Francophone writers from North Africa and the Middle East often choose to write within a sacred context, sometimes engaging directly with Islamist rhetoric.
John Ruskin's training as an interdisciplinary polymath started in childhood. He learned to memorise the Bible at his mother's knee and published his first poem aged ten. His lifelong fascination with
The Spanish Communist exile and Francophone Holocaust writer Jorge Semprun (1923-) is a major contributor to contemporary debates on the politics and ethics of remembering the Franco era, Communism an
The coming together of linguistics and sociology in the 1960’s, most notably via the work of William Labov, marked a revolution in the study of language and provided a paradigm for the understanding o
This book addresses three key areas of intellectual enquiry: literary criticism, cultural critique, and philosophical theology. Once closely related, especially in the Catholic tradition, they often a
This collection brings together textual commentaries on thirty representative works of literature in Portuguese — either complete poems or extracts from longer works — ranging from the medieval lyric
More often than not, monographs on the reception of an author are either detailed, chronologically organized accounts of the reputation of that author, or studies in literary influence. This study ado
Both W. G. Sebald (1944-2001) and the Austrian author Christoph Ransmayr (1954-) were born too late to know directly the violence of the Second World War and the Holocaust, but these traumatic events
This collection of thirteen essays on literary analysis of travel writing from the Mediterranean region examines depictions of the Self and Other in texts from ancient Greece to the present. The works
How have French Jewish women reacted to the great traumas of the last century, the Holocaust, North African decolonization and the resulting migration of African Jews to France, the Arab-Israeli crisi
The question of the legacies of the work of Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) is increasingly coming to the fore in the wake of his death --- alongside, though not simply subsumed by, the question of the de
Ismail Kadare has experienced a life of controversy. In his own country and internationally he has been both acclaimed as a writer and condemned as a lackey of the Albanian socialist dictatorship. Com
Fenoulhet (Dutch, U. College London) emphasizes expressions of liberated womanhood, but encompasses the whole range of topics and themes addressed by Dutch women writers during the middle half of the
Gilby (French, Cambridge U.) begins with a detailed analysis of Longinus' On the Sublime, first translated from Greek to French in 1663, then surveys how French writers of the period follow him in con
Twenty-one essays presented by Grundtvig (Italian, U. of Copenhagen, Denmark), McLauglin (Italian studies, U. of Oxford, UK), and Petersen (Italian, U. of Copenhagen) examine the relationship between
Kemp (French, U. of Oxford) examines how elements of crime fiction are taken by four literary novelists of the late 20th century and employed within their own work to quite different effects from that
In the rich landscape of the early modern European comic novel the inn often features as a monument to digression - the perfect setting for chance encounters with strangers who always have a story to
Louis II de Bourbon (1621-86), known as Le Grand Conde, stood alongside Richelieu and Mazarin as one of the key figures who shaped the reign of Louis XIV. In response to profound upheavals in their wo
Miguel Angel Asturias (1899-1974), the first Spanish-American prose writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, is both a pivotal and a representative figure in the development of the twentie
Bernard Howells explores the problematics surrounding individualism and history in a number of prose texts, and situates Baudelaire within the broader contexts of nineteenth century historical, cultur
