Books in the Oxford Modern Languages and Literature Monographs series

This work deals with the process of aesthetic education, as defined by Winckelmann on the basis of his own experience of art and as applied to his teaching of two pupils. A number of crucial difficulties are revealed, not least because Winckelmann's teaching programme does little justice to his insights, which were later appreciated and, in some cases, reproduced by Goethe.

Situating Derrida's engagement with Freud vis-a-vis key contemporaries such as Levi-Strauss and Foucault, this title uses close analysis of a range of primary texts to show how Derrida reshaped Freud's insights in the very different intellectual context of post-war France.

This book is a wide-ranging study of the history of ideas. Interdisciplinary by its intent and design, it offers an innovative examination of the intellectual background, affiliations and contexts of two major twentieth century thinkers, and an historical interpretation of their work in aesthetics, cultural theory, literary history and philosophy.

Explores the theatricality of Jean Racine's language and takes as its analytical tool two relatively neglected parts of rhetoric ("inventio" and "dispositio"), highlighting the dramatic excitement created by characters who constantly engage in verbal battle trying to dominate those around them.

This book is a study of French Caribbean literature in light of postcolonialism. Through readings of Aime Cesaire, Edouard Glissant, Maryse Conde, Baudelaire, Freud, and others, Jeannie Suk illuminates how debates about negritude, antillanite, and creolite contribute to paradoxes at the heart of postcolonial modes.

Tracing the development of Joubert's thought, from his time as secretary to Diderot to his association with Chateaubriand, this study argues that he was a writer of considerable sensitivity on aesthetics.

This title examines hitherto neglected Yiddish books from the late 18th century in order to analyse the linguistic changes manifest in both the transition and shift from Old to nascent Modern Literary Yiddish within the broader context of genre and literary tradition and in the framework of Yiddish dialectology, grammar, and sociolinguistics.

This book considers how and why German authors have used the child's viewpoint to present the Third Reich. Given the popularity of this device, this study asks whether it is an evasive strategy, a means of gaining new insights into the era, or a means of discovering a new language. This raises issues central to the post-war German aesthetic.

Combining scholarly analysis with illuminating case studies - such as an abbess's account of the Reformation, a prioress's diary from the Thirty Years' War, and a biography of a 15th-century visionary - Charlotte Woodford introduces the much neglected female historians of the era, and sets their writings in an historical and literary context.

This book takes the reader through the translation and performance processes of the Royal Shakespeare Company's 2004-05 Spanish Golden Age season to establish a model for translating, rehearsing, and performing Spanish Golden Age drama.

A Tale Blazed Through Heaven charts the development of representations of the mythological tale of Mars, Venus, and Vulcan from its origins in classical antiquity to its reception in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain. It offers a new perspective on the literary and visual culture of the period, both in Spain and in Europe as a whole.

This volume examines the topic and treatment of conspiracy in fifteenth-century Italian literature. It situates the theme of conspiracy within the literary and historical contexts of the period, examines its representation within four key texts, and reflects on the legacy of these literary-historical works over the following century.

This volume explores poetic dialogue and dialogic patterns in medieval vernacular Italian poetry. It focuses on representations of conversion narratives and poetic subjectivity in the writings of Guittone d'Arezzo, Guido Guinizzelli, and Guido Cavalcanti, and Dante.

Jessica Goodman sheds new light on Carlo Goldoni's experience as a dramatic author in 1760s Paris, and on his critical reactions to that experience. She draws on contemporary Comedie-Italienne archives to offer the most comprehensive existing account of this oft-neglected theatre and its authorial relations.

Dante's Lyric Redemption uses Dante's relationship to some important Italian and Provencal writers of his time to highlight his radical and distinctive handling of the relationship between erotic love and salvation.

This book explores the literary work of Anna Maria Ortese (1914-1998), one of the greatest and most original writers in twentieth-century Italian and European literature and shows the intense relationship between Ortese's texts and masterpieces of European literature.

Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei presents striking new readings of the exotic in major German writers such as Kafka, Mann, Brecht, and Hesse, alongside the thought of Nietzsche, Freud, Simmel, and Expressionist aesthetics. She shows how the evocation of exotic spaces serves to reflect on central problems of European modernity and the modern self.

On a Knife-Edge represents the first book-length study in English solely devoted to the work of Joao Cabral de Melo Neto (1920-1999), one of Brazil's foremost poets of the twentieth century and a unique voice within Brazilian Modernism.

Dunlaith Bird argues that vagabondage - a physical and textual elaboration of gender identity in motion - emerges as a totemic concept in European women's travel writing from 1850. For Olympe Audouard, Isabella Bird, Isabelle Eberhardt, and Freya Stark vagabondage is a means of extending the parameters by which 'women' are defined.

The Drowned Muse charts the trajectory of representations of "L'Inconnue de la Seine" in literature and the visual arts since the late 1890s and shows how the mask's metamorphoses track across the years provides points of negotiation through which to better understand modernity.

A study of novels by Uwe Johnson, Max Frisch, Christa Wolf, Jurek Becker, and Gunter Grass, this text investigates the fictions and fantasies invented by five narrators. It examines the purpose which the fictions serve and the means by which each author deliberately draws attention to them.

Straddling the disciplines of literature and social history, and based on extensive archival research, this book makes a crucial contribution to the feminist project of writing women back into literary history. It brings to light the hitherto unrecognised literary tradition in the prehistory of psychoanalysis: the psychiatric memoir.

The first study of Marquard von Lindau, arguably the most widely-read author in German before the Reformation. Active in the second half of the 14th century, in the generation after the Black Death, Marquard made a distinctive and critical contribution to contemporary understanding of Christ's Passion, the Eucharist, and the Virgin Mary.

In this closely analytical study, Cruickshank reads the work of four influential writers of prose fiction - Angot, Echenoz, Houellebecq, and Redonnet - in the context of the turn of the millennium in France, which coincided with a number of tangible crises and apocalyptic discourses, and with the growth of the mass media and global market.

Adam Watt's critical study of Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, focuses on the role of the acts of reading depicted in the seminal novel. Reading is shown to be a formative and often troubling force in the life of the novel's narrator.

Showing how Goethe protrayed human beings as part of natural continuum, very much in the spirit of the Enlightenment, this book demonstrates that 18th-century anthropological thought provides an essential, hitherto overlooked context for the understanding of Goethe's literary enterprise.

The concept of imitatio - the imitation of classical and vernacular texts - was a dominant critical and creative principle in Italian Renaissance literature. This study charts the development of imitatio from the 14th to the early 16th centuries, offering insights into the works of Italian writers.

This volume explores the extent to which Turkish linguistic features became incorporated into, and influenced, South Slavonic literature, with attention to both religious and secular works of the seventeenth and eighteenth century.

This is the first book-length study in English on Vittorio Sereni (1913-83), a major figure in Italian twentieth-century poetry. It argues that a key innovation of Sereni's poetry is the way in which it reworks the boundaries of poetic space to construct a lyric 'I' radically repositioned in the textual universe with respect to its predecessors.

Javier Marias has explained many times that working as a translator of literary works from English into Spanish helped shape him as a writer. This study explores those claims by analysing two things: firstly, his translations themselves; and secondly, seeing how those translations have left discernible traces in his own fiction.