Books published by Verlag Peter Lang

Contrasts the portrayal of kings and kingship in the drama of William Shakespeare and Spanish playwright Pedro Calderon de la Barca, concentrating on the ways in which both dramatists use the individual complexities of their kingly characters to address the intellectual and moral dilemmas of the ideological backgrounds that helped to create them.

This book aims to revise the traditional interpretation of William Golding's fiction. The author investigates Golding's complicated metaphors which fluctuate so widely as to make consistent readings almost impossible. The study reveals that these fluctuating metaphors are created around a void, which is depicted not only as a gap but also as an impenetrable dark spot, or a counter-gaze. The characters in Golding's fiction endeavour to symbolise the void, but it ultimately resists symbolisation. Mainly from the perspective of semiotics, psychoanalysis, and philosophy, the book looks at the way in which the elements excluded from the symbolic system react against it and leave this void. The author then focuses on the void's significance in the creation of unique metaphors.

Tonal consciousness, in the sense of a clear intuition about which note or chord a piece of music will finish on, is as much a part of our everyday experience of music as it is of contemporary music theory. This book asks to what extent such tonal consciousness might have operated in the minds of musicians of the Middle Ages, given the different tone world found in the modes of Gregorian chant, in troubadour and trouvère music, in Minnesang and in the early polyphony based upon chant. The author¿s approach is analytical, focusing on modality and balancing up-to-date concepts and methods of music analysis with those insights into their own compositional needs and processes that the people of the Middle Ages provided themselves through their writings about music. The book examines a range of both music sources and theoretical sources from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries. This is a ground-breaking contribution both to the study of medieval music and to music analysis.

Provides insights into historical aspects of language, particularly items regularly deployed for politeness functions, and the social, particularly interpersonal, contexts with which it interacts. This title also sheds light on how meanings are dynamically constructed in situ, and probes various theoretical aspects of politeness.

The papers in this volume are devoted to new in-depth treatments of distinctive aspects of Chinese and Japanese syntax, semantics and pragmatics, informed by influential theoretical concepts of the day, including cognitive grammar, construction grammar, information structure, grammaticalization and linguistic typology.