In Renaissance Italy there existed a rich interplay between two cultural practices frequently regarded as entirely separate and mutually antagonistic: the humanistic study of the ancient world and ancient literature, and the oral and improvisational performance of poetry, which constituted one of the most popular forms of entertainment. A Sudden Frenzy explores the development and impact of these Renaissance practices of improvisation and oral poetry. James K. Coleman shows how the confluence of humanist culture and the art of oral poetry resulted in an extraordinary turn toward improvisation and spontaneity that profoundly influenced poetry, music, and politics. By examining the culture of improvisation, this book reveals the ways in which Renaissance thinkers transcended cultural dichotomies, both in theory and in practice. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including letters, poetry, visual art, and philosophical texts, A Sudden Frenzy reveals the far-reaching and sometimes surprising ways that these phenomena shaped cultural developments in the Italian Renaissance and beyond.

'Nobody knows how to write'. Thus opens this carefully nuanced and accessible collection of essays by one of the most important writer-philosophers of the 20th century, Jean-Francois Lyotard (1924-1998). First published in French in 1991 as Lectures d'enfance, these essays have never been printed as a collection in English. In them, Lyotard investigates his idea of infantia, or the infancy of thought that resists all forms of development, either human or technological. Each essay responds to works by writers and thinkers who are central to cultural modernism, such as James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Sigmund Freud. This volume - with a new introduction and afterword by Robert Harvey and Kiff Bamford - contextualises Lyotard's thought and demonstrates his continued relevance today.

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.

"A woman is more than just her exterior. The lingerie is also important." "The mission of the press is to spread culture while destroying the attention span." "Art serves to rinse out our eyes." Uniquely combining humor with profundity and venom with compassion, Dicta and Contradicta is a bonanza of scandalous wit from Vienna's answer to Oscar Wilde. From the decadent turn of the century to the Third Reich, the acerbic satirist Karl Kraus was one of the most famous-and feared-intellectuals in Europe. Through the polemical and satirical magazine Die Fackel (The torch), which he founded in 1899, Kraus launched wicked but unrelentingly witty attacks on literary and media corruption, sexual repression and militarism, and the social hypocrisy of fin-de-siecle Vienna. Kraus's barbed aphorisms were an essential part of his running commentary on Viennese culture. These miniature gems, as sharp as diamonds, demonstrate Kraus's highly cultivated wit and his unerring eye for human weakness, flaccidity, and hypocrisy. Kraus shies away from nothing; the salient issues of the day are lined up side by side, as before a firing squad, with such perennial concerns as sexuality, religion, politics, art, war, and literature. By turns antagonistic, pacifistic, realistic, and maddeningly misogynistic, Kraus's aphorisms provide the sting that precedes healing. For Dicta and Contradicta, originally published in 1909 (with the title Spruche und Widerspruche) and revised in 1923, Kraus selected nearly 1,000 of the scathing aphorisms that had appeared in Die Fackel. In this new translation, Jonathan McVity masterfully renders Kraus's multilayered meanings, preserving the clever wordplay of the German in readable colloquial English. He also provides an introductory essay on Kraus's life and milieu and annotations that clarify many of Kraus's literary and sociohistorical allusions.

In the early twenty-first century, the Chinese literary world saw an emergence of fictional works - dubbed as "oppositional political novels" - that took political articulation as their major purpose and questioned the fundamental principles and intrinsic logic of the Chinese model. Based on close readings of five representative oppositional Chinese political novels, Questioning the Chinese Model examines the sociopolitical connotations and epistemological values of these novels in the broad context of modern Chinese intellectual history and contemporary Chinese politics and society. Zhansui Yu provides a sketch of the social, political, and intellectual landscape of present-day China. He investigates the dialectic relationship between the arts and politics in the Chinese context, the mechanisms and dynamics of censorship in the age of the Internet and commercialization, and the ideological limitations of oppositional Chinese political novels. In the process of textual and social analysis, Yu extensively cites Western political philosophers, such as Hannah Arendt, Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault, and references well-regarded studies on Chinese literature, politics, society, and the Chinese intelligentsia. Examining oppositional Chinese political novels from multiple perspectives, Questioning the Chinese Model applies a broad range of knowledge beyond merely the literary field.

This book is not designed to define the sacred. It is, rather, a bringing together of case histories (a rich, varied collection from medieval, early modern and nineteenth-century contexts in England and Wales) that goes beyond familiar paradigms to explore the dynamic, protean interaction, in different times and places, between sacred space and text. Essentially an interdisciplinary enterprise, it focuses a range of historical and critical methodologies on that complex process of transformation and transmission whereby spiritual intuitions, experiences and teachings are made palpable 'in art and architecture, poetry and prayer, in histories, scriptures and liturgies, even landscapes. So the sacred, variously constructed and inscribed, makes itself felt 'on the pulse'; is a presence, a voice even now not stilled.

Early modern anger is informed by fundamental paradoxes: qualified as a sin since the Middle Ages, it was still attributed a valuable function in the service of restoring social order; at the same time, the fight against one's own anger was perceived as exceedingly difficult. And while it was seen as essential for the defence of an individual's social position, it was at the same time considered a self-destructive force. The contributions in this volume converge in the aim of mapping out the discursive networks in which anger featured and how they all generated their own version, assessment, and semantics of anger. These discourses include philosophy and theology, poetry, medicine, law, political theory, and art. Contributors: David M. Barbee, Maria Berbara, Tamas Demeter, Jan-Frans van Dijkhuizen, Betul Dilmac, Karl Enenkel, Tilman Haug, Michael Krewet, Johannes F. Lehmann, John Nassichuk, Jan Papy, Christian Peters, Bernd Roling, Paolo Santangelo, Barbara Sasse Tateo, Anita Traninger, Jakob Willis, and Zeynep Yelce.

The Reformation is often alluded to as Gutenberg's child. Could it then be said that the Counter-Reformation was his step-child? The close relationship between the Reformation, the printing press and books has received extensive, historiographical attention, which is clearly justified; however, the links between books and the Catholic world have often been limited to a tale of censorship and repression. The current volume looks beyond this, with a series of papers that aim to shed new light on the complex relationships between Catholicism and books during the early modern period, before and after the religious schism, with special focus on trade, common reads and the mechanisms used to control readership in different territories, together with the similarities between the Catholic and the Protestant worlds. Contributors include: Stijn Van Rossem, Rafael M. Perez Garcia, Pedro J. Rueda Ramirez, Idalia Garcia Aguilar, Bianca Lindorfer, Natalia Maillard Alvarez, and Adrien Delmas.

From the Arthurian epic poem Parzival to Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and the Assassin's Creed video game series, the Knights Templar have captivated artists and audiences alike for centuries. In modern times, the Templars have featured in many narrative contexts, evolving in a range of contrasting story roles: the grail guardian, the heroic knight, the villainous knight, and the keeper of conspiracies. This study explores why these gone but not forgotten warrior monks remain prominent in popular culture, how history influenced the myth, and how the myth has influenced literature, film and video games.

Ruth Kluger (1931 - 2020) passed away on October 5, 2020 in the U.S. Born in Vienna and deported to Theresienstadt, she survived Auschwitz and the Shoah together with her mother. After living in Germany for a short time after the War, she immigrated to New York. She was educated in the U.S. and received degrees in English literature as well as her Ph.D. in German literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She taught at several American universities. She has numerous scholarly publications to her credit, mostly in the fields of German and Austrian literary history. She is also recognized as a poet in her own right, an essayist, and a feminist critic. She returned to Europe, where she was a guest professor in Goettingen and Vienna. Her memoir, entitled weiter leben (1992), which she translated and revised in an English parallel-text as Still Alive, was a major bestseller and highly regarded autobiographical account of a Holocaust survivor. It was subsequently translated into more than a dozen languages. It has also generated a vigorous critical discussion in its own right. Ruth Kluger received numerous prestigious literary prizes and other distinctions. The present volume, The Legacy of Ruth Kluger and the End of the Auschwitz Century, aims to honor her memory by assessing critically her writings and career. Taking her biography and writings as points of departure, the volume includes contributions in fields and from perspectives which her writings helped to bring into focus acutely. In the table of contents are listed the following contributions: Sander L. Gilman, "Poetry and Naming in Ruth Kluger's Works and Life"; Heinrich Detering, "'Spannung': Remarks on a Stylistic Principle in Ruth Kluger's Writing"; Stephan Braese, "Speaking with Germans. Ruth Kluger and the 'Restitution of Speech between Germans and Jews'"; Irene Heidelberger-Leonard, "Writing Auschwitz: Jean Amery, Imre Kertesz, and Ruth Kluger"; Ulrike Offenberg, "Ruth Kluger and the Jewish Tradition on Women Saying Kaddish; Mark H. Gelber, "Ruth Kluger, Judaism, and Zionism: An American Perspective"; Monica Tempian, "Children's Voices in the Poetry of the Shoah"; Daniel Reynolds, "Ruth Kluger and the Problem of Holocaust Tourism"; Vera Schwarcz, "A China Angle on Memory and Ghosts in the Poetry of Ruth Kluger."

This book explores the diverse range of practical and theoretical challenges and possibilities that digital technologies and platforms pose for Holocaust memory, education and research. From social media to virtual reality, 360-degree imaging to machine learning, there can be no doubt that digital media penetrate practice in these fields. As the Holocaust moves beyond living memory towards solely mediated memory, it is imperative that we pay critical attention to the way digital technologies are shaping public memory and education and research. Bringing together the voices of heritage and educational professionals, and academics from the arts and humanities and the social sciences, this interdisciplinary collection explores the practicalities of creating digital Holocaust projects, the educational value of such initiatives, and considers the extent to which digital technologies change the way we remember, learn about and research the Holocaust, thinking through issues such as ethics, embodiment, agency, community, and immersion. At its core, this volume interrogates the extent to which digital interventions in these fields mark an epochal shift in Holocaust memory, education and research, or whether they continue to be shaped by long-standing debates and guidelines developed in the broadcast era.