Developing Writing Skills in German, is a unique course designed to improve the reading and writing skills of intermediate students of German. Presenting a wide range of authentic written materials, the book aims to develop reading strategies and the ability to write texts of various types - essays, articles and reviews - while imparting an understanding of important aspects of German society.

From the environment to consumerism, each chapter focuses on a different theme and concentrates on the advancement of particular skills; all the chapters conclude with a task appropriate to the skills focus of the section.

Summary writing, note-taking, the use of mind-maps to collect ideas, and other strategies for successful writing in German are presented here. This course is suitable both for classroom use and independent study, with feedback and answer key supplied at the back of the book.

Developing Writing Skills in German, is a unique course designed to improve the reading and writing skills of intermediate students of German. Presenting a wide range of authentic written materials, the book aims to develop reading strategies and the ability to write texts of various types - essays, articles and reviews - while imparting an understanding of important aspects of German society. From the environment to consumerism, each chapter focuses on a different theme and concentrates on the advancement of particular skills; all the chapters conclude with a task appropriate to the skills focus of the section. Summary writing, note-taking, the use of mind-maps to collect ideas, and other strategies for successful writing in German are presented here. This course is suitable both for classroom use and independent study, with feedback and answer key supplied at the back of the book.

The femme fatale as a nineteenth-century motif has been well-researched and a whole body of critical literature attests to her haunting fascination for literary critics. This study interrogates literary definitions of the femme fatale and challenges the notion that the femme fatale is a post-Romantic, late nineteenth-century type. Whilst arguing for a more precise discrimination, it considers the earlier emergence of the motif in English Romanticism and focuses on a period where femmes fatales do not appear with marked frequency, but where cultural history emphasises their quality. Tracing such contemporary contextualisations, this study argues for the existence of a multiplicity of different types of fatal women even in Romanticism and for their continuous line of development through to the pervasive motif of the femme fatale in decadent writing.

Browsing through books and TV channels, we find people pre-occupied with eating, cooking and competing with chefs. Eating and food in today's media have become a form of entertainment and art. A survey of literary history and culture shows to what extent eating used to be closely related to all areas of human life, to religion, eroticism and even to death. In this volume, early modern ideas of feasting, banqueting and culinary pleasures are juxtaposed with post-18th- and 19th-century concepts in which the intake of food is increasingly subjected to moral, theological and economic reservations. In a wide range of essays, various images, rhetorics and poetics of plenty are not only contrasted with the horrors of gluttony, they are also seen in the context of modern phenomena such as the anorexic body or the gourmandizing bete humaine. It is this vexing binary approach to eating and food that this volume traces within a wide chronological framework and which is at the core not only of literature, art and film, but also of a flourishing popular culture.

Mantic elements are manifold in the English drama of the Renaissance period: they are supernatural manifestations and have a prophetic, future-determining function within the dramatic plot, which can be difficult to discern. Addressing contemporaries of Shakespeare, this study interprets a representative number of revenge tragedies, among them The Spanish Tragedy, The White Devil, and The Revenger's Tragedy, to draw general conclusions about the use of mantic elements in this genre. The analysis of the cultural context and the functionalisation of mantic elements in revenge tragedy of the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline era show their essential function in the construction of the plot. Mantic elements create and stimulate audience expectations. They are not only rhetoric decorum, but structural elements, and convey knowledge about the genre, the fate of which is determined by retaliation. An interpretation of revenge tragedy is only possible if mantic providentialism is taken into account.

In academic as well as in public debates, audiovisual media have often been accused of perpetuating gender stereotypes and of confronting viewers time and again with traditional role models and binary concepts of masculinity and femininity. In recent years, films, television series and music videos increasingly have shown women and men who transgress the traditional gender dichotomy. One of the central ideas behind this volume is the attempt to bring together explorations of 'gendering' in different audiovisual media. The contributions seek to explore in particular shifting constructions of femininity and masculinity and aim to provide further insight into the media- and genre-specific ways of constructing, perpetuating and challenging gender concepts in audiovisual media, taking into consideration the interplay of the different levels on which gendering occurs in them. Thus, two articles in the present volume address the processes of constructing, perpetuating and challenging notions of femininity and masculinity in music videos, while other contributions are dedicated to the analysis of gendering in films and/or TV series.

Viele Klassiker der Weltliteratur verdanken ihren Bekanntheitsgrad nicht zuletzt ihrer Rezeption in Form adaptierter Ausgaben fur junge Leser. Die Autorin dieser historisch-deskriptiven UEbersetzungsstudie zeigt am Beispiel einer Analyse von jeweils neun deutschen Kinder- und Jugendbuchausgaben von Gulliver's Travels und The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn aus verschiedenen Jahrhunderten auf, wie zeit- und kulturspezifische Einstellungen der Bearbeiter die Gestaltung der Zieltexte beeinflussen und welche Folgen dies hat. Neben einem historischen UEberblick uber die Rezeptionsgeschichte der beiden Klassiker in Deutschland bietet die Untersuchung einen Einblick in die Besonderheiten des kinderliterarischen UEbersetzens (wie den Umgang mit Tabuthemen und satirischen Elementen) und spricht grundsatzliche UEbersetzungsprobleme (wie die UEbertragung von Dia- und Soziolekten) an.

Literaturhistorisch betrachtet erlebte die gothic novel im engeren Sinne ihre Blutezeit zwischen 1764, dem Publikationsdatum von Horace Walpoles The Castle of Otranto. A Gothick Story, und 1820, der Veroeffentlichung von Charles Maturins Melmoth the Wanderer. Inwieweit die Charaktere und die Handlungsstruktur der gothic novel die Romanliteratur des 19. Jahrhunderts beeinflusst haben, und inwieweit die Wortwahl und die Symbolik der englischen Schauerromantik ubernommen bzw. adaptiert worden sind, soll in der Studie anhand detaillierter Einzelwerkanalysen untersucht werden.