled histories of exchange and influence both within the region known as Central and Eastern Europe, and between the region and the West. The exchange of ideas between scholars in the East and West was facilitated by both personal and institutional relations, both official and informal encounters. For the longest time, however, intellectual exchange was thwarted by political tensions that led to large parts of Central and Eastern Europe being isolated from the West. A few literary theories nevertheless made it into Western scholarly discourses via exiled scholars. Some of these scholars, such as Mikhail Bakhtin, become widely known in the West and their thought was transposed onto new, Western cultural contexts; others, such as Ol'ga Freidenberg, were barely noticed outside of Russian and Poland. This volume draws attention to the schools, circles, and concepts that shaped the development of theory in Central and Eastern Europe as well as the histoire croisee - the history of translations, transformations, and migrations - that conditioned its relationship with the West.

This book brings together Old Norse-Icelandic literature and critical strategies of memory, and argues that some of the particularities of this vernacular textual tradition are explained by the fact that this literature derives from, represents, and incorporates into its designs mnemonic devices of different kinds. Even if Old Norse-Icelandic manuscript culture is relatively silent about the mnemonic context of the literature, the texts themselves exhibit multiple reminiscences of memory. By showing that this literature reveals glimpses of mnemonic technologies at the same time as it testifies to a cultural memory, this study demonstrates how 'the past', and narrative traditions about the past, were constructed in a dynamic relationship with ideas that existed at the time the texts were written. Moreover, the book deals with the function of memory in early book-culture, with metaphors of memory, and with mnemonic cues such as spatiality and visuality. With its new readings of canonical texts like the Islendingasogur, the Prose Edda and selected eddic poems, as well as of less widely studied branches of Old Norse-Icelandic literature, such as the sagas of bishops and religious texts, this book will be of interest to Old Norse scholars and to scholars interested in medieval Scandinavia and memory studies.

"Figures of Exile is an excellent volume of essays carefully curated by Daniela Omlor and Eduardo Tasis that pays a long overdue homage to the late Nigel Dennis, one of the most important Hispanists of his generation. It does so brilliantly by bringing together a group of talented international scholars - the majority of whom can be considered as Professor Dennis's disciples - who each offer original and illuminating perspectives on a variety of topics and authors related to the Spanish Republican exile, a field for which Nigel Dennis was an inescapable point of reference." (Javier Letran, University of St Andrews) Figures of Exile contributes to the ongoing dialogue in the field of exile studies and aims to refamiliarise a wider readership with the Spanish exile of 1939. It provides new perspectives on the work of canonical figures of this exile, such as Rafael Alberti, Luis Cernuda, Jose Bergamin, Pedro Salinas, Francisco Ayala, Emilio Prados, Federico Garcia Lorca or Maria Zambrano, and brings to the fore the work of less-studied figures like Jose Diaz Fernandez, Juan David Garcia Baca, Ernesto Guerra da Cal, Nuria Pares, Maria Luisa Elio, Maria Teresa Leon and Tomas Segovia. Rather than being disparate, this broad scope, which ranges from first generation to second generation exiles, from Galicia to Andalusia, from philosophers to poets, is testament to the wide-ranging impact of the Spanish Republican exile.

The rapid development of the TV series in the twenty-first century has resulted in an emergence of new aesthetic, cultural, and social trends. The development has influenced both the mainstream of popular culture and reception practices of audiences across nations and platforms. This book observes how the means employed in key contemporary TV series texts and a specific thematic variety have promoted new reception styles and redefined conventional interpretive practices. The authors analyze a variety of series released since 2000 to discuss historical (dis)continuities of genres and conventions, and observe how interpretive competences promoted by the rhetoric of contemporary TV series result from, and are polemical with, the conventions of visual and verbal cultures of preceding decades.

Questioning hegemonic masculinity in literature is not novel. In the nineteenth century, under the July Monarchy (1830 1848), several French writers depicted characters who did not conform to gender expectations: hermaphrodites, castrati, homosexuals, effete men and mannish women. This book investigates the historical conditions in which these protagonists were created and their success during the July Monarchy. It analyses novels and novellas by Balzac, Gautier, Latouche, Musset and Sand in order to determine how these literary narratives challenged the traditional representations of masculinity and even redefined genders through their unconventional characters. This book also examines the connections and the disparities between these literary texts and contemporary scientific texts on sexual difference, homosexuality and intersexuality. It thus highlights the July Monarchy as a key period for the redefinition of gender identities.

Using Documents presents an interdisciplinary discussion of human communication by means of documents, e.g., letters. Cultural scientists, together with researchers from media science and media engineering, analyze questions of document modeling, including a document's contexts of use, on the basis of cultural theory. The research also concerns the debate on the material turn in the fields of cultural studies and media studies. Looking back on existing work, texts on written communication by the philosopher and sociologist Georg Simmel and by an interdisciplinary French group of authors under the pseudonym Roger T. Pedauque are taken as a starting point and presented afresh. A look ahead to the future is also attempted. Whereas the modeling (including technical modeling) of documents has to date largely been limited to the description of output forms and specific content, the foundations are laid here for including documents' contexts of use in models that are grounded in cultural theory.

This book aims to redefine the relationship between film and revolution. Starting with Hannah Arendt's thoughts on the American and French Revolution, it argues that, from a theoretical perspective, revolutions can be understood as describing a relationship between time and movement and that ultimately the spectators and not the actors in a revolution decide its outcome. Focusing on the concepts of 'time,' 'movement,' and 'spectators,' this study develops an understanding of film not as a medium of agitation but as a way of thinking that relates to the idea of historicity that opened up with the American and French Revolution, a way of thinking that can expand our very notion of revolution. The book explores this expansion through an analysis of three audiovisual stagings of revolution: Abel Gance's epic on the French Revolution Napoleon, Warren Beatty's essay on the Russian Revolution Reds, and the miniseries John Adams about the American Revolution. The author thereby offers a fresh take on the questions of revolution and historicity from the perspective of film studies.

Art honours the world, and criticism honours art, even - perhaps especially - when the critic sets out to destroy. The bad review is hardly ever written out of mere spite. In most cases, the motivation is disappointed idealism. Critics are people who love art and who hate to see it traduced. Hence the critic's sempiternal cry: You're doing it wrong. What the critic wants is for you to do it better. Since 2008, acclaimed novelist Kevin Power has reviewed almost three hundred and fifty books. Power declares, 'Even now, cracking open a brand-new hardback with my pencil in my hand, I feel the same pleasure, and the same hope. That's the great secret: every critic is an optimist at heart.' Art that thinks and feels at the same time - 'good art' - requires explication. The writing of criticism in response to such art is an activity that has taken place since Aristotle first sat down to figure out what made tragedy work. It is in the pursuit of this question - what makes good art 'good' - that Kevin Power found his vocation. During a ten-year stint as a regular freelance reviewer for the Sunday Business Post, Power fell in love with the writing of criticism, and with the reading of it, too, particularly by talented novelists who review books on the side. His conclusion is that criticism is absolutely an art. But it is never more so than when practiced by an actual artist. These pieces, ranging from reviews of Susan Sontag to the meaning of Greta Thunberg, apocalyptic politics, and literary theory, represent a decade's worth of thinking about books; a record of the author's attempts to honour art, and through art, the world. In The Written World, Power explains how he became a critic and what he thinks criticism is. It begins and ends with a long personal essays, 'The Lost Decade', written especially for this collection, about his mental and writing block after publishing Bad Day in Blackrock and his decade-long journey to White City. The pieces gathered by Power are connected by a theme - this is a book about writing, seen from various positions, and about growth as an artist and a critic.

For more than 200 years, Thomas Traherne's Centuries of Meditations was undiscovered and unpublished. The manuscript passed through many hands before finally being compiled into a book by bookseller and scholar BERTRAM DOBELL (1842-1914) in 1908. Centuries is a collection of poems written to express the rapture of life lived in accordance with God. Yet Dobell is careful to state that even though Traherne was a clergyman, there is plenty of beauty to be found in his poetry that does not require specific belief in Christianity or in God. Readers of many ages and persuasions will be touched by Traherne's passages on love and belonging.