Books published by Verlag Peter Lang

With reference to Paul Ricoeur¿s conception of the interconnectedness of history and fiction, this comparative literary study examines narrative strategies that three contemporary writers of fiction ¿ Toni Morrison, V. S. Naipaul, and Ben Okri ¿ have devised to counteract the incompleteness of historical representation. In her novel Beloved Morrison redefines the slave-narrative tradition and reveals an alternative history of slavery by unveiling the interior lives of her characters. Through a hybrid prose that mixes fiction with history in the novels The Enigma of Arrival and A Way in the World, Naipaul illuminates «areas of darkness» in the diasporic world of East Indian Trinidadians and provides new ways of transforming English literary and cultural history. Focusing on West African identity and community, Okri brings a mythic and fantastic dimension to postcolonial fiction as a way of giving a voice to people who are generally without power and almost without any place in a world of inequality and injustice. Probing into historical incompleteness, this study underscores the indispensable role of fiction in representing life, rectifying history, and enlarging reality.

This book traces how religion could have originated in prehistory and antiquity, out of natural human and prehuman behaviour. Religion is defined here as beliefs, conceptions, practices and roles concerned with the ¿supernatural¿. A variety of elements of religion can be identified. These include: spirits, ghosts, life after death, heaven, shamans. To try to reduce religion to a single original element is a mistake. There may be no single origin. But the individual elements have separate origins, and these can be traced. The common subjective component of religious elements is the numinous, which is commonly ascribed to external sources identified as ¿supernatural¿ and ¿spiritual¿. The numinous sense is explained by means of certain neural processes with a focus in the temporal lobes. Probably for the first time, evidence is brought to bear from primatology, palaeoanthropology, ethnography, ancient history and history of religions, as well as theology, neurology and psycho-pharmacology. The field of origins of religion has been neglected by anthropology since the 1930s, but has enjoyed renewed interest from the 1990s. This wide-ranging interdisciplinary book makes an important contribution to the field.

Pierre Michon is one of France¿s most significant contemporary writers. Since the publication in 1984 of his first book, Vies minuscules, Michon¿s work has never ceased to evade generic classifications. His work ingests books, lives and thought and probes their complex interrelationship and those moments of convergence that transform an ordinary name into that of an ¿Author¿ or of an ¿Artist¿. The contents of Michon¿s work are well documented: they are drawn from canonical novels, chronicles, archives and the biographies of artists¿ lives and are worked into cross-generic forms that revive names and make us rethink the uncertainty of literature. Less has been written of his engagement with avant-garde thought. The legacy of French avant-garde thinkers of the 1960s and 1970s, in particular the work of Roland Barthes, informs Michon¿s work. Barthes¿s notions of the referent, of intertextuality and of authorship, for example, are transposed, reconfigured and sometimes contested within Michon¿s work. In this way, Barthes¿s name, the afterlife of his thought, remains encrypted within Michon¿s prose. This book situates and reads Michon¿s texts through the complex inscription and transformation of names drawn from the Creuse, literature, art and avant-garde thought. And it is within this matrix that Michon puts in play his own name and its uncertain relation to literature.

This is the first edition of the fourteenth-century Lumen anime C and of its German translation Das liecht der sel, completed in 1426 by Ulrich Putsch, Bishop of Brixen (Bressanone) in the South Tyrol. The two works are theological compendia for use in homiletic and catechetical contexts, and teach their intended readership much about basic Christian doctrine and morality, with a special emphasis on the Virgin Mary. Their didactic method makes particular use of nature exempla and of (frequently spurious) quotations from authorities. Both were highly influential in late-medieval Germany, especially in Austria and Bavaria, but their important role in conveying the insights of late-medieval Catholicism to an increasingly numerous lay audience has yet to be fully appreciated. The present edition should facilitate this and several other necessary re-assessments. Critical texts of the Latin and German versions are printed in parallel. They are preceded by an introduction which offers, for each text in turn, descriptions of its manuscripts, an account of its textual history, and an evaluation of previous research ¿ and, in respect of Das liecht der sel, also covers the biography of Ulrich Putsch.

This book critically examines David Tracy¿s well-known methodology of fundamental theology, namely his revisionist model as developed in his Blessed Rage for Order (1975), together with his methodological shifts through the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s. It explores how successful he has been in constructing a methodology for the public theological discourse that he deems so necessary. More particularly, this book asks how serviceable this methodology is for articulating Christian discourse in an intelligible and public way in the contemporary context of religious plurality.

National Narcissism offers a groundbreaking anthropological and sociological approach to nationalism through an exposé of the belief systems and psychology of extreme nationalists for whom nationalism is a form of religion. This theoretical approach is illustrated with examples primarily taken from Hungary, with a special focus in two chapters on the role of gender in nationalism. The state of politics and society in Hungary is also examined in a way that steps beyond the usual simplistic, flat narratives of ¿what Hungarians are like¿, by stressing the broad variety of viewpoints current in Hungarian society, the milieu in which a small minority of extreme nationalists are able to make their voice heard out of proportion to their numbers or political support. The theory offered by National Narcissism has wide-ranging implications for the future study of extremist nationalism in nation-states throughout the world. Sociologists, anthropologists, nationalism studies specialists, social-psychologists, and historians of the recent past in Hungary will find that this theoretical book, richly illustrated with examples from Hungarian society, challenges positive and negative stereotypes about nationalism, extremism, post-communism, central and eastern Europe, the European Union and, not least, about Hungarians themselves.

This book contains the first complete English translation, fully annotated, of the treatise Concerning Frequent Communion, commonly attributed to Sts. Makarios of Corinth and Nikodemos the Hagiorite, the compilers of the Philokalia. This pivotal treatise, by two central figures in the Kollyvades movement, which originated on Mount Athos in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, addresses a somewhat less well-known corollary issue in Orthodox spirituality, that of frequent Communion. The authors discuss the controversy surrounding a decline in the frequency of Communion in the Christian East, the relationship of that controversy to the Kollyvades movement, and the theological arguments in support of frequent Communion advanced by Makarios and Nikodemos, whose joint authorship of the treatise they endeavor to substantiate.

This book examines the contribution made by Joaquim Nabuco (1849-1910) to political thought in Brazil during the Belle Epoque (1888-1910). Nabuco was once leader of the abolitionist cause in Brazil and turned his attention after the abolition of slavery in 1888 to saving the monarchy. This study traces Nabucös views on the monarchic institution in Brazil, considering first the origins of his (liberal) monarchist beliefs and his ideas on how the institution should adapt to halt the threat of republicanism before 1889. It concentrates on the first decade of the Republic and the ways in which Nabuco presented a challenge to the new regime. By examining the impact of his views on the State¿s domestic and international roles, the book reveals Nabucös contribution to nation-building in late-nineteenth-century Brazil.

Arising from a colloquium held in Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, in March 2004, this volume offers fresh insights into Swiss culture and literature from an Irish perspective. It brings together articles by writers and scholars from various academic fields including cultural studies, linguistics and literature. The book is a reflection of the multifaceted interests of Irish academics in Switzerland as a cultural space in the heart of Europe. Ireland as a vantage point, situated at the western margin of the European continent, offers new perspectives from which differences as well as surprising parallels between the two cultures become visible and from which Switzerland appears in a different light. The volume critically addresses questions of identity in Swiss literature and culture and discusses them from various angles ¿ by analysing the representation of minority cultures in Swiss literary and media discourse, by reading Swiss literature in an intercultural context, but also through accounts of Irish visitors in Switzerland and Swiss writers travelling to or living in Ireland.

The Second World War marked an ethical turn in British fiction. The author of this study demonstrates this by closely examining John Fowles¿s and Iris Murdoch¿s works as post-war meta-textual magical-realist novels interested in ethics and the nature of contemporary reality. These ethical novels transcend mere morality to explore the essence of the Good. Through paradigms of human experience, they direct our attention towards the Other and impart moral principles based on acts of Goodness. The author assesses the moral intimations in Fowles¿s The Magus and Murdoch¿s The Sea, the Sea in the context of their philosophical writings, mainly The Aristos and Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals respectively. She shows that Fowles and Murdoch endeavour to instruct the reader morally through the accessible language of fiction.

Janet Frame's literary career was inextricably woven into the fabric of the twentieth-century New Zealand literary scene. However, she also became New Zealand's best-known international writer and her great literary influence in both fields has not been charted before now. This study also seeks to redress the excessive commitment in scholarship to maintaining, even celebrating, Frame's reputation as a psychologically disturbed writer. This book surveys all aspects of Janet Frame's biographical legend by considering her later literary and autobiographical works, Jane Campion's film adaptation of the autobiographies, An Angel at my Table, as well as biographies and literary histories that both rely on and contribute to her well-known legend. In doing so, the author hopes to offer novel perspectives on Frame's literary production, on Frame scholarship, on auto/biographical theories and on New Zealand literary history.

The book explores the Deep Ecology perspective and Buddhist Economics for transforming business toward a more ecological and human form. It argues that ecology and ethics provide limits for business within which business is legitimate and productive. By transgressing ecological and ethical limits business activities become destructive and self-defeating. Today¿s business model is based on and cultivates narrow self-centeredness. Both Deep Ecology and Buddhist Economics point out that emphasizing individuality and promoting the greatest fulfillment of the desires of the individual conjointly lead to destruction. Happiness is linked to wholeness, not to personal wealth. We need to find new ways of doing business, ways that respect the ecological and ethical limits of business activities. Acting within limits provides the hope and promise of contributing to the preservation and enrichment of the world.

This book explores theologically the practice of hospital chaplains seeking to meet the spiritual needs of parents bereaved by baby death in-utero. The lived experience of bereaved parents, gathered through a series of in-depth interviews, informs such an exploration. Parents describe the trauma of late miscarriage and stillbirth as still being shrouded by silence, myth and misunderstanding in contemporary society. Up-to-date theoretical understandings of grief are also re-examined in light of parents¿ stories of living with baby death. This book offers suggestions as to how the actual spiritual needs of parents may be met and their grief sensitively facilitated through the sharing of rituals co-constructed by parents and chaplain which seek to have theological integrity yet be relevant in our postmodern age. In our prevalent culture of caring, where increasingly ongoing professional and personal development are regarded as normative, recommendations are made which may aid reflection on current, or shape future, practice for chaplains, pastors, students and various healthcare professionals.

The decade of the 1860s was a turbulent period in Irish politics, both at home and abroad, and saw the rise and apparent failure of the separatist Fenian movement. In England, this period also witnessed the first realistic attempt at establishing a genuinely popular press amid Irish migrants to Britain. This was to be an ideological battle as both secular nationalists and the Roman Catholic Church, for their very distinct reasons, desperately wished to communicate with a reading public which owed its existence in large measure to the massive immigration of the years of the Famine. Based on extensive archival research, this book provides the first serious study of the Irish press in Britain for any period, through a detailed analysis of three London newspapers, The Universal News (1860-9), The Irish Liberator (1863-4) and The Irish News (1867). In so doing, it provides us with a window onto the complex of relationships which shaped the lives of the migrants: with each other, with their English fellow Catholics, with the Catholic Church and with the state. A central question for this press was how to reconcile the twin demands of faith and fatherland.