Books in the Cultural History & Literary Imagination series

This book explores for the first time the individual and collective significance of First World War facially disfigured combatants, with a special focus on France, Germany and Great Britain. It illuminates our understanding of how the combatant and the onlooker made sense of the experience and the memory of the war.

This book is a cultural history and interpretation of Brazilian modernism in the arts and letters. In the first three decades of the twentieth century, artists, writers, musicians, and architects from both sides of the Atlantic interacted to create a modern style for Brazil, helping to define Brazilian national expression into the present.

Claudio Magris is considered an authority on central European literature and culture. This book explores why he has become such a relevant figure, demonstrating how his ideas about history, ethics and identity are so fundamental for Europe's future.

This diverse volume focuses on British reactions to, and representations of, Spanish affairs during the lively period following the Peninsular War (1814-1823). The essays offer literary, social, historical and cultural perspectives that bring both fresh light to this formative period and a wealth of new scholarly material.

How do you bring history alive? This book explores the use of dramatic modes ¿ such as melodrama, metatheatre, and immersion ¿ to bring immediacy and a sense of living presence to works of literature rooted in history. Focusing on Australian and Canadian literature from the late 1980s to the present, the book features original research on novels by award-winning writers such as David Musgrave, Richard Flanagan, Daphne Marlatt, Peter Carey, Tomson Highway, Thomas Keneally, and Guy Vanderhaeghe. The analysis addresses how these writers use strategies from drama and theatre to engage with colonial and postcolonial histories in their novels and create resonant connections with readers. Some of the novels encourage readers to imagine themselves in historical roles through intimate dramatizations inside characters¿ minds and bodies. Others use exaggerated theatrical frames to place readers at a critical distance from representations of history using Brechtian techniques of alienation. This book explores the use of dramatic modes to enliven and reimagine settler-invader history and bring colonial and postcolonial histories closer to the present.

This book argues that ideology is a prism through which the work of Vladimir Nabokov needs to be considered. It is thus the first attempt to foreground questions of ideology and politics within a field that has historically been resistant to such readings.The perception of Nabokov as an apolitical writer is one which the author encouraged throughout the latter part of his career in his non-fictional writings and in the small number of well-rehearsed interviews that he gave. When questions of ideology and politics have arisen in scholarship, they have only been featured in passing or have merely re-confirmed the author¿s self-designation as an «old-fashioned liberal». When we consider that Nabokov lived through some of the most traumatic historical ruptures of the past century then this lack of reference to ideology in the critical literature appears quite revealing.Through the analysis of works which have previously received little attention as well as new perspectives on better known works, this book demonstrates how ideology and politics were ever-present and had an indelible effect on Nabokov's literary aesthetics.

This collective volume explores the 'spatial turn' in literary and cultural studies and brings together studies of contemporary English-speaking literature that apply spatial theory to the analysis of literary texts. Themes include abjection, espionage, discipline, post-human identities, urban geographies, dystopia and coercive medical practices.

Invisibility Studies explores current changes in the relationship between what we consider visible and what invisible in different areas of contemporary culture. Contributions trace the cultural significance of these developments, such as transparency and privacy in urban architecture and the invasion of surveillance into everyday life.

This book follows the work of a group of right-wing nationalist writers from 1890 to 1960, whose writings both paved the way for the rise of Nazism and continued to stimulate debate about German cultural and political identity after 1945. The volume features studies of Hans Grimm, Kolbenheyer, Schafer, Strauss, von Munchhausen and Binding.

Constructions of Conflict

The urban spaces we inhabit today have been moulded by a combination of historical forces ¿ by social and economic processes, by the specific designs of urban planners, and by the regulatory and ritual practices of earlier times. As arenas of cultural activity they are also imbued with legends, symbolic associations, and historical memories. This second volume of papers arising from the conference ¿Imagining the City¿, held in Cambridge in 2004, examines the physical organization and the imaginative perception of cities from both a historical and a contemporary perspective, and over a geographical range that reaches from Ukraine to Mexico. It includes discussions of the ways in which cities have been envisaged in late antiquity, in the Middle Ages, and in early modern times, as sites of religious, cultural and political rituals; of the uses to which urban spaces have been put by industrial societies and by the political cultures of the twentieth century; and of the implications for the populations of particular cities of the roles these have played in establishing the historical identity of particular communities (whether national, political or religious) and in the delineation of boundaries between cultures.

In this book the author explores the representational strategies of the modern period and their relation to political life through the story of Stanislas Leszczynski, architect king and roi bienfaisant, ¿a king that does good¿. The ingredients of his story are compelling. They include: an exiled king (who makes a cameo appearance in Voltaire¿s Candide and corresponds with Rousseau); a collection of writings that include aphorisms, political treatises, and a utopian novel; gardens that include a grotto of eighty-six life-size automata and an experimental village of courtiers; and architecture and landscapes that traverse the contested boundaries of central Europe, imaginary constructions of the orient, and the borderlines between fact and fiction. These come together to make a distinctive account of the transitional period in eighteenth-century culture. Stanislas¿ architectural and literary works were rooted in an acceptance of the uncertainty of the world more characteristic of the story. His ¿hope of a better age¿ emerges as an endeavour ¿ through the writing and the architecture ¿ to find one¿s own meaning in history as well as a model for the good life. His story suggests a way of exploring what this struggle still entails today.

This is the first book-length account of Joseph Conrad¿s reception in Germany, a virtually unresearched area of Conrad studies. It demonstrates that Conrad was read and used by his German readers as a cosmopolitan literary and moral voice against the prevailing nationalism of Germany in the ¿dark times¿ of the 1930s and 1940s, when their own voices were being silenced. Challenging the longstanding assumption that Germany remained largely indifferent to his works, this book demonstrates that, particularly after the translation of the complete fiction commencing in the 1920s, Conrad¿s works achieved near cult status in Germany. On the basis of diaries and letters, contemporary reviews and essays, unpublished archival material as well as novels and films, the author illuminates the range and importance of Conrad¿s presence as a powerful liberating imagination within twentieth-century German culture. Championed by Thomas Mann, lauded by Hermann Hesse, and decried as ¿Conrad the Jew¿ by the Nazis, Conrad has remained an influential presence in post-war German culture. The study offers a completely fresh perspective on Conrad¿s works and speaks eloquently for the importance of recognizing the way trans-national literary cultural relations have helped to shape European cultural history.

Melancholy has become a central theme of German literature since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. This book traces the complex discourse of melancholy in contemporary literature in the work of Monika Maron, Christoph Hein, Arno Geiger and Alois Hotschnig with a focus on themes such as time, transcience, the body, gender and postmemory.

From Hegel to the present, the humanities and social sciences have revealed the volatile power of third agency. The articles in this volume trace the role of triadic figures across a broad range of discourses, revealing the roots of modernity in dialectic and paradox. Features innovative perspectives on Adorno, Agamben, Derrida, Simmel and more.

The last decade has seen renewed interest in political theories of the public sphere, reacting to new challenges posed by globalization, communication technology, and intra- and international conflicts. The essays in this volume explore different strategies for enriching the ongoing debates on this issue.

This book explores the dreams, plans and hopes as well as the nightmares and fears that are an integral part of alternative thinking in the Western hemisphere. While ideological struggles of the twentieth century focused on the macro level, the real impetus for change came from blue-sky thinking that imagined alternatives to the status quo.

The relationship between different media has emerged as one of the most important areas of research in contemporary cultural and literary studies. But how should we conceive of the relationship between texts and images today? This title investigates the effects of different forms of representation in modern European and American literature.

How has 1968 been (re)produced and/or contested within different national cultures and how do these processes reflect national preoccupations with order, individual freedom, youth culture and self-expression? Is there a collective memory of 1968 and does this memory cross national boundaries? This title deals with these questions.

How do we approach other people's pain? This volume explores the theoretical framework of trauma studies and its place within academic discourse and society, and examines from a multidisciplinary perspective the possibilities and limitations of trauma as an analytical category.