Early Modern Debts: 1550-1700 makes an important contribution to the history of debt and credit in Europe, creating new transnational and interdisciplinary perspectives on problems of debt, credit, trust, interest, and investment in early modern societies. The collection includes essays by leading international scholars and early career researchers in the fields of economic and social history, legal history, literary criticism, and philosophy on such subjects as trust and belief; risk; institutional history; colonialism; personhood; interiority; rhetorical invention; amicable language; ethnicity and credit; household economics; service; and the history of comedy. Across the collection, the book reveals debt's ubiquity in life and literature. It considers debt's function as a tie between the individual and the larger group and the ways in which debts structured the home, urban life, legal systems, and linguistic and literary forms.

This book is a study of female virginity loss and its representations in popular Anglophone literatures. It explores dominant cultural narratives around what makes a "good" female virginity loss experience by examining two key forms of popular literature: autobiographical virginity loss stories and popular romance fiction. In particular, this book focuses on how female sexual desire and romantic love have become entangled in the contemporary cultural imagination, leading to the emergence of a dominant paradigm which dictates that for women, sexual desire and love are and should be intrinsically linked together: something which has greatly affected cultural scripts for virginity loss. This book examines the ways in which this paradigm has been negotiated, upheld, subverted, and resisted in depictions of virginity loss in popular literatures, unpacking the romanticisation of the idea of "the right one" and "the right time".

This collection of essays reveals the extent to which politics is fundamental to our understanding of Samuel Beckett's life and writing. Bringing together internationally established and emerging scholars, Beckett and Politics considers Beckett's work as it relates to three broad areas of political discourse: language politics, biopolitics and geopolitics. Through a range of critical approaches, including performance studies, political theory, gender theory, historicizing approaches and language theory, the book demonstrates how politics is more than just another thematic lens: it is fundamentally and structurally intrinsic to Beckett's life, his texts and subsequent interpretations of them. This important collection of essays demonstrates that Beckett's work is not only ripe for political engagement, but also contains significant opportunities for understanding and illuminating the broader relationships between literature, culture and politics.

This book offers a bold new view of the way in which modernist fiction, painting, music, and poetry are interlinked. Dowden shows that modernism, contrary to a longstanding view, did not turn away from mimesis. Rather, modernism operates according to a deepened understanding of what mimesis is and how it works, which in turn occasions a fresh look at other related dimensions of the modernist achievement. Modernism is neither "difficult" nor elitist. Instead, it trends toward simplicity, directness, and common culture. Dowden argues that naivete rather than highbrow sophistication was for the modernists a key artistic principle. He demonstrates that modernism, far from glorifying subjective creativity, directs itself toward healing the split between subject and object. Mimesis closes this gap by resolving representation into play and festivity.

This book reconstructs the lines of nihilism that Walter Benjamin took from Friedrich Nietzsche that define both his theory of art and the avant-garde, and his approach to political action. It retraces the eccentric route of Benjamin's philosophical discourse in the representation of the modern as a place of "permanent catastrophe", where he attempts to overcome the Nietzschean nihilism through messianic hope. Using conventions from literary criticism this book explores the many sources of Benjamin's thought, demonstrating that behind the materialism which Benjamin incorporates into his Theses on the Concept of History is hidden Nietzsche's nihilism. Mauro Ponzi analyses how Benjamin's Arcades Project uses figures such as Baudelaire, Marx, Aragon, Proust and Blanqui as allegories to explain many aspects of modernity. The author argues that Benjamin uses Baudelaire as a paradigm to emphasize the dark side of the modern era, offering us a key to the interpretation of communicative and cultural trends of today.

Ausgangspunkt ist die zur Literatur anderer europaischer Lander besonders ab dem 19. Jahrhundert auffallige Zuruckhaltung des deutschen Lesepublikums in der Rezeption polnischer Literatur. Dargestellt werden die allgemein bekannten, aber auch weniger bis kaum bekannten, vor allem geschichtlichen Grunde hierfur und die dann nach dem totalen Stillstand 1945 langsam einsetzenden gemeinsamen Bemuhungen, in jeder, besonders auch kultureller Hinsicht, aus dem absoluten Tiefpunkt im deutsch-polnischen Verhaltnis herauszukommen; wofur ein besseres gegenseitiges Verstandnis durch einen vertieften kulturellen Austausch, das Kennenlernen der gemeinsamen Geschichte mit Empathie und Eingehen auf die jeweils andere Mentalitat zu den wichtigsten Voraussetzungen zahlen und anzustreben sind.

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) was one of the most influential and controversial women of her age. No writer, except perhaps her political foe, Edmund Burke, and her fellow reformer, Thomas Paine, inspired more intense reactions. In her brief literary career before her untimely death in 1797, Wollstonecraft achieved remarkable success in an unusually wide range of genres: from education tracts and political polemics, to novels and travel writing. Just as impressive as her expansive range was the profound evolution of her thinking in the decade when she flourished as an author. In this collection of essays, leading international scholars reveal the intricate biographical, critical, cultural, and historical context crucial for understanding Mary Wollstonecraft's oeuvre. Chapters on British radicalism and conservatism, French philosophes and English Dissenters, constitutional law and domestic law, sentimental literature, eighteenth-century periodicals and more elucidate Wollstonecraft's social and political thought, historical writings, moral tales for children, and novels.

This Element looks at contemporary authorship via three key authorial roles: indie publisher, hybrid author, and fanfiction writer. The twenty-first century's digital and networked media allows writers to disintermediate the established structures of royalty publishing, and to distribute their work directly to - and often in collaboration with - their readers. This demotic author, one who is 'of the people', often works in genres considered 'popular' or 'derivative'. The demotic author eschews the top-down communication flow of author > text > reader, in favor of publishing platforms that generate attention capital, such as blogs, fanfiction communities, and social media.

This open access book is a result of an extensive, ambitious and wide-ranging pan-European project focusing on the development of children and young people's cultural literacy and what it means to be European in the 21st century prioritising intercultural dialogue and mutual understanding. The Horizon 2020 funded, 3-year DIalogue and Argumentation for cultural Literacy Learning (DIALLS) project included ten partners from countries in and around Europe with the aim to centralise co-constructive dialogue as a main cultural literacy value and to promote tolerance, empathy and inclusion. This is achieved through teaching children in schools from a young age to engage together in discussions where they may have differing viewpoints or perspectives, to enable a growing awareness of their own cultural identities, and those of others. Central to the project is children's engagement with wordless picture books and films, which are used as stimuli for discussions around core cultural themes such as social responsibility, living together and sustainable development. In order to enable intercultural dialogue in action, the project developed an online platform as a tool for engagement across classes, and which this book elaborates on. The book explores themes underpinning this unique interdisciplinary project, drawing together scholars from cultural studies, civics education and linguistics, psychologists, socio-cultural literacy researchers, teacher educators and digital learning experts. Each chapter of the book explores a theme that is common to the project, and celebrates its interdisciplinarity by exploring these themes through different lenses.

Science fiction was being written throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but it underwent a rapid expansion of cultural dissemination and popularity at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. This Element explores the ways this explosion in interest in 'scientific romance', that informs today's global science fiction culture, manifests the specific historical exigences of the revolutions in publishing and distribution technology. H. G. Wells, Jules Verne and other science fiction writers embody in their art the advances in material culture that mobilize, reproduce and distribute with new rapidity, determining the cultural logic of twentieth-century science fiction in the process.

The complete guide to the world of poetry -- from sonnets to spoken word!

Poetry For Dummies will help you understand, appreciate, and write poetry. This book is filled with hands-on exercises to get your creative juices flowing and smart tips on getting your poems published.

Can anyone really own a culture? This magnificent account argues that the story of global civilisations is one of mixing, sharing, and borrowing. It shows how art forms have crisscrossed continents over centuries to produce masterpieces. From Nefertiti's lost city and the Islamic Golden Age to twentieth century Nigerian theatre and Modernist poetry, Martin Puchner explores how contact between different peoples has driven artistic innovation in every era - whilst cultural policing and purism have more often undermined the very societies they tried to protect. Travelling through Classical Greece, Ashoka's India, Tang dynasty China, and many other epochs, this triumphal new history reveals the crossing points which have not only inspired the humanities, but which have made us human.

In Lateinamerika konsolidiert sich eine sozial und wissenschaftlich relevante germanistische Szene erst dann, wenn das Angebot von Deutsch als Fremdsprache (DaF) an Schulen sich verbreitet, und sich somit die Prasenz von Deutsch in verschiedenen Bereichen der Gesellschaft quantitativ und qualitativ starkt. Im Zeichen dieser Herausforderung ist die bildungs- und sprachpolitische Dimension des Faches ein (nicht selten unreflektierter, diffuser) Bestandteil der dort praktizierten Germanistik, der das Fach wissenschaftlich befruchtet und bereichert. Ausserdem liefert Lateinamerika neue Impulse durch den konsequenten Dialog seiner Germanistik mit der Romanistik im deutschsprachigen Raum und den Nationalphilologien in den Landern des Halbkontinents. Innovative Forschungsperspektiven einer offenen, interdisziplinar angelegten DaF-Germanistik in Lateinamerika und einer internationalen Germanistik, die mit Lateinamerika allmahlich ins Gesprach kommt, stehen im Mittelpunkt dieses Bandes.

Die 10 Beitrage dieses Bandes richten den Blick ins facettenreiche Innere der Germanistik. Aus chinesischer und deutscher bzw. vergleichender Sicht werden aktuelle Themen aus den Bereichen Linguistik, Literatur und Medien in ihrer gegenwartstypischen Verflechtung eroertert. Im Fokus stehen dabei Probleme der Entlehnung und Interferenz, des Spracherwerbs und der Sprachdidaktik sowie die Analyse und Reflexion kultureller und politischer Entwicklungen.

Muse du poete W.B. Yeats mais aussi activiste anglaise au service de l'independance de l'Irlande, Maud Gonne n'etait pas a un paradoxe pres. Le plus frappant et le moins etudie est sans doute qu'elle fut une revolutionnaire irlandaise en France. C'est a Paris qu'elle passa les annees les plus intenses de son engagement politique, au tournant des XIXe et XXe siecle. L'objet de cet ouvrage est donc de considerer la France, son environnement politique, culturel et social, non pas comme un decor mais comme l'explication majeure au militantisme etaux choix politiques de Maud Gonne. Maud Gonne fut boulangiste avant d'etre muse, avant meme d'etre une nationaliste irlandaise. Au travers d'approches historique et culturelle qui se completent et se renforcent, le portrait de Maud Gonne devient aussi le recit d'un imaginaire nationaliste ou la place accordee a la femme et a son lien avec la terre est essentielle. Cet imaginaire, base en grande partie sur une pensee mythique, engendra des circulations d'idees et de personnes et fit des nationalismes francais et irlandais de proches parents.En mots et en actes, par l'enthousiasme ou l'irritation qu'elle provoquait, Maud Gonne etait l'un des membres les plus en vue de l'internationale nationaliste.

Este volumen reune los trabajos del equipo de investigacion PRESEEA-Sevilla y aborda de manera integral una variedad de aspectos del espanol hablado en Sevilla: las unidades fraseologicas y la informalidad lexica; elementos gramaticales, como los diminutivos y los pronombres personales atonos; cuestiones foneticas como la -/d/- intervocalica y el seseo-ceceo o las estrategias de impersonalizacion y formulas de tratamiento. Todo ello pretende ofrecer un panorama global de la rentabilidad de estos fenomenos y su distribucion sociolinguistica en esta comunidad de habla.

Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals was Iris Murdoch's major philosophical testament and a highly original and ambitious attempt to talk about our time. Yet in the scholarship on her philosophical work thus far it has often been left in the shade of her earlier work. This volume brings together 16 scholars who offer accessible readings of chapters and themes in the book, connecting them to Murdoch's larger oeuvre, as well as to central themes in 20th century and contemporary thought. The essays bring forth the strength, originality, and continuing relevance of Murdoch's late thought, addressing, among other matters, her thinking about the Good, the role and nature of metaphysics in the contemporary world, the roles of art in human understanding, questions of unity and plurality in thinking, the possibilities of spiritual life without God, and questions of style and sensibility in intellectual work.

Im Jahre 1904 schreibt der junge Stefan Zweig zum ersten Mal an die von ihm verehrte Schwedin Ellen Key. Sie ist uber 50, Zweig ist 23 Jahre alt. Es entwickelt sich ein fast 20 Jahre dauernder, vertrauensvoller Briefwechsel. In diesen Briefen spiegelt sich zunachst die Entwicklung des jungen Dichters wider, spater vor allem unglaubiges Entsetzen, als die kulturell verbundenen Menschen und Nationen Europas mit Ausbruch des Ersten Weltkrieges zu Feinden werden. Ab 1915 wird in der Korrespondenz zwischen Zweig und Key deutlich, dass Resignation an Raum gewinnt. Der Krieg als humanitare Katastrophe und Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit lasst den Glauben an die Kraft von Literatur und Kunst schwinden. Beide kampfen aber weiter mit der Schreibfeder fur den Frieden und warnen in Wort und Schrift vor Radikalisierung. Sie hoffen weiter, dass ein menschliches Gewissen mittels Sprache nachhaltig angeruhrt werden kann.

Das seit jeher spannungsreiche Verhaltnis zwischen Autor und Subjekt bildet in der Gegenwartslyrik ein Experimentierfeld, das eine Herausforderung fur die Lyriktheorie darstellt. Die Beitrage diskutieren zentrale Positionen zu den Konzepten 'abstrakter Autor' und 'lyrisches Subjekt' unter Berucksichtigung ihrer unterschiedlichen Genese sowie Terminologie in den verschiedenen Philologien. Aus der Gedichtanalyse werden Perspektiven oder Alternativen zu diesen Konzepten entwickelt, um ein Instrumentarium zur Beschreibung der neuen Autor-Subjekt-Relationen in der Lyrik zu gewinnen. Der Band mit germanistischen, slavistischen, anglistischen und komparatistischen Beitragen ist Ergebnis des DFG-Projekts zur "Typologie des Subjekts in der russischen Dichtung der 1990-2010er Jahre" und der DFG-Kollegforschungsgruppe "Russischsprachige Lyrik in Transition - Poetische Formen des Umgangs mit Grenzen der Gattung, Sprache, Kultur und Gesellschaft zwischen Europa, Asien und Amerika".

Jasmin Humburg provides evidence of naturalist narrative strategies, tropes, and character variations in six contemporary American television series: The Wire, Treme, Shameless, Ozark, Orange is the New Black and 2 Broke Girls. The author investigates how poverty is negotiated through classic literary naturalism and contemporary televisual articulations, and how the latter may have been influenced by the former in the age of the Great Recession. By connecting literary studies, television studies, and concepts of social mobility, this project contributes to the field of new poverty studies.

Uncle Tom, Topsy, Sambo, Simon Legree, little Eva: their names are American bywords, and all of them are characters in Harriet Beecher Stowe's remarkable novel of the pre-Civil War South. Uncle Tom's Cabin was revolutionary in 1852 for its passionate indictment of slavery and for its presentation of Tom, "a man of humanity," as the first black hero in American fiction. Labeled racist and condescending by some contemporary critics, it remains a shocking, controversial, and powerful work -- exposing the attitudes of white nineteenth-century society toward "the peculiar institution" and documenting, in heartrending detail, the tragic breakup of black Kentucky families "sold down the river." An immediate international sensation, Uncle Tom's Cabin sold 300,000 copies in the first year, was translated into thirty-seven languages, and has never gone out of print: its political impact was immense, its emotional influence immeasurable.

Explores the tension between the abstract intellect and material bodies in May Sinclair's writing May Sinclair was a bestselling author of her day whose versatile literary output, including criticism, philosophy, poetry, psychoanalysis and experimental fiction, now frequently falls between the established categories of literary modernism. In terms of her contribution to dominant modernist paradigms she was, until recently, best remembered for recasting the psychological novel as 'stream of consciousness' narrative in a 1918 review of Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage. This book brings together the most recent research on Sinclair and re-contextualises her work both within and against dominant Modernist narratives. It explores Sinclair's negotiations between the public and private, the cerebral and the corporeal and the spiritual and the profane in both her fiction and non-fiction. Key Features Brings together the most recent research undertaken by foremost Sinclair scholars and early-career researchers Considers Sinclair's contribution to contemporary aesthetic and philosophical debates about the nature and representation of human identity Explores a wide range of Sinclair's work, including fiction, psychology, philosophy and short stories

Every age has characteristic inventions that change the world. In the 19th century it was the steam engine and the train. For the 20th, electric and gasoline power, aircraft, nuclear weapons, even ventures into space. Today, the planet is awash with electronic business, chatter and virtual-reality entertainment so brilliant that the division between real and simulated is hard to discern. But one new idea from the 19th century has failed, so far, to enter reality-time travel, using machines to turn the time dimension into a two-way highway. Will it come true, as foreseen in science fiction? Might we expect visits to and from the future, sooner than from space? That is the Time Machine Hypothesis, examined here by futurist Damien Broderick, an award-winning writer and theorist of the genre of the future. Broderick homes in on the topic through the lens of science as well as fiction, exploring some fifty different time-travel scenarios and conundrums found in the science fiction literature and film.