Books in the European Connections series

This book is an interdisciplinary analysis of an art form that is crucial to the understanding of Italian contemporary society: political music from the 1960s to today. Using cultural studies, digital humanities and literary analysis, this book analyses a corpus of political music to offer insights into the sociolinguistic aspects of Italian.

Gerard de Nerval's French translations of Goethe's Faust are key works in Franco-German cultural relations. This book presents a nuanced view of works that continue to be the principal conveyors in France of arguably the foremost work of German literature.

This study observes the composition and distribution of books in the diversity of its aesthetic possibilities: the several materials and formats are considered, together with all the different participants to the publishing process (writers, artists, bookbinders, publishers).

This interdisciplinary study, situated at the cross-section of music, literature and gender, examines the woman singer and her song as a literary motif in French and German prose fiction from the 1790s to the mid-nineteenth century. Through selected case studies, this diachronic history of motifs offers a fresh perspective on canonical singer archetypes, such as Goethe's child singer Mignon and Madame de Stael's ground-breaking artist Corinne. The volume also examines lesser known narratives by authors including Caroline Auguste Fischer, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Hector Berlioz and Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, some of which have not been considered critically in this regard before. This allows for a re-evaluation of the significance of the singer motif in musical narratives from the Romantic era to the July Monarchy. The sometimes polemic, often ambivalent, yet always nuanced and multi-layered reflection on the woman singer in literature bears testimony to the complexity of the nineteenth-century musical-literary discourse and its fluid negotiation of gender relations and female performance, fitting well with that ineffable, enigmatic essence of the woman singer herself who, as a literary motif and a cultural icon, continues to resonate and fascinate well beyond the nineteenth century.

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw an explosion in Europe of interest in foreign languages and literatures. This book explores how early generations of women writers formed connections with each other across national boundaries.

The notion of citizenship is part of national collective memory and a memory of individuals belonging to a specific historical and cultural context. This book seeks to investigate the importance of women's relationship with citizenship and nationality from a diachronic perspective analysing different forms of writing in various European contexts.

Cees Nooteboom (born 1933) is a writer of fiction, poetry and travel literature. Translated into at least thirty-four languages, his work raises important questions about the mobility of literary texts. This book reflects on texts crossing boundaries and brings nomadic philosophy to bear on translation studies, in the context of Nooteboom's work.

Divorce is a conspicuous character trait of modernity, commonly portrayed in texts and on screen, with its moral and social rationalisation firmly rooted in Enlightenment and Romantic thought. The aim of this volume is to bring into focus this contemporary cultural fascination by assembling the variety of academic responses it has started to create. Bringing together the reflections of scholars from the UK and North America who have worked in this domain, this study offers for the first time a genuinely wide-ranging account of the depiction of divorce across the northern hemisphere in a number of media (fiction, journalism, film and television). It reaches historically from the intellectual and legal aftermath of the Enlightenment right up to the present day. As such, the collection shows both the roots of this apparently contemporary phenomenon in nineteenth-century literary practice and the very particular ways in which divorce characterises the different narrative media of modernity.

Offers texts and images that has evolved from papers given at the inaugural Making Sense colloquium, which was held at the University of Cambridge in September 2009.

Roland Barthes and Pier Paolo Pasolini were two of the most eclectic cultural personalities of the past century, as elusive as they were influential. Despite the glaring differences between them, they also shared a number of preoccupations, obsessions and creative approaches. Certain themes recur insistently in the works of both men: the pervasiveness of power and the violence inherent in the modernising process; the possibility of freedom and subjective autonomy; and the role of creative practices in a society configured as a desert of alienation. Despite this common ground, no systematic attempt at reading the two authors together has been made before now. This book explores this uncharted territory by comparing these two intellectual figures, focusing in particular on the similarities and productive tensions that emerge in their late works. Psychoanalysis plays a key role in the articulation of this comparison.

Explores the cultural meanings of women leaving home. This volume aims to put the narrative element of home-leaving into a European context by investigating travel in various directions: from England to somewhere abroad, from the (former) colonies to the (former) imperial centre or simply within a psychic space.

This collection of essays, inspired by André Breton¿s concept of the limites non-frontières of Surrealism, focuses on the crossings, intersections and margins of the surrealist movement rather than its divides and exclusion zones. Some of the essays originated as papers given at the colloquium ¿Surrealism: Crossings/Frontiers¿ held at the Institute of Romance Studies, University of London, in November 2001. Surrealism is foregrounded as a trajectory rather than a fixed body of doctrines, radically challenging the notion of frontiers. The essays explore real and imaginary journeys, as well as the urban dérives of the surrealists and situationists. The concept of crossing, central to a reading of the dynamics at work in Surrealism, is explored in studies of the surrealist object, which eludes or elides genres, and explorations of the shifting sites of identity, as in the work of Joyce Mansour or André Masson. Surrealism¿s engagement with frontiers is further investigated through a number of revealing cases, such as a political reading of 1930s photography, the parodic rewriting of the popular ¿locked room¿ mystery, or the surrealists¿ cavalier redrawing of the map of the world. The essays contribute to our understanding of the diversity and dynamism of Surrealism as an international and interdisciplinary movement.

Explores the multifaceted concepts of otherness, barbarism and exteriority. This book examines some major twentieth-century poetic responses to the violent denial of otherness and difference in modern Europe. It focuses on three twentieth-century poets who experienced barbarism in some way and whose work constitutes a poetic counter-attack.

A collection of essays and creative work from the 2010 Making Sense colloquium, which was held at the Centre Pompidou and the Institut Telecom, Paris, bringing together artistic creation, theoretical debate and academic scholarship. Includes contributions from the philosopher Bernard Stiegler, outlining his interpretation of 'Making Sense'.