The brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have established an international reputation for their emotionally powerful realist cinema. Inspired by their home turf of Li?ge-Seraing, a former industrial hub of French-speaking southern Belgium, they have crafted a series of fiction films that blends acute observation of life on the social margins with moral fables for the postmodern age. This volume analyses the brothers' career from their leftist video documentaries of the 1970s and 1980s through their debut as directors of fiction films in the late 1980s and early 1990s to their six major achievements from The Promise (1996) to The Kid with a Bike (2011), an oeuvre that includes two Golden Palms at the Cannes film festival, for Rosetta (1999) and The Child (2005). It argues that the ethical dimension of the Dardennes' work complements rather than precludes their sustained expression of a fundamental political sensibility.

Resuming Maurice is a collection of personal essays on greater and lesser known writers whose lives and careers have sparked some of Philip Mosley's own literary and historical interests. Drawing on the experience of a 40-year academic career, he also introduces elements of personal narrative into his appreciations of this diverse set of authors whose backgrounds range from English (Vita Sackville West, Whitwell Elwin, George Barker, John Seymour, Virginia Haggard, J. K. Nettlefold), Welsh (Dylan Thomas) and American (Ned Washington) to Belgian (Maurice Maeterlinck), Danish (Karen Blixen), Mexican (Octavio Paz, Rosario Castellanos) and Kenyan (Ngugi wa Thiong'o). Corresponding to the growing academic subdiscipline of celebrity studies, a unifying theme of literary celebrity and its discontents runs throughout the volume. To suggest figuratively the interconnective structure and spirit of the collection, `A convivial preface' ventures an imaginary dinner party attended by these authors with Mosley in the background. Chapter 1, `Resuming Maurice,' on Maeterlinck, is the capstone essay and includes a `Pre-amble' on the celebrity theme. The essays on Barker, Elwin, Seymour and Nettlefold have strong East Anglian connections, while the one on Virginia Haggard invokes the Norfolk origin of her famous great-uncle, the Victorian novelist Sir Henry Rider Haggard. The collection aims at the `common reader' (in Virginia Woolf's sense), a broad audience of literary enthusiasts and especially those interested in how literary history and criticism, biography and memoir, and celebrity studies may intersect in productive and engaging ways.

"Bruges-la-Morte" is the story of one man's obsession with his dead wife and his soul's struggle between an alluring young dancer - his late wife's double - and the beautiful, melancholy city of Bruges, whose moody atmosphere mirrors his mourning. This hallmark of Belgian symbolist literature, originally published in 1892 and first translated into English by Philip Mosley to great acclaim twenty years ago, is now back in print for the next generation of English readers to discover. With penetrating psychological force and richly metaphorical language, "Bruges-la-Morte" draws a haunting picture of love, grief, and murder in what has become a "dead city," severely Catholic and once proud. The source of the famous opera Die tote Stadt and endless inspiration for Belgian and French artists, this novella will enthrall readers with its dark portrait of fin-de-siecle Europe.

In presenting the first English language study of Belgian cinema, Split Screen explores the fascinating history of a cinema largely determined by linguistic division and beset by problems of cultural identity. This "split screen" characterizes the Belgian cinema, which has not received the critical praise that it deserves, despite the recent international successes of films like Toto the Hero, and the achievements of individual directors such as Henri Storck, Andre Delvaux, and Chantal Akerman. In surveying the evolution of Belgian cinema from its beginnings to the present day, Philip Mosley locates all the major feature films, describes the crucial intervention of the state in film production, and reveals undervalued Belgian traditions in documentary, in animation, in short films, and in a colonial cinema created partly by missionaries in the former Belgian Congo. Due to the political and economic transformations affecting Europe, the reforms of the Belgian state, and the increasing globalization of world media industries, Belgian cinema can now inscribe itself within new national and international contexts