The fifteen essays in this volume reflect the diversity of German studies in Britain and Ireland today. The German language itself is the focus of four studies, covering historical aspects of German and Yiddish, language pedagogy and controversial contemporary issues, such as the rise of Anglicisms in German and the language of second- and third-generation immigrants. Traditional literary philology is also well represented in six essays on prose writers and dramatists from the nineteenth century to the present day, but it is a traditional philology that has been much modified and enriched by the cultural and historical perspectives evident in the remaining five essays. These include psychoanalytical and contextual studies and embrace the historical development and elaboration of mass media technologies from radio to public-access table TV.

The Piracy Years: Internet File Sharing in a Global Context is the first collection to provide an overview of digital piracy’s recent past and its potential futures. Combining research essays, interviews, and overviews, the volume brings together leading scholars and infamous digital pirates from China, Germany, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In June 1999, the peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing website Napster transformed the availability of online content, but the site was quickly sued into oblivion. Despite the highly publicised shutdowns of a number of P2P websites, many continue to thrive, and digital piracy has become a global phenomenon. This book argues that any future media theory and research will have to contend with such web practices remaining an integral and politically formative part of the Internet. Offline and online piracies thrive on technological affordances in opposition to corporate efforts – in music, film, publishing, and academia – to label them as threatening to the economy and society. Therefore, this book explores piracy as a phenomenon navigating the conventions, norms, and boundaries of legality in digital cultures. Pirate networked sociabilities work within and outside the fringes of market economy through the lens of institutional and discursive power. By creating new ways that keep society moving and from stagnation, they ensure its continued existence - including the survival of the very areas they attack. The Piracy Years is an essential resource for researchers, post-graduate students, and anyone interested in the global spread and ever-increasing importance of digital piracy.