Books in the Studies in Comparative Literature series

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.

If I have been a vagabond, and have never been able to root myself in any one place in the world, it is because I have no early memories of any one sky or soil. It has freed me from many prejudices in giving me its own unresting kind of freedom; but it has cut me off from whatever is stable, of long growth in the world. - Arthur SymonsArthur Symons (1865-1945) was a central figure in the cultural and social networks of the British fin de siècle. He was an often controversial poet and critic who introduced British readers to French Decadence and Symbolism and had an equally important if largely unacknowledged influence on the development of modernism. In 1908 - the year of a mental breakdown that had a disastrous effect both on his career and posthumous reputation - W.B. Yeats referred to him as 'the best critic of his generation.' Symons's vast body of work also includes fiction and writings on the visual arts, music, theatre and the popular stage, as well as translations of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Verlaine and D'Annunzio. The essays in this volume reflect the breadth of Symons's interests, reassessing this dynamic writer who played a key mediating role between English and European literatures, and between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The Rhetoric of Exile explores the rhetorical construction of force in indirect exile and in literary responses to it. Between banishment, a compulsory exile, and expatriation, a voluntary one, many legal systems have allowed for a third model. Such an exile is pragmatic and ambiguous in nature: the degree of compulsion is never explicitly defined, but all agents involved understand that it is real. As far back as the Roman Republic, there have been exiles who felt considerable duress but could not pin it down to any specific legal document or judicial decision, and these victims of silent persecution are all the more likely to brood on the elusive force over them, and to recreate it by imaginative means. What is displaced and hidden in law - force as metonymy -- returns as a potent and condensed image in literature -- force as metaphor.Vladimir Zori¿ is Assistant Professor in Russian and Slavonic Studies at the University of Nottingham.

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.

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.