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This collection of 15 essays looks at the theme of decadence and its recurring manifestations in European literature and literary criticism from medieval times to the present day. Various definitions of the term are explored, including the notion of decadence as physical decay.

Ranging from the early modern to the postcolonial, and dealing mainly with encounters in Europe, the Americas and the Middle East, Perspectives on Travel Writing is a collection of new essays by international scholars that examines some of the various contexts of travel writing, as well as its generic characteristics.

In recent years the twin themes of travel and translation have come to be regarded as particularly significant to the study of early modern culture and literature. Traditional notions of ''The Renaissance'' have always emphasised the importance of the influence of continental, as well as classical, literature on English writers of the period; and over the past twenty years or so this emphasis has been deepened by the use of more complicated and sophisticated theories of literary and cultural intertextuality, as well as broadened to cover areas such as religious and political relations, trade and traffic, and the larger formations of colonialism and imperialism. The essays collected here address the full range of traditional and contemporary issues, providing new light on canonical authors from More to Shakespeare, and also directing critical attention to many unfamiliar texts which need to be better known for our fuller understanding of sixteenth-century English literature. This volume makes a very particular contribution to current thinking on Anglo-continental literary relations in the sixteenth century. Maintaining a breadth and balance of concerns and approaches, Travels and Translations in the Sixteenth Century represents the academic throughout Europe: essays are contributed by scholars working in Hungary, Greece, Italy, and France, as well as in the UK. Arthur Kinney''s introduction to the collection provides an North American overview of what is perhaps a uniquely comprehensive index to contemporary European criticism and scholarship in the area of early modern travel and translation.

In 1767, Hamburg chartered the first Deutsches Nationaltheater. Michael Sosulski connects the performance of body discipline by professional actors, soldiers, and schoolchildren to the growing interest in German national identity, long before Germany's incorporation as a nation-state. Through the efforts of literary intellectuals and advocates, including G.E. Lessing and Friedrich Schiller, the Nationaltheater emerged as an ideal space in which to imagine the nation, because for Germans, nationality emerged as a performed identity.

This investigation of the operation of irony in Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris contends that the principle target of the collections spleen is, in fact, its own readership. Though focuses on Le Spleen de Paris, the study engages with the full range of Baudelaire's writings, including his art and literary criticism.

If Proust apparently took little interest in what he described as a poor avatar of reductive, mimetic representation, the resonances between his own radical reworking of writing styles and the novelistic forms, and cinema as the art of time are undeniable. This book in English considers these interconnections.

In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, legions of English citizens headed north. Why and how did Scotland, once avoided by travelers, become a popular site for English tourists? In this book, the author uses published and unpublished travel accounts, guidebooks, and the popular press to examine the evolution of the idea of Scotland.

This volume makes a very particular contribution to current thinking on Ango-continental literary relations in the sixteenth century.

Explores the dialectical contest between history and truth that defines the period of cultural transition called the 'baroque'.

This title is an investigation into the concept of transubstantiation, using an approach which covers theoretical and philosophical treatments, questions of its ethical, political and aesthetic significance into the 20th century, and its use as a metaphor in the production and understanding of culture.

The main contention of this book is that contemporary theory is still essentially Romantic. Despite protestations to the contrary and despite all attempts to elude or exceed the limits bequeathed by Romantic thought, Clemens demonstrates its continuing influence in philosophical and literary works.

The essays in this volume analyze renditions of exile over centuries and across disciplines. They range from the 13th to the 20th century and cover English literature, translation studies, cultural history, museum studies, the history of science, French cultural studies, and Italian literature.

Using a comparative approach to the genre, this study highlights the presence of a large and varied production of contemporary Italian travel writing and analyzes the reason for its invisibilty in the Italian literary system.

A study of the dream vision in the work of Chaucer. It demonstrates how, by drawing upon Aristotelian psychology, Chaucer articulated precisely those aspects of the courtly identity that are determined by language and empirical experience, and those which are transcendent of this determinism.

Feminist scholars explore their personal negotiations of gender, class, ethnicity and national or regional identity through their readings of two literary and "cultural" texts. The collection centres on the ontological experience of reading and writing "as a feminist".

The most prolific historian of early modern German literature in the 20th century, Klaus Garber has largely remained unknown to English-language scholars. The seven essays selected here are translated into English for the first time and represent the "essence" of Garber's work.

Blending comparative literary and cultural studies with gender studies and genetic studies, this book analyses the work of British writers and painters whom Proust recognized as precursors in the aesthetic representation of the taboo subject of homosexuality.

Compares text/image interaction as manifested in emblem books (and related forms) and the modern bande dessinee, or French-language comic strip. This study examines the ways in which emblems - and their modern counterparts - interact with the surrounding culture, and what they disclose about that culture.

As well as providing a more precise conceptual framework for the genre of tragicomedy than has so far been available, the author demonstrates some of its persistent features in the two broad time periods when it had its greatest popularity. These periods being the Renaissance and the modern era.

The subject of excrement or faeces is normally the domain of clinicians or puerile comedy. However this collection explores the subject from an academic perspective by examining past writings from a wide variety of mostly European sources.

Considers English versions of the Metamorphoses - a poem concerned with translation and transformation on a multiplicity of levels - as important sites of social and historical difference from the fifteenth to the early eighteenth centuries. This work argues that translation is central to the construction of national and gendered identities.

Presents a cross-disciplinary study, combining historical macro-sociology and a sociology of emotions with historical anthropology and cultural studies. This book charts the development of political authority structures in their varied historical manifestations, as well as their affective sedimentation as collective habitus (national character).

A study of the Societe des auteurs dramatiques (SAD), this book traces the story of the SAD from its conception in the mid-1770s through to the French Revolution, exploring first the Society's founding in 1777, then its trajectory until its dissolution at the end of 1780, and finally discusses a revival of the group during the Revolution.