Books published by Verlag Peter Lang

This book aims to shed light on how translations of popular music contribute to fostering international relations by focusing on a case study of Turkish-Greek rapprochement in the last two decades. Drawing on a range of disciplines, the book explores the multifaceted nature of translation and music and their wide-ranging impact on society.

Materials may seem to be sculpture's most obvious aspect. This book places materials at the centre of our approach to sculpture, examining their symbolic and aesthetic language, their abstract and philosophical associations, and the ways in which they reveal the political, economic and social contexts of sculptural practice.

This book examines the responses of visual artists, including architects, designers and photographers, to the technological and social modernisation of Germany during the first three decades of the twentieth century. It investigates how these aspects of the modernising process inform both the subject matter and formal innovations of their work. The study analyses how these visual practices were not just the concerns of isolated and enclosed art worlds but had wider social resonances, ranging from the debates concerning the reformist objectives of the Deutscher Werkbund (1907) to the National Socialist ideological onslaught on modernist culture culminating in the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibitions of 1937. Many of the artists encountered here were radicalised by the First World War, the Russian Revolution and the November 1918 Revolution in Germany, experiences which effected change in their conceptualising of cultural production and its social function: their modes of working, however, would also set challenging markers for what forms art might take for the twentieth century. The book is, therefore, both a study of art in complex political and sociocultural contexts and a reflection on how engagement with a social imagination can challenge a tradition based on the assumptions of individual imaginings.

Explores the visual, textual, performative, and perceptual aspects of this phenomenon, with particular emphasis on painting and sculpture in late medieval Cologne. This book examines the cult from the core outward, seeking to understand hagiographic texts and images in terms of their role in articulating relic cults.

This book examines the presentation of, and attitudes to, the Second World War in post-war West German prose fiction. The fierce public reactions which some of these works provoked at the time of their publication are taken into account in this study since their reception provides a picture of the psychological relationship West Germany had with its wartime past in the immediate post-war period and beyond. Writers of Unterhaltungsliteratur and Trivialliteratur are often studied within their own genre, but, this book sets such writers alongside their canonical colleagues. This approach opens up the possibility of considering whether the strategies adopted to influence contemporary society, to reflect that society and to come to terms with the Second World War are determined by the classification of these works as Kitsch or Kunst. The authors included are Alfred Andersch, Heinrich Böll, Hans Hellmut Kirst, Heinz G. Konsalik, Theodor Plievier and Erich Maria Remarque. The selected works deal specifically with the German soldier and officer, the fighting fronts, the home front and the connections between the German army and the National Socialist regime.

This book explores Jewishness in the writings of Isaac Bashevis Singer. The author makes a close examination of Singer¿s literary works, Judaism, Jewish history and related criticism to illustrate Singer¿s unique but ambiguous position in American Jewish literature. The book offers a discussion of Singer¿s modernity. Singer¿s Jewishness finds its major expression in challenging the notion of covenant and the concept of «the coming modern consciousness» of Spinozäs philosophy. The book also focuses on Singer¿s representation of Jewish assimilation in the past and present, both in Poland and in America and on the de-Americanisation of the Holocaust. After an examination of Singer¿s narrative strategies the author also discusses the similarities and diversities of four major American Jewish writers, Singer, Bellow, Malamud and Roth in terms of Jewish identity and Jewish historical consciousness.

This wide-ranging and provocative study focuses on the importance of the mother in the genealogical and social frameworks of the Old French and Occitan chanson de geste. The masculine dominance of these narratives of warfare and conflict is questioned, reassessed, and redefined, as the complexity and significance of the maternal character is revealed through the study of a contrasting range of epic texts, with Raoul de Cambrai providing a key focus. The study draws upon medieval theological and scientific doctrine and modern psychoanalytic and feminist theory, especially the works of Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Jaques Lacan, to illuminate the tensions and ambiguities consistently inherent in the perception of the mother and the maternal body. Authority, continuation, violence, and death are key topics, revealing the problematic nature of gender roles and their relation to the structures of power that shape both medieval society and epic narrative.

This book brings together a number of ground-breaking essays that explore the interface of language and gender-consciousness in foundation texts of Judaism and Christianity. Using critical perspectives that derive from a feminist revaluation of traditional religious discourse, the contributors to this volume address basic questions of meaning and interpretive freedom that are integral to a contemporary reading of Scripture and liturgy. They raise such issues as the relevance of a liturgical tradition in which the Deity is addressed in exclusively masculine terms, and the continued viability of scriptural texts that reflect consistently androcentric values. In each of these essays the authors can be seen to respond to the challenge of the feminist critique of patriarchalism in the Western religious tradition, as well as to the perceived need, within contemporary Judaism and Christianity, for new interpretive models for the reading of sacred texts.

The male homosexual appears in many guises in postwar West German literature: whether he is a sexually predatory soldier, corrupt teacher, decadent artist, purveyor of kitsch, or powerful industrialist, he appears almost always as an insider of the social and political system. Writers such as Heinrich Böll, Wolfgang Koeppen and Alfred Andersch utilized images of homosexuality in order to examine the Nazi past and to critique the Federal Republic of Germany. Their literary depictions are informed by discourses that circulated in the early twentieth century, including the scientism of Magnus Hirschfeld, the masculinism of the German youth movement and the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen, and the literary irony of Thomas Mann. Pre-Nazi images of homosexuality reappear in postwar West German literature in a new sociohistorical context, in which the meaning of the Nazi past and its relationship to the new Federal Republic is debated on many levels. The Nazi Abduction of Ganymede traces the development of a postwar West German literary tradition that participated in parallel developments in philosophy, psychoanalysis, and popular culture, all of which continued to find new ways to link homosexuality with fascism.

This book takes as its terrain the changing perceptions of evil across centuries of English Literature. Starting with the models of conflict and malevolence in the Book of Genesis, its paths are the themes of ambition, desire, survival, belief and knowledge, from the Middle Ages to the present day. As if looking through both ends of a telescope, it moves forward in time, propelled by what has been left behind and by our knowledge of what will follow. Because the cinema is so vibrant an archive of shifting images of ourselves, selected films are viewed alongside the narrative fiction, drama and poetry of each chapter. Throughout the book, résumés and quotations bring as-yet-unread writings into the same line of vision as all the others. Exploring Evil confronts the diversity of evils reflected in literary depictions of human behaviour and finds two constant elements: the abuse of free will and a denial of the humanity of others. The author argues that, however much its forms and objectives may change, the supremacy of evil in the life of the imagination remains unassailable.

This is a study of the sociopolitical role of the belief in chen prophecy in early medieval China. The chen prophecies discussed in this work are not confined to the traditional prophetic-apocryphal texts. Many contemporary prophecies emerged and circulated in association with current events; personal names, reign titles, poems, folk and children¿s rhymes, even rumor-rhymes were recognized as heavenly revelations. Although prophetic utterances were used as psychological weapons in politics, it would be wrong to regard chen prophecy as simply political propaganda. Chen prophecies were believed to be genuine prophetic messages at the time. Chen prophecy was an indispensable part of a symbolic ritual of legitimation of mandate-transfer. It was recognized as a coded revelation that derived its prophetic power from the primitive belief in the magic power of words. The emphasis on winning public acceptance may have been another source of its prophetic power. Social integration, legitimation of dynastic change, and the hopes for a better future in an age of tumult thus depended on the belief in the interaction between Heaven¿s mandate and man¿s destiny.