Unbinding Medea signals the very different answers to medea to provoke debate that transcends individual and discipline-specific approaches to the reception of her myth from antiquity to the twenty-first century and to present interdisciplinary parameters of engagement.

Medea - simply to mention her name conjures up echoes and cross-connections from Antiquity to the present. The vengeful wife, the murderess of her own children, the frail, suicidal heroine, the archetypal Bad Mother, the smitten maiden, the barbarian, the sorceress, the abused victim, the case study for a pathology. For more than two thousand years, she has arrested the eye in paintings, reverberated in opera, called to us from the stage. She demands the most interdisciplinary of study, from ancient art to contemporary law and medicine; she is no more to be bound by any single field of study than by any single take on her character. The contributors to this wide-ranging volume are Brian Arkins, Angela J. Burns, Anthony Bushell, Richard Buxton, Peter A. Campbell, Margherita Carucci, Daniela Cavallaro, Robert Cowan, Hilary Emmett, Edith Hall, Laurence D. Hurst, Ekaterini Kepetzis, Ivar Kvistad, Catherine Leglu, Yixu Lue, Edward Phillips, Elizabeth Prettejohn, Paula Straile-Costa, John Thorburn, Isabelle Torrance, Terence Stephenson, and Amy Wygant.

Eating disorders are situated at the complex interface of biology, medicine, culture, society, and politics, and are seen differently from each perspective. This book brings together discussions of eating, food, gender, sexuality and mental health through analysis of published autobiographical narratives authored by men with experience of living with one of the main eating disorders (anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa and binge-eating disorder) as well as associated mental health problems such as body dysmorphic disorder and depression. Written by a literary scholar, the book speaks with authority on the value of literary narratives for much-needed qualitative research and training on the lived experience of eating disorders in men. With its transnational and comparative focus on texts from the US, UK, Germany, and Austria, Men Writing Eating Disorders will appeal to readers working across the arts and humanities and science disciplines. Its interdisciplinary approach offers new insights for readers interested in autobiography, illness narratives, Gender Studies and Critical Masculinity Studies; for scholars keen to explore the nexus of the arts, humanities and sciences within the emerging disciplines of Health Humanities and Medical Humanities; and for healthcare professionals and clinical researchers who recognize the importance of personal narratives in training and practice.

Presents fifteen new German-language novelists and a close reading of an exemplary work of each for academics and the general reader alike. After the international success in the 1990s of authors such as Bernhard Schlink, Marcel Beyer, and Thomas Brussig, an impressive number of new German-language novelists are making a significant impact. Some, like Karen Duve, Daniel Kehlmann, and Sasa Stanisic, have achieved international recognition; some, like Julia Franck, have won major prizes; others, like Clemens Meyer, Alina Bronsky, and Ilja Trojanow, are truly "emerging authors" who have begun toattract attention. Between them they represent a range of literatures in German, from women's writing to minority writing (from Turkish immigrants and Eastern Europe), to "pop literature" and perspectives on the former GDR and onGermany's Nazi past. This volume devotes individual essays to fifteen such writers, examining in detail a major work of each. Translated excerpts from works by Vladimir Vertlib and Clemens Meyer round out the book, which willbe of interest not only to academics and students of English and Comparative Literature in the UK, the US, and beyond, but also to the general reader, for whom titles of texts and quotations are translated. Contributors: Lyn Marven, Stuart Taberner, Anke S. Biendarra, Stephen Brockmann, Rebecca Braun, Frauke Matthes, Brigid Haines, Julian Preece, Emily Jeremiah, Valerie Heffernan, Barbara Mennel, Heike Bartel, Kate Roy, Andrew Plowman, Sonja E.Klocke, Jamie Lee Searle, Katy Derbyshire. Lyn Marven is a Lecturer in German at the University of Liverpool. Stuart Taberner is Professor of Contemporary German Literature, Culture, and Society at the University of Leeds.

Pushing at Boundaries presents approaches to women writers who have recently had a big impact in shaping the contemporary literary field in Germany. The opening chapters offer the first extensive consideration of Karen Duve's work, including an excerpt from her latest novel, the romance parody Die entfuhrte Prinzessin, a fascinating commentary by her translator Anthea Bell, and essays on her acclaimed novel Regenroman, her subversive take on West German youth culture in the 1980s in Dies ist kein Liebeslied, and explorations of the witty echoes of fairy tales and myths in all her novels and stories. Other writers compared with Duve or discussed independently include Anne Duden, Jenny Erpenbeck, Julia Franck, Michael Fritz, Kerstin Hensel, Julia Schoch, Malin Schwerdtfeger, and Maike Wetzel. A final essay explores Berlin, as capital city and urban jungle, in recent novels by Sibylle Berg, Tanja Duckers, Alexa Hennig von Lange, Judith Hermann, Unda Hoerner, Inka Parei, Kathrin Roeggla, Antje Stelling, and Antje Ravic Strubel. Readers will find many cross-connections and contrasts reflecting the heterogeneous and often conflict-ridden culture in Germany today. Topics include the subversion of gender stereotypes; the merging of 'high' and 'low' culture; the invasion of cultivated spheres by 'wild' nature; post-Wende border crossings between East and West; and the highly charged relationship between lust and disgust.

Anne Duden's reputation as one of the most innovative writers of her generation, established in 1982 with the experimental stories in UEbergang, was confirmed in 1985 by Das Judasschaf, a novel interweaving an individual's anguish with the cultural trauma of the German past. In her acclaimed poem cycles Steinschlag (1993) and Hingegend (1999) Duden pushes the limits of language in densely metaphoric evocations of landscapes and places of political and personal remembrance, mixing lament for ruined nature with grotesque comedy, mystic vision with horror. Duden is a distinguished practitioner of short forms. Her essays display the same intense engagement with the visual arts as informs her narrative texts. Her deep interest in music is echoed in the musicality of short prose poems. This volume presents for the first time a comprehensive collection of approaches to Duden's fiction, poetry and essays by international scholars. Topics include: the ethics and aesthetics of Duden's engagement with German history; her constructions of female subjectivity; her criticism of western dualistic thinking with its devaluation of the body and exploitation of nature; her position within a modernist tradition with roots in the Romantic Age; the visual arts and poetic influences such as Hoelderlin and Celan; the dilemmas of translating Duden's highly individual style. Three essays on Steinschlag constitute the first systematic reading of this difficult, much praised cycle.