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Are our actions and values freely chosen, or imposed on us by a complex interplay of unconscious motivations, culture, history, institutions and the pressure of others? Is the human subject a self-defining, self-creating autonomous agent, or merely the product or plaything of forces beyond its control? Are other people allies in the project to realize freedom, or unmovable obstacles who stand in our way? If we knew how to embrace freedom, would it be a blessing or a curse, a joyous epiphany or a crushing burden? To what extent does our finite mortal existence condition and limit our freedom? The work of Christina Howells has been instrumental in demonstrating how Continental thought has explored these questions in ways which are intellectually rigorous and humanly compelling. In this volume, some of her colleagues and former students build upon her work by addressing the situation of 'theory' today - literary, political, psychoanalytic, aesthetic and philosophical - in its relation to freedom and subjectivity. The volume includes a number of new essays on each of Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) and Jean-Luc Nancy (b. 1940), as well as essays on a range of other theorists. Taken together, the volume's essays show how the modern theorising subject may be both the source and the product of its endeavour to understand its place in the human, mortal world.Oliver Davis is Reader in French Studies at Warwick University. Colin Davis is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. Christina Howells is Professor of French and Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford.

Gravity and grace are spiritual terms, but they can also offer us a way to think about literature. Grace may mean not only the felicity and ease - what Schiller refers to as the 'mobile beauty' - inhabiting certain works of art, but also the sense of something given, or about to be given, by a work as we read it: something incalculable, perhaps accidental, but vital and regenerative. Like a promise, this quality also needs gravity, a sense of substance within it. The gracefulness of a dancer relies upon gravity, and the grace of a text depends on the weight of words. These matters are pursued here in essays on subjects ranging from Voltaire to Ali Smith, from Baudelaire to Beckett, not forgetting Mallarmé, and offered to Roger Pearson in honour of the grace and gravity of his own writing.

In the late Middle Ages, the Low Countries - ruled by the Dukes of Burgundy and their Hapsburg successors - boasted a dynamic literary culture in both French and Dutch. Speakers of these languages interacted in more ways than might be expected. Writers shared topics and techniques; works were translated; printers who spoke one language published material in the other. The Multilingual Muse brings together an unprecedented community of scholars, both historians and literary specialists, to chart these interactions. It reveals that poetry, far from resisting linguistic and cultural translation as is widely supposed, was a deeply transcultural enterprise in the region.Adrian Armstrong is Centenary Professor of French at Queen Mary University of London. Elsa Strietman is a Fellow Emerita of Murray Edwards College, Cambridge and was Senior Lecturer in Dutch, University of Cambridge.

Discourses of degeneration (social, political, medical) peaked in the 1890s across Europe, and posited the moral and biological decline, even sterility, of European nations. In early twentieth-century Spain, the novels of Pío Baroja and Vicente Blasco Ibáñez both assimilated and subverted the cultural myths of degeneration that were fuelled by influential European theorists such as Bénédict Morel, Cesare Lombroso and Max Nordau. In the light of widespread anxieties about reproduction and national decadence, this interdisciplinary book traces the creative tension between each author's literary representations of the degenerate female body and the consumer agency of women readers. Through its alignment of gender paradigms and degenerationism in Baroja and Blasco Ibáñez, Bodies of Disorder offers a challenge to established hierarchies of canonical and popular fiction. Countering Baroja's resounding public disdain for his Valencian contemporary, Katharine Murphy repositions Blasco as markedly closer to the so-called 'Generation of 1898' than hitherto acknowledged.Dr Katharine Murphy is Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Studies at the University of Exeter. Author of Re-reading Pío Baroja and English Literature (2004), she has published widely on Comparative Literature and Spanish Modernism.

Both comparative criticism and translation cross borders, yet borders that have been crossed still exist. Even a border that has been dismantled is likely to reappear in a different place, or as a less obvious set of limiting practices: migrant texts and migrant ideas, like migrant people, may not achieve full citizenship in their new locations. Of course, there is a creative aspect to borders too, as postcolonial theory in particular has emphasized. Borders are contact zones, generators of hybridity, spaces of exchange, cross-fertilization, and enrichment. For all these reasons, borders require minding - thinking about, managing, even in a sense policing.Rather than celebrating the crossing of borders, or dreaming of their abolition, Minding Borders traces their troubling and yet generative resilience. It explores how borders define as well as exclude, protect as well as violate, and nurture some identities while negating others. The contributors range comparatively across geography, politics, cultural circulation, creativity, and the structuration of academic disciplines, hoping that the analysis of borders in one domain may illuminate their workings in another. Whatever other form a border takes it is always also a border in the mind.

Texts of different kinds grant insight into the rich cultural canvas of the Middle Ages: epic poetry, vernacular lyric, and music; liturgical rites and ceremonial manuals; manuscripts, illuminations, modern adaptations and editions, and many more. Adopting a range of disciplinary perspectives-literary studies, liturgical studies, and musicology-this collection of essays reveals the two-fold performative nature of such texts: they document, mediate, or prefigure acts of performance, while at the same time taking on performative roles themselves by generating additional layers of meaning. Focussing on acts, authors, and performative processes of reception, the contributors demonstrate the significance of the performative to the culture and study of the High and Late Middle Ages (c.1000-1500), from troubadour songs and Minnesang to motets, from the biblical figure of Job to Christine de Pizan and Dante, from Scandinavia to Béarn and Imperial Augsburg.Henry Hope (Music) and Pauline Souleau (French) are early-career researchers at the universities of Bern and Oxford; with Ardis Butterfield (John M. Schiff Professor of English, Professor of French and Music at Yale University) they share an interest in transcending linguistic, national, generic, and disciplinary borders in the study of medieval texts.

Early modern Spanish American poetry (c. 1500-1700) is a fascinating but little-studied aspect of Hispanic colonial culture. Spanish American poetry was transmitted in material ways, not simply as an intellectual and literary phenomenon. Poetry was considered as a written and oral object, disseminated, conditioned and controlled by a range of societal players both within and beyond the urban space. While the obvious networks of interchange connected the European metropolis to the burgeoning colonies, there were also cross-regional connections in Central and South America. As performance art, poetry connected with other art forms in the region - music, painting and sculpture - but as an act of devotion it also intersected the history of early American religious culture.This wide-ranging and highly interdisciplinary volume offers pioneering work bringing together scholars from both Europe and the Americas, North and South.Rodrigo Cacho is Reader in Spanish Golden Age and Colonial Studies at the University of Cambridge. Imogen Choi is Associate Professor of Spanish at Exeter College, University of Oxford.

H. G. Adler (Prague, 1910-London, 1988), a survivor of Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and two other Nazi concentration camps, is unique for his scholarly and creative approach to the traumas of the Second World War. While Adler became a pioneer in the now well-established field of Holocaust studies, he was nearly forgotten as a prolific author of poetry and prose. The tables have turned in recent years. English translations of his major fictional works have led to an international literary reception. At the same time, his groundbreaking historical work deserves renewed attention.This edited volume elucidates Adler's complex reception history and is the first comprehensive interdisciplinary publication that responds to his new international acclaim. In addition to offering innovative perspectives on Adler's individual works, the major intervention of the volume is the examination and contextualization of Adler's significant contributions to literary modernism and scholarly investigations of persecution and genocide under National Socialism.Lynn L. Wolff is Assistant Professor of German Studies at Michigan State University.

Chantal Akerman was one of the most significant directors of our times. A radical innovator of cinematic forms, she was at the forefront of feminist and women's filmmaking. In the 1990s, she developed an important installation practice and began to experiment with self-writing.Focusing on Akerman's works of the last two decades, a period during which she diversified her creative practice, this collection traces her artistic trajectory across different media. From her documentaries 'bordering on fiction' to her final installation, NOW, the volume elucidates the thematic and aesthetic concerns of the later works, placing particular emphasis on self-portraiture, the exploration of intimacy, and the treatment of trauma, memory and exile. It also attends to the aural and visual textures that underpin her art. Drawing on a wide range of theoretical approaches as well as engaging more creatively with Akerman's work, the essays provide a new optic for understanding this deeply personal, prescient oeuvre.Marion Schmid is Professor of French Literature and Film at the University of Edinburgh. Emma Wilson is Professor of French Literature and the Visual Arts at the University of Cambridge.

As Albert Camus once remarked: 'Of capital punishment, people write only [...] in a low voice.' Journalists and state officials alike use a carefully policed language when making any reference to the death penalty: when human beings are to be executed by the state, some key actors talk about what will be done in terms of legalities and procedures. Does fiction provide a counterbalance for that discretion, or simply echo it? What other perspectives can it bring into the foreground, and can literary language express a response to a supposedly necessary horror, or a terrible injustice, which other voices or media cannot?Considering a range of major works from across Western Europe and the United States, from the 18th century until the present day, Death Sentences investigates the contribution of poetics to our understanding, past and present, of capital punishment. The sophisticated literary representations found in Hugo, Dostoevsky, Wilde, Kafka, Mailer, King and others offer a privileged vantage point from which to illuminate and critique a unique institution which itself relies heavily on spectacle and representation to be operative and legitimized.Birte Christ is Assistant Professor of American Literature and Culture at Justus-Liebig-University Giessen. Ève Morisi is Associate Professor of French and Fellow of St Hugh's College at the University of Oxford.

This volume offers a unique and fresh perspective on Italian Futurism by approaching it, for the first time, through the lens of microstoria. In this 'history from below' of what is one of Europe's most famous and important avant-garde movements, large-scale questions on the history of Futurism are explored by focusing on objects, practices and situations as diverse as The Church, Puppets, The Letterhead or Gymnastics. With contributions from fifteen renowned international scholars, the book offers an exciting, kaleidoscopic view of Futurism and its multiple artistic, political and societal connections. The final chapter of the book is an interview with Günter Berghaus, one of Futurism's most dedicated and prolific scholars today, to whom the book is dedicated.Sascha Bru is Professor of General and Comparative Literature at the University of Leuven; Luca Somigli is Professor of Italian at the University of Toronto; Bart Van den Bossche is professor of Italian Literature at the University of Leuven.

One writer, Mary Shelley, inaugurated two of the three paradigms through which human beings imagine, with panic or pleasure, the end of their species. Complementing her visions of a world-encompassing natural plague (The Last Man, 1826) and man-made technological self-eradication (Frankenstein, 1818), the third - and oldest - paradigm of how to depict humankind's demise is the religious notion of Apocalypse, God's Day of Reckoning. Through in-depth philosophical and theological contextualization of the German, French and British literary settings of the apocalyptic tradition around 1800, Sublime Conclusions chronicles the transition from theism and deism to atheism and the 'Death of God' on which, Weninger contends, Shelley's novels - and hence modern science fiction in general - are premised. A tour de force of comparative methodology, Weninger's transdisciplinary approach is as wide-ranging as it is meticulous, interweaving the manifold discourses of catastrophe in literary history, art and film history, philosophy and theology, as well as the history of science and science fiction, across more than two centuries of European intellectual history from Voltaire's mid-eighteenth-century response to the earthquake of Lisbon to Günther Anders's presaging, in the wake of Hiroshima, humankind's extinction through nuclear Armageddon.Robert Weninger is Emeritus Professor of German and Comparative Literature at King's College London.