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On what grounds do we speak of 'the avant-garde' in inter-war European culture? Why do we understand the conflicts and quarrels among these diverse movements as expressing a shared attitude - the culture of the manifesto, the drive to reject, to explore, to renew - that trumps the conflicts and quarrels themselves? Why do the stern rationalism of a functionalist building and the irreverent irrationalism of a Dadaist performance seem heralds of a similar spirit?The Czech avant-garde theorist Karel Teige (1900-1951) regarded architecture and film as providing the key to formulating a unified theory that would capture this 'integrity of the avant-garde'. Teige - whose thought has many points of contact with celebrated figures such as Georg Lukács and Walter Benjamin, and who was a close associate of Le Corbusier, André Breton, and Hannes Meyer - reveals how a vibrant 'alternative' avant-garde tradition can raise central questions for understanding European modernism more broadly.Peter Zusi is Associate Professor of Czech and Comparative Literature at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London.

Stephen Romer's essays range from the key figures of French and English Modernism to the contemporary practice of poetry, and its translation. At the heart of Chaos and the Clean Line is an enquiry into the talismanic power that a source of order can possess for the poet who lives in a disordered world. It is what drives Mallarmé's 'fury against the formless'. Sometimes it may be found in a longed-for sense of psychological detachment, as when Laforgue invents the figure of Pierrot. Or it may be the craft and genius of a former age, safely removed from the alienating cities of today, such as Eliot finds in Dante, or in Gautier's chiseled verse. For Pierre Reverdy, the clean line of order may come from a Cubist painting; for Ezra Pound, it may be an epiphany of angled sunlight fallen on stone in Provence; for Apollinaire, the shockingly original analogies he draws between physical eroticism and trench warfare.Stephen Romer is Associate Professor of English at the University of Tours, and Lecturer in French at Brasenose College, Oxford.

This book delves into the fascinating journey of American drama in Catalonia, exploring how the theatrical output of a world superpower has impacted (and transformed) the stages of an allegedly minor actor in the cultural scene of the 20th century. Yet, while Catalonia is the birthplace of such geniuses as Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí or Antoni Gaudí, it is also that of playwrights Joan Brossa, Manuel de Pedrolo, Fermín Cabal or Jordi Galcerán, among others. All of them grew up in, and imbibed, a theatrescape in which American borrowings were not only habitual (often the only foreign plays around) but inspiring and groundbreaking. If Alias Jimmy Valentine re-defined theatrical decorum in Catalonia in the early 1900s, The Vagina Monologues, in the 1990s, challenged prevalent sexual taboos. Throughout the 20th century, Catalonia went from a peripheral, marginalized region of a once vast empire to a booming and largely autonomous centre of culture, recognized all over the world and admired for its uniqueness and original artistic contributions. American plays accompanied, and often directly inspired, such a journey.Ramón Espejo is a Professor of American Literature at the University of Seville, Spain, and is one of the leading American drama and theatre scholars in Europe.

Crossings is a gathering of essays whose preoccupations converge in the idea that the workings of poetry and trans­lation are closely related. This is especially true in the work of Hölderlin, in whose poems the kinship is coupled with a way of reading the world and an attentiveness to transitions of all kinds: what can come over to us from the past, and what will pass on from us to posterity? What are the consequences for poetry if the present moment is understood as a perpetual transition? Translation can be a means of testing this understanding, and poetry perhaps negotiates the crossing itself. Later writers like Philippe Jaccottet, who thought of the poet's work as a work of translation, continue this line: the poem becomes a form of attention and, as such, a thing permeable to an elsewhere. Touching on bird-flight and sonnets, aqueducts and metamorphosis, what these readings have in common is a fidelity to the movement of particular poems.Charlie Louth is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the Queen's College, University of Oxford.

In the popular imagination, the pioneering explorer Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) provides the link between Romantic-era Germany and Latin America. But the reception and critical reworking of German Romantic culture reach far beyond Humboldt's legacy, and still inform contemporary Latin American writing. Initial responses to the European Romantic tradition were deeply embedded in the cultural nationalism of newly-independent nation states. Nineteenth-century Germans, however, often encountered the region through travel writing and landscape painting, in the context of a market for exotic images in the age of European empires. Today, Latin American authors problematize this historic relation, but their work also recalls German Romanticism's formal innovations: non-closure, fragmentation, genre subversion, and translation as linguistic reinvention. These become modes of resistance to a world literary market that replicates on an aesthetic level the colonial relationship between the viewer and the viewed.In its wide-ranging exploration of these cultural affinities, this volume introduces and analyses a sub-field of world literature that transcends linguistic, temporal and spatial borders.Jenny Haase is Professor of Spanish and Latin American Literatures and Cultures at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. Joanna Neilly is Associate Professor in German at the University of Oxford, and a Tutorial Fellow of St Peter's College.

In an era of social crisis and change at the end of the 19th century, the German poet Stefan George created a modern social imaginary for homosexual men. The newly-coined term 'homosexual' gave expression to an emerging category of modern man. But in discovering himself, the modern homosexual found little resonance in the society around him. Through his poetry George created a sense of connectedness and imagined possibilities of liaison, friendship and community among homosexual men where none had existed before. In volumes of verse from the early 1890s until his final volume in 1928, George created a lyric vita, tracing the contours of a homosexual life in language that moves from dark to light, loneliness to companionship. But it is not an easy journey. The period in which George wrote was an era of normative, even militant masculinity. As war raged, George's poetry engaged with tragedy and grief at the loss of the men he loved. Yet his lyric vita ends with a final poetic statement of refusal, which is also the poet at his most authentic: a refusal to mask his true self.Peter Morgan is Professor of European Studies at the University of Western Australia.

The Scandinavian countries regularly top ranking lists for happiness, and are, along with Germany, among the most desired destinations for immigration. But the journey towards them can be arduously challenging, and even on arrival the welcome is often ambiguous. Comparing three novels each from the literatures of Denmark, Germany, Norway and Sweden, this book follows the migratory journey chronologically to explore its impact on the characters' lives, bodies and self-understanding.Through these individually felt experiences, Anja Tröger sheds light on the social and political structures causing conflict and struggle for immigrants. Drawing parallels across national borders, she contends that fiction can constitute a counter-discourse to the marginalisation and othering of refugees and asylum seekers: it can reimagine the lives and voices of those who are usually unheard and unseen.Anja Tröger is Teaching Fellow in Scandinavian Studies at the University of Edinburgh.

Carved on stone, painted on canvas, wood or porcelain, stitched on fabric, written on parchment or printed on paper, the 109 inscriptions in this unique collection preserve the surviving public writing of Venice's individuals and collectivities in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. They celebrate the completion, authorship or sponsorship of buildings, sculptures, paintings, reliquaries and shrines. They caption the splendid mappa mundi of Fra Mauro and Jacopo de' Barbari's iconic view of Venice. They declare the ownership of a processional banner, of the recipient of a maiolica plate, and of neighbourhood association properties. They record wills, indulgences and appeals. They mark the graves of confraternities, a barber-surgeon and a master mason. They can be found from Piazza San Marco to the corners of Cannaregio and Castello as well as on the lagoon islands. Written in the vernacular, their weight of presence, unmatched by any other Italian centre, attests to the city's exceptional literacy in our period and provides a wealth of privileged historical information. The corpus, with accompanying photographic record, is the first of its kind. It is thoroughly contextualized and analysed in terms of historical and artistic background, script and language.Ronnie Ferguson is Emeritus Professor of Italian at the University of St Andrews and Cavaliere della Stella d'Italia. He is a Fellow of the Ateneo Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti and of the Accademia Galileiana. His research interests include medieval and Renaissance epigraphy, the language and culture of Venice, Renaissance comedy and historical linguistics.

Over the last forty years, contemporary French poetry has been living in a state of crisis. Pronounced dead - or worse, irrelevant - it has sought to reassert its value, define its current specificity, and delineate its difference from the poetic practices of the past. But what are the defining contours of poetry today, given the sheer variety of practices that make up the contemporary field? Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Fe¿lix Guattari's discussion of minor literature, which explores the relationship between literature, language and power, Daisy Sainsbury argues that one unifying feature is the presence of a 'minor poetics'. Through close readings of three important poets - Dominique Fourcade, Olivier Cadiot and Christophe Tarkos - she examines how these three successive generations of linguistically experimental poets disrupt both literary and non-literary discourses, making the major minor, and redefining the political potential of poetic language in the process.Daisy Sainsbury is an independent scholar based in Paris.

This volume opens the world of Old Yiddish to scholars and students of Yiddish and Jewish Studies alike. It is a further step to broaden awareness that Yiddish, far from starting with the nineteenth century, can claim a history of over a thousand years. Presenting topics such as the oldest traces of Yiddish, bibliographical issues, language interaction, inter­­pretation, contextualization and research history, this vol­ume will contribute greatly to understanding of Western Yiddish literature. Uniting renowned and emerging scholars from various disciplines such as philology, history, literary criticism, comparative literature, bibliographical studies, and musicology, Worlds of Old Yiddish Literature makes Old Yiddish Studies the focus of interdisciplinary dialogue within and between its chapters.The editors are Simon Neuberg of Trier University and Diana Matut of the University Halle-Wittenberg.

Dante's works contain too much and too little blood. On the one hand, one might wonder why there is any blood in the Comedy; why are the souls - which lack flesh and blood - bleeding at all? On the other hand, we must ask: in a Christian poem that claims to be salvific, why are references to the Eucharist, and to the Passion either implicit, understated or parodic? Investigating blood across all of the poet's works, Leone shows that Dante's treatment of blood reveals a sophisticated and self-conscious metaliterary project: the poet exploits blood's connotative force in medieval culture in ways that engage with - and diverge from - the various traditions and cultural practices that inform his work: scientific, theological, devotional, classical and literary. Anne C. Leone is Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at Syracuse University.

A porous boundary zone between Europe and Africa, a space at once liminal and peripheral, both a gateway and a border defined through cultural and religious alterity - medieval Iberia challenges post-medieval notions of East, West, nationhood and Europe. Examining the ideological implications of real and fictional travels to the Peninsula in German-language texts ranging from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, Doriane Zerka considers the construction of individual and collective identities, religious, cultural and political. Combining the work of Michel Foucault, postcolonialism and network theory, she sheds light on the ideological processes contributing to the construction of any cultural entity modern audiences might call 'Spanish', 'German' or 'European'.Doriane Zerka is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics, University of Cambridge. Imagining Iberia is her first book, and has been awarded the 2020 Women in German Studies Book Prize and the 2020 Preis der Gesellschaft für interkulturelle Germanistik für jüngere Forscherinnen und Forscher.

In the midst of the violent conflicts of 1918 ambitious plans for new cultural formations emerged on the territory of the former Russian Empire. The most important Jewish community organization was the Kultur-Lige. Founded to 'organize the Jewish masses and develop Yiddish culture', the association's first meeting took place at the Kyiv apartment of the Yiddish writer David Bergelson. 'Leagues for Yiddish culture' were simultaneously founded in such places as Vilna (Vilnius), Warsaw, Moscow, Berlin, and New York. Scores of Yiddish books came out under the imprints of the Kultur-Lige publishing houses in Kyiv and Warsaw. However, it is less well known that he activity of the Kultur-Lige covered not only literature, journalism, and linguistics, but also the visual arts, music, theatre, and education. The goal of the Kultur-Lige was nothing less than the development and stewardship of Jewish secular national culture in its entirety.

The integration of women into public Jewish performance (Yiddish-language theater by 1877 and Hebrew-language theater by about 1918) was a revolution in modern Jewish culture. While a great deal of seasoned Yiddish-speaking male talent preexisted theater in the form of cantors, choristers, and tavern singers, East European Jewish women had no experience participating in public Jewish performance. From the theater's first days, women assumed positions of authority, security, and visibility in great numbers. Rapidly, by the 1890s, when the center of the Yiddish theater shifted from cities throughout Romania and the Russian Empire where it first launched in the late 1870s to cities across the globe - including London, Buenos Aires, and New York City by the turn of the century - substantial numbers of female Yiddish actors enjoyed celebrity on par with their male counterparts.Women on the Yiddish Stage presents an array of scholarly essays that challenge the existing historical accounting of the modern Yiddish theater; highlight pioneering artists, creators, and impresarios; and map sources and methodologies of this rich area of forgotten history.

In the quarter-century following Uruguay's transition to democracy in 1985, there was a surge in the writing and popularity of historical novels. Authors such as Tomás de Mattos, Amir Hamed, Susana Cabrera, Mario Delgado Aparaín and Marcia Collazo Ibáñez engaged with archival sources, historical works, school textbooks, monuments and other forms of material culture in their bid to re-engage with the past.In her new study, Kardak follows the trajectory of recent Uruguayan historical fiction. Though these post-transition authors do not directly represent the 1973-85 dictatorship, instead depicting events of the nineteenth century, they nevertheless use history to address very present concerns of cultural identity. Heroes of independence such as José Gervasio Artigas (1764-1850) are reassessed, and historically marginalised groups like the Indigenous Charrúas and Afro-Uruguayans are brought into the forefront of the national story.

The study of European literatures was once characterized by single-language, nation-bound enquiry, but in the context of globalization the transnational and multi-lingual aspect of these literatures has come to the fore. The forces driving this change range from acknowledgement of ancestral and regional enclaves within nation states to migration between nation states, and from beyond Europe, giving rise to minority communities across the continent. This wide-ranging volume spans literatures from Galicia to Greenland, written in and between languages ranging from Basque, Welsh and Breton, to French, Italian and German, and in genres that include theatre, narrative prose and experimental poetry. By viewing Europe from its peripheries and investigating diversity both between and within European nations, this book presents small, minority and minor literatures as a continuum along which notions of community are constantly affirmed, contested and redefined.Kate Averis teaches European literatures at the Universidad de Antioquia, Colombia. Margaret Littler is Professor Emerita of Contemporary German Culture at the Univ­ersity of Manchester. Godela Weiss-Sussex is Professor of Modern German Literature at the Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies, London and Fellow of King's College Cambridge.

Rome. Saturday 16 October 1943. This is where and when the largest single round-up and deportation of Jews from Italy happened. 1259 people were arrested by the German occupiers and gathered in a temporary detention centre for two days. They were eventually deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau from a local railway station, Stazione Tiburtina.From December 1944, literary texts of this event have facili­tated a national and international understanding and recollection of 16 October 1943. They have been bearers of historical awareness, channels of memory; not only outcomes of remembrance but also active ingredients in the process of forging cultural memory. In this pioneering interdisciplinary study drawing from literary and cultural memory studies, Mara Josi shows how 16 ottobre 1943 by Giacomo Debenedetti, La Storia by Elsa Morante, La parola ebreo by Rosetta Loy, and Portico d'Ottavia 13 by Anna Foa have operated on the personal and the collective level: in other words, on the reader and on society.Mara Josi obtained her PhD at the University of Cambridge. Before joining the University of Ghent as an FWO Post­doctoral Fellow, she was an IRC Postdoctoral Fellow at University College Dublin and a lecturer at the University of Manchester.

Viewing the films of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub means looking at the construction of cinema itself: image, sound, performance, montage. Their work constitutes one of the most distinctive, beautiful, and politically radical oeuvres of modern cinema and has attracted the attention of a wide range of philosophers, filmmakers, and cineastes. Their sensual cinema of the eye and ear is as rich as the many texts and documents - musical, literary, and visual - that have served as the basis of individual works. Their films propose a Marxist critique of capitalism and suggest alternative ways of living.This volume grew out of the complete retrospective of the films of Huillet and Straub held in London in 2019 which all the authors attended. Editors Martin Brady and Helen Hughes are specialists in German, political, and documentary cinema.

Imagined as an armed old man leaping like a locust or as a young man walking in the dark, doubt occupies a prominent place in the mental landscape of Renaissance Italians. Intriguing stories of doubters, as well as allegories and tales of doubt populated sonnets, dialogues, novelle, religious tracts, and a wealth of other vernacular texts. In an age of crisis and renewal, doubt no longer pointed to an exclusively individual condition nor was it solely the object of philosophical and theological reflections. Rather, doubt became a complex cultural object at the centre of numerous cultural strategies. Why was it so? Were Renaissance Italians especially inclined to doubt? And, if so, what were the cultural and emotional consequences of such an attitude? Resorting to a large and diverse array of literary and visual sources, Marco Faini reconstructs how doubt became a privileged tool to make sense of an increasingly complex world.Marco Faini is Assistant Professor of Italian at the University at Buffalo (SUNY).

In this book, Mairéad Hanrahan examines the shifts in political focus in Genet's writing, from the intimate fantasies of the early novels to the struggle for emancipation of the Palestinians in the posthumously published Un Captif amoureux. She argues that his texts have always been centrally concerned with power relations, challenging from the very beginning the opposition that traditionally confines the political to the public sphere. Genet's writing has always been political - but Hanrahan argues also that it was never solely political. On the contrary, a tension always existed for him between the poetic and the political.Genet's changing focus from the personal to the public is explored via the shifts in his practice of genre. Analysing how genre and politics are inextricably involved in Genet's writing, Hanrahan highlights a core paradox in its evolution. This writer who remained constant over the course of his life in his opposition to hegemonic power relations grappled throughout his work with the suspicion that his art may serve to shore up the very structures he unreservedly contests. Yet his writing also testifies, in both what it says and what it does, to the idea that literature is fundamentally at odds with the social order of the world.Mairéad Hanrahan is Professor of French at University College London.

The decades after World War II saw France's look, feel and lived realities transformed by spatial planning and modernization. Aménagement du territoire was a technical and administrative project, but was also political, moral and philosophical, as well as creative and imaginative. It was driven by a powerful obsession with the future and a belief that spatial planning could create the future in the present. During the presidency of Charles de Gaulle (1958-69), it became a vehicle for reasserting France's place in the world after decolonization and expressing its grandeur as an advanced civilization.In Making Space in Post-war France, Edward Welch tracks the conceptual, ideological and discursive foundations of aménagement, mining an array of material from legislative texts to publicity brochures to investigate how visions of the future were articulated and inscribed on the ground as new towns, infrastructure and other expressions of modernity. He ranges across work by writers, filmmakers and photographers to explore how modernized landscapes and their effect on lived experience begin to permeate French culture during the 1970s and 80s, and how the legacies of spatial planning are negotiated politically, socially and culturally from the 1990s into the new millennium as the French state wrestles with the different pressures affecting its territory.Edward Welch is Carnegie Professor of French at the University of Aberdeen.

A conventional view of Russia represents it as a country where autocracy, centralised rule, and domination by the 'power vertical' both inside and outside the country are inescapable facts of the past and present. But Russia's variety is as important a feature of the place as its size, and over time, politics and culture have radically altered to accommodate historical cataclysms, as well as periods of calm. This collection of essays by Catriona Kelly examines a Russia that is 'out of focus', beyond the usual simplifying optic. It considers often overlooked areas of historical and contemporary experience such as the lives and creative culture of Russian women, of children and teenagers, and of ethnic minorities. An internationally known specialist in Russian culture acts as a guide to unexpected discoveries and unexplored territories at the margins of Empire and the fringes of Europe.Catriona Kelly is Senior Research Fellow in Russian and Soviet Culture at Trinity College and Honorary Professor of Russian and Soviet Culture in the University of Cambridge. She is also Emeritus Fellow in Russian at New College and an Honorary Faculty Research Fellow in Russian at the University of Oxford. She was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2007. She has published many books and articles on Russian history and culture, including A History of Russian Women's Writing (1994), Comrade Pavlik: the Rise and Fall of a Soviet Boy Hero (2005), Children's World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890-1991 (2008), St Petersburg, Shadows of the Past (2014), and Soviet Art House: Lenfilm Studio under Brezhnev (2021).