Books published by Peter Lang Ltd

The Argentinian poet Jorge Luis Borges, whose visionary poem «Ariosto y los árabes» inspired the title of this book, defined Ariostös Orlando furioso as a dream: a dream that grew out of the medieval legends of Charlemagne and King Arthur to conquer the entire western world and become a collective fantasy, a mirror onto which for centuries countless readers have reflected their own dreams and aspirations. That dream reached its 500th anniversary in 2016 and, to mark the occasion, a group of 14 scholars, comprising internationally acclaimed specialists as well as younger researchers, came together in Oxford to reflect on Ariosto in what would turn out to be a memorable meeting of minds. This book contains their thoughts and ideas, and above all their dialogue, offering fresh perspectives on one of the most enigmatic works of European, and ¿ increasingly ¿ world literature. Divided into three parts (Tradition; Interpretation; Reception), it aims to establish what Ariostös poem was in its own time, at key stages during its five-century history, and of course what it means today. In revisiting Ariostös dream, it tries to answer the question: is it still alive?

This book is about the Russian contribution to monasticism on Mount Athos and the Athonite contribution to Russian spirituality and marks the millennium of the Russian presence on Mount Athos. Athos has been the spiritual heart of the Orthodox world for even longer and Russian pilgrims have congregated there throughout its history. Russian monks visiting Athos have returned to their homeland with the treasures of Athonite spirituality such as the practice of hesychasm in the sixteenth century, the Patristic anthology known as the Philokalia in the eighteenth century, and the spiritual classic The Way of a Pilgrim in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century the Russian monastic population fluctuated wildly, but still they produced influential elders such as St Silouan and Fr Sophrony, and Athonite elders continue to exercise enormous influence on the revived Russian Orthodox Church to this day. The papers collected in this volume, first delivered as contributions to a conference held by the Friends of Mount Athos in February 2017 at Madingley Hall, Cambridge, span the breadth of the millennium.

This volume employs a range of empirical methodologies - including eyetracking, direct observation, qualitative research and corpus analysis - to describe the use of discourse markers in second language acquisition. The variety of different approaches used by the contributors facilitates the observation of correlations between morphosyntactic, semantic and pragmatic features of discourse markers and enriches our understanding of the cognitive behaviour of L2 speakers, both in the understanding and production of texts. Some of the essays examine the acquisitional paths of discourse markers in instructional and natural contexts, with a particular focus on situations of language contact and social integration; others describe experimental studies that analyse the cognitive processing of discourse markers in L2 learners. All the contributions aim to offer new insights which will expand and develop existing theoretical claims about this area of study and open up avenues for further research.

Forthcoming

This volume explores the complex webs of interaction between the environmental movement, socialism, and the «natural» environment in Germany, and beyond, in the twentieth century. There has long been a divide between the environmental, or «green,» movement and socialist movements in Germany, a divide that has expressed itself in scholarship and intellectual discourse. And yet, upon closer inspection, the split between «red» and «green» is not as clear as it might at first seem. Indeed, little about the interaction between socialism and environmentalism, or socialism and the environment, fits into a neat binary. In a way, the discourses, positions, and policiesthat structure the interactions between environmentalism, nature, and socialism in German history and culture can be said to constitute a kind of ecology ¿ a complex and interdependent web of relations, which can appear as antagonisms, but which can also contain deeper, less immediately visible, interdependencies. Ecologies of Socialisms attempts to combine the work of scholars from a wide range of disciplines (history, literature, German/Austrian studies, philosophy, geography) in order to contribute to a better and more nuanced understanding of how «green» and «red» have clashed and also merged in German history and culture.

This volume investigates literary and cinematographic narratives from Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau and Sao Tome and Principe, analysing the different ways in which social and cultural experience is represented in postcolonial contexts. It continues and completes the exploration of the postcolonial imaginary and identity of Portuguese-speaking Africa presented in the earlier volume Narrating the Postcolonial Nation: Mapping Angola and Mozambique (2014). Memory, history, migration and diaspora are core notions in the recreation and reconceptualization of the nation and its identities in Capeverdian, Guinean and Saotomean literary and cinematographic culture. Acknowledging that the idea of the postcolonial nation intersects with other social, political, cultural and historical categories, this book scrutinizes written and visual representations of the nation from a wide range of inter- and transdisciplinary perspectives, including literary and film studies, gender studies, sociology, and post-colonial and cultural studies. It makes a valuable contribution to current debates on postcolonialism, nation and identity in these former Portuguese colonies.

China als Motiv in der deutschsprachigen Literatur kann auf eine lange Tradition zurückblicken. Die Darstellung Chinas in verschiedenen Epochen hängt jedoch nicht selten eng mit dem Zeitgeist und den historischen Gegebenheiten der jeweiligen Epoche zusammen. Die Niederschlagung der Studentenbewegung auf dem Platz des Himmlischen Friedens in Peking im Juni 1989 und der Fall der Berliner Mauer nur fünf Monate später, gefolgt von der Wiedervereinigung Deutschlands, führten jedoch u.a. dazu, dass deutsche Literaten nun enttäuscht und ernüchtert nach China blickten. In diesem Zusammenhang drängt sich die Frage auf, wie die Volksrepublik in der gegenwärtigen deutschsprachigen Literatur, vornehmlich in der Romanliteratur, dargestellt wird. Anhand von acht ausgewählten deutschen Romanen mit China-Motiven, die nach 1989 erschienen sind, soll die aktuelle Darstellung Chinas in der deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur untersucht werden. Dabei wird den Fragen nachgegangen, warum es so zustande gekommen ist und welche Entwicklungsperspektiven sich daraus ableiten lassen.

This volume brings together a range of international contributors to explore new ways of carrying out research with children with disabilities. It also investigates how scholars across a wide variety of disciplines are engaging with one another in innovative research and practice related to children¿s engagement, participation, agency and voice. It includes perspectives from fields as diverse as psychology, early childhood studies, speech and language therapy (SLT), occupational science and therapy (OST), law, education and disability studies. A wide range of creative and practical methodologies for eliciting children¿s voices are interrogated and articulated in the book, which will be of interest to both professionals and researchers.

L¿Italia degli anni Sessanta non è solo il paese del miracolo economico, delle migrazioni interne e dei conflitti sociali: è anche un paese che scopre (o riscopre) il proprio volto perturbante e lunare, attraverso un vero e proprio boom dell¿occulto che investe ogni settore dell¿industria culturale. A partire dal 1959 ¿ quando il Dracula della Hammer Film Productions intercetta i desideri e le ansie di un¿Italia in rapida trasformazione, suscitando la perplessità di intellettuali e benpensanti ¿ l¿¿insolitö invade la letteratura, il cinema, la cultura popolare: e riceve infine la sua consacrazione nel 1971, quando, a ridosso degli anni di piombo, quindici milioni di telespettatori si appassionano alla serie televisiva Il Segno del comando, ambientata in una Roma notturna e popolata da spettri e sette esoteriche. Tra vampiri cinematografici e fantasmi da salotto, veggenti di campagna e mutanti adolescenti, ferrovieri medium e scommesse col diavolo, Italia lunare riporta alla luce il volto marginale e segreto dell¿Italia del benessere, fornendo una chiave di lettura inedita per comprendere il paese e le sue contraddizioni.

In 1945, the Soviet Union annexed the East Prussian city of Königsberg, later renaming it Kaliningrad. Left in ruins by the war, the home of Immanuel Kant became a Russian city, a source of historical and cultural fascination for settlers, former inhabitants, visitors and observers alike. New settlers replaced the German population in the years that followed. This book looks at three aspects of Kaliningrad¿s relationship to the memory of Königsberg through cultural and literary sources and visual representations. First, it addresses the symbolism of Königsberg as a memory site in German culture and nostalgia for the city after 1945. Second, it discusses imagined and satirical literary-cultural adaptations and deconstructions of the idea of «Kant and Königsberg» during the Cold War and afterwards. Third, it explores and reflects on discourses of memory, history and nostalgia in representations of the city by poets, photographers and filmmakers visiting Kaliningrad from the 1960s onwards. The book provides an introduction to the memory debates relating to Königsberg-Kaliningrad, as well as new critical readings of literary texts, films and photographic works.

The figure of the «Muslim» woman or girl performs a crucial role in far-reaching socio-political debates in Germany. Indeed, such figures challenge the boundaries of gender equality and secularism and contest notions of tolerance and integration. The (in)visibility of Muslim women¿s bodies and their apparent position in Islam function as ostensible indicators of their oppression and of Islam¿s supposed incompatibility with western values.This book investigates representations of «Muslim» women and girls in German popular culture from 1990 to 2015. The study analyses the discursive function of such figures in German popular culture via three key research questions: what representational practices surround the figure of the Muslim woman or girl in German life writing, young adult literature and film? How do such representations function to produce «non-Muslim» subject positions? What is the function of this figure within narratives of feminism and assertions of gender equality? This study understands itself as an intervention into contemporary racist discourses in Germany and operates within a transdisciplinary framework of intersectional feminism and cultural and German studies. Ultimately, the book aims to make visible and interrogatethe underlying hierarchies and agendas that drive representations of Muslim women and girls.This book was the winner of the of the 2017 Early Career Researcher Prize in German Studies, a collaboration between the Institute for German Studies at the University of Birmingham and Peter Lang.

This volume explores and challenges the extensive possible meanings and semantic connotations of the stain, including dirt, blood, dye, clue, symptom, shadow, smudge, memory, crack, trace and blindspot. The roles, functions, workings and unworkings of stains are interrogated across a range of disciplinary areas in French and Francophone literature and culture. The collection provides a theoretical framework for the significance of the stain in interpretation across a wide range of disciplines as well as offering close readings of films, photographs, paintings and literary texts in which the figure of the stain appears. In this respect, the following key notions are addressed and reconfigured: presence and absence, obscurity, visibility and legibility, form(lessness) and (non)representation, the (non)human and the animal, language and materiality, experience and knowledge, suffering and healing, remembering and forgetting. In parallel, the collection offers innovative readings of the work of key thinkers, examining how Barthes, Proust, Bataille, Camus and others engage with the topic of stains. This volume presents the stain as a powerful critical tool which complicates and contaminates historical, ethical, aesthetic and methodological boundaries. The essays celebrate the productive potential of the stain as an oblique means of accessing and uncovering significant and unexpected continuities and discontinuities.