Books published by Verlag Peter Lang

This book explores the different ways in which psychoanalysis has been connected to various fields of Italian culture, such as literary criticism, philosophy and art history, as well as discussing scholars who have used psychoanalytical methods in their work. The areas discussed include: the city of Trieste, in chapters devoted to the author Italo Svevo and the artist Arturo Nathan; psychoanalytic interpretations of women terrorists during the anni di piombo; the relationships between the Freudian concept of the subconscious and language in philosophical research in Italy; and a personal reflection by a practising analyst who passes from literary texts to her own clinical experience. The volume closes with a chapter by Giorgio Pressburger, a writer who uses Freud as his Virgil in a narrative of his descent into a modern hell. The volume contains contributions in both English and Italian.

Against All Odds

This book focuses on the mother-daughter relationship as it features in a number of films from the 1990s onwards. Bringing the insights of psychoanalysis and feminism to bear on a diverse and compelling range of representations of the mother-daughter dynamic, the author addresses a range of questions relating to the social, historical and cultural conditions which go to inform the female experience. These include, in relation to Dolores Claiborne, Heavenly Creatures and The Others, an exploration of different forms of familial violence and resistance to it and in One True Thing, Stepmom and Pieces of April, questions about the construction of the ideal mother and her loss. From The Pianös engagement with French feminism and Losing Chase¿s reworking of the life and work of Virginia Woolf to the depiction of cross-racial relationships during apartheid in Friends, the films that go to make up this study all share a central concern with both the literal and symbolic forms that the mother-daughter relationship encompasses.

Giorgio Manganelli (1922-1990), one of Italy's most radical and original writers, went further than most in exploring the creative possibilities of hybrid genres and open forms. This study examines the wealth of Manganelli's imagination - his grotesque animals, speaking corpses, and melancholy specters.

Shows how translations appeared to challenge official claims about the birth of a Fascist culture and cast Italy in a receptive role that did not tally with Fascist notions of a dominant culture extending its influence abroad. This book examines the aggressive campaign that was conducted against the Italian Publishers Federation.

This collection of new essays addresses a key debate in Irish studies. While it is important that new research endeavours to accommodate the new and powerful manifestations of Irishness that are evident today in our globalised economy, these considerations are often overlooked. The writers in this book seek to reconcile the established critical perspectives of Irish studies with a forward-looking critical momentum that incorporates the realities of globalisation and economic migration. The book initiates this vital discussion by bringing together a series of provocative and thoughtful essays, from both renowned and rising international scholars, on the vicissitudes of cultural identity in a post-modern, post-colonial and post-national Ireland. By including work by leading scholars in the fields of film studies, migration and Diaspora studies, travel literature and gender studies, this collection offers a thorough twenty-first-century interrogation of Irishness and provides a timely fusion of international perspectives on Irish cultural identity.

Beyond the Back Room

This book addresses the influence of the imperial cult in first-century AD Asia Minor and its subsequent relevance to the reading of the New Testament. In particular, this work argues, through a contrapuntal reading of 1 Timothy 2:1-7, that the early Christian community strongly resisted the Emperor¿s claim to be the «mediator» between the gods and humanity. In contrast to this claim, the author shows that 1 Timothy 2:1-7 can be read as a polemic from a minority community, the Christian church in Ephesus, against the powerful voice of the Roman Empire in regard to divine mediation.

Raymond Williams was an enormously influential figure in late twentieth-century intellectual life as a novelist, playwright and critic, British Sartre, as "The Times" put it. This volume brings together a complete collection of Williams' critical essays on science fiction and futurology, utopia, and dystopia, in literature, film, and politics.

This book examines the role of Samuel Beckett in contemporary philosophical aesthetics, primarily through analysis of both his own essays and the various interpretations that philosophers (especially Adorno, Blanchot, Deleuze, and Badiou) have given to his works. The study centres around the fundamental question of the relationship between art and truth, where art, as a negative truth, comes to its complete exhaustion (as Deleuze terms it) by means of a series of ¿endgames¿ that progressively involve philosophy, writing, language and every individual and minimal form of expression. The major thesis of the book is that, at the heart of Beckett¿s philosophical project, this ¿aesthetics of truth¿ turns out to be nothing other than the real subject itself, within a contradictory and tragic relationship that ties the Self/Voice to the Object/Body. Yet a number of questions remain open. ¿What¿ or ¿whö lies behind this process? What is left of the endgame of art and subjectivity? Finally, what sustains and renders possible Beckett¿s paradoxical axiom of the ¿impossibility to express¿ alongside the ¿obligation to express¿? By means of a thorough overview of the most recent criticism of Beckett, this book will try to answer these questions.

Fascist and colonial legacies have been determinant in shaping how Italian colonialism has been narrated in Italy till the late 1960s. This book deals with the complex problem of public memory and discursive amnesia. It shows that colonial discourse persisted in historiography, newspapers, newsreels and film.

This book contains a collection of original research articles on lexicography written by prominent international scholars within the field. It aims at describing the state-of-the-art in lexicography at the beginning of the 21 century and at making proposals for future theoretical and practical work in the field. Theoretical lexicography currently has two competing theories: a contemplative theory focusing on the description of existing dictionaries on the basis of linguistic principles, and a function-based, transformative theory focusing on the dictionary and the user in order to develop new principles for dictionary research and dictionary making. Research in lexicography has now reached a crossroads and it is time to take stock of the present situation and try to identify the theories and principles that will set the agenda and point the direction for future lexicographic research and the production of printed and electronic dictionaries.