This volume explores the relation between identity and diversity as the essential condition of interculturalism, and the sometimes positive, sometimes negative, role that identity and diversity play within intercultural dialogue in an increasingly globalised world. An international conference, in Madrid, October 2003, brought together scholars from four continents and allowed them to share their knowledge and learn about the issues of « identity and diversity: philological and philosophical reflections. The present volume contains a selection of the conference papers. The contributors explore the dynamics of identity as a process open to differences. Although identity and difference are not exclusively discursive, it is discourse and natural language that incorporate them.

Cultural Hybrids of (Post)Modernism starts from the premise that the literary-cultural milieu we live in is characteristically hybrid. To develop that premise, the present volume focuses on explaining the strong impact that Japanese culture, especially Japanese aesthetics, bore on Western intellectuals, Modernist literary writers and artists from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards, and, conversely, the impact of Western modernity on Japanese cultural modernization from the Meiji Era onwards. Such intercultural contact has brought on a renewal of cultural formats that can be explained in terms of hybridity as regards both the aesthetic and the intellectual production of the artists and thinkers from Japan and the West throughout the twentieth century and to the present. The outcome of modernization was the creation of new cultural standards in Japan and the West and, with it, new ways of understanding pedagogy and education, a reconceptualization of the Nation versus the individual, a redefinition of the role of women in modernizing society, also a revision of philosophical thought and a new approach to the role of linguistic signs in the production of meaning.

Este volumen embarca al lector en un viaje a traves de las experiencias y emociones de cinco mujeres de elite que, en tiempos de cambio, fueron protagonistas de sus vidas y escribieron sobre ellas, regalando al interesado su memoria convertida en textos. Todas ellas tuvieron oportunidades, convirtieron la posibilidad en una necesidad, y su necesidad en una realidad, y contribuyeron, con el relato de sus vivencias en Espana y America, a lo que mas tarde llegaria a conformar un genero literario. Algunas viajaron gracias a la profesion de sus conyuges (Caroline E. Cushing y Lady Louisa Tenison). Otras buscaron en los viajes y la escritura una via de escape a sus problemas sentimentales (Baronesa de Wilson o Isabella Bird), o a sus necesidades intelectuales (Maria de Maeztu). En todas, sin embargo, el viaje constituiria mucho mas: una verdadera pasion.

New, carefully focused essays providing a thorough examination of Hemingway's groundbreaking non-fictional work. Published in 1932, Death in the Afternoon reveals its author at the height of his intellectual and stylistic powers. By that time, Hemingway had already won critical and popular acclaim for his short stories and novels of the late twenties. A mature and self-confident artist, he now risked his career by switching from fiction to nonfiction, from American characters to Spanish bullfighters, from exotic and romantic settings to the tough world of theSpanish bullring, a world that might seem frightening and even repellant to those who do not understand it. Hemingway's nonfiction has been denied the attention that his novels and short stories have enjoyed, a state of affairs this Companion seeks to remedy, breaking new ground by applying theoretical and critical approaches to a work of nonfiction. It does so in original essays that offer a thorough, balanced examination of a complex, boundary-breaking, and hitherto neglected text. The volume is broken into sections dealing with: the composition, reception, and sources of Death in the Afternoon; cultural translation, cultural criticism, semiotics, and paratextual matters; and the issues of art, authorship, audience, and the literary legacy of Death in the Afternoon. The contributors to the volume, four men and seven women, lay to rest the stereotype of Hemingway as a macho writer whom women do not read; and their nationalities (British, Spanish, American, and Israeli) indicate that Death in the Afternoon, even as it focuses on a particular national art, discusses matters of universal concern. Contributors: Miriam B. Mandel, Robert W. Trogdon, Lisa Tyler, Linda Wagner-Martin, Peter Messent, Beatriz Penas Ibanez, Anthony Brand, Nancy Bredendick, Hilary Justice, Amy Vondrak, and Keneth Kinnamon. MiriamB. Mandel teaches in the English Department of Tel Aviv University.

New scholarly essays providing a multifaceted approach to the role of Africa in Hemingway's life and work. Hemingway's two extended African safaris, the first in the 1930s and the second in the 1950s, gave rise to two of his best-known stories ("The Snows of Kilimanjaro" and "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber"), a considerable amount of journalism and correspondence, and two nonfiction books, Green Hills of Africa (1935), about the first safari, and True at First Light (1999; longer version, Under Kilimanjaro 2005), about the second.Africa also figures largely in his important posthumous novel The Garden of Eden (1986). The variety and quantity of this literary output indicate clearly that Africa was a major factor in the creative life of this influential American author. But surprisingly little scholarship has been devoted to the role of Africa in Hemingway's life and work. To start the long-delayed conversation on this topic, this book offers historical, theoretical, biographical, theological, and literary interpretations of Hemingway's African narratives. It also presents a wide-ranging introduction, a detailed chronology of the safaris, a complete bibliography of Hemingway's published and unpublished African works, an up-to-date, annotated review of the scholarship on the African works, and a bibliography of Hemingway's reading on natural history and other topics relevant to Africa and the world of the safari. Contributors: Silvio Calabi, Suzanne del Gizzo, Beatriz Penas Ibanez, Jeremiah M. Kitunda, Kelli A. Larson, Miriam B. Mandel, Frank Mehring, Philip H. Melling, Erik G. R. Nakjavani, James Plath, and Chikako Tanimoto. Miriam B. Mandel is retired as Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and American Studies at Tel Aviv University.

Tolkien no habria estado de acuerdo con el empleo del termino "Occidente" para hablar del espacio legendario y cultural que tenia en mente cuando reconstruyo y re-mitifico el pasado literario en su obra cumbre. El termino proviene de la Antiguedad Clasica y no abarca en su origen los territorios del vasto Norte, cuyas tradiciones literarias Tolkien tambien incorporo en su vision mitificada del Oeste. El Oeste de Tolkien sintetiza leyendas y expresiones literarias del oeste, norte y sur de Europa, y por ello los personajes de El Senor de los Anillos a menudo hunden sus raices en una multitud de generos literarios. El presente estudio recorre la evolucion de los personajes principales de la obra de Tolkien y explica, entre otras cosas, como el dialogo entre diferentes generos literarios puede dar cuenta de las aparentes incoherencias en el personaje de Aragorn, los diferentes papeles genericos que desempena Gandalf a lo largo de la historia, o como unos prosaicos hobbits, surgidos de la Inglaterra rural del siglo XIX, son capaces de relacionarse con los antiguos mundos epicos de Rohan y Gondor.

?Que importancia tenia la imagen mitificada del Oeste americano en la imaginacion de King durante la elaboracion de El Pistolero? Mucha, a juzgar por el resultado. Al mismo tiempo, parece que la fertil imaginacion de King se conjura con las referencias culturales contemporaneas. El propio autor confiesa su anhelo por crear una novela que contega el espiritu de busqueda, aventura y magia de El Senor de los Anillos (1954), pero situada en el espacio del lejano Oeste americano al estilo de la pelicula de spaghetti western El bueno, el feo y el malo (1966) de Leone. Con El Pistolero, King da otra vuelta de tuerca al mito del Oeste, y con el presente estudio pretendemos tender puentes entre diferentes tradiciones literarias para entender la particular indosincrasia de la obra de King, capaz de albergar las tradiciones narrativas de la Antigu edad Clasica, la epoca medieval y la moderna, con sus tintes goticos, romanticos y fantasticos, a la vez que desarrollar y modernizar el mito del Oeste americano e introducir al lector contemporaneo en un nuevo universo literario.