Books published by Verlag Peter Lang

This is the first book-length account of Joseph Conrad¿s reception in Germany, a virtually unresearched area of Conrad studies. It demonstrates that Conrad was read and used by his German readers as a cosmopolitan literary and moral voice against the prevailing nationalism of Germany in the ¿dark times¿ of the 1930s and 1940s, when their own voices were being silenced. Challenging the longstanding assumption that Germany remained largely indifferent to his works, this book demonstrates that, particularly after the translation of the complete fiction commencing in the 1920s, Conrad¿s works achieved near cult status in Germany. On the basis of diaries and letters, contemporary reviews and essays, unpublished archival material as well as novels and films, the author illuminates the range and importance of Conrad¿s presence as a powerful liberating imagination within twentieth-century German culture. Championed by Thomas Mann, lauded by Hermann Hesse, and decried as ¿Conrad the Jew¿ by the Nazis, Conrad has remained an influential presence in post-war German culture. The study offers a completely fresh perspective on Conrad¿s works and speaks eloquently for the importance of recognizing the way trans-national literary cultural relations have helped to shape European cultural history.

This volume brings together a collection of essays focusing on selected aspects of inter- and multidisciplinarity in contemporary Austrian culture. These include the connections between literature and the media, literature and the visual arts, literature and travel, and the visual arts and public space. The individual contributions deal with central figures in the Austrian arts, including Thomas Bernhard, Franzobel, Elfriede Jelinek, Peter Handke, Peter Turrini and Doron Rabinovici, as well as collective ventures such as Walter Grond¿s Odysseus project and the museum in progress. They analyse the impact of connections between disciplines on the cultural landscape in contemporary Austria, as well as examining the limits of such interaction between disciplines.

This book brings together authors working on some of the most significant poverty and welfare research projects on the European stage. The contributions focus broadly on the experience of being poor in England, Scotland, Ireland and Germany between 1800 and the 1940s, a theme that has received inadequate attention in the European historiography thus far. The chapters are organised into three thematic sections. The first deals with the experience of being poor: networks, migration and survival strategies; the second with confinement, discipline, surveillance and classification: paths to the welfare state; and the third with the symbolism of poverty.

This study provides a wide-ranging critique of contemporary anti-humanist postcolonial theory. By charting a genealogy of the complicity of humanism and oppression in the New World, this analysis highlights the process of consolidation of a racialised, autonomous and rational modern subject as well as the existence of a fractured modernity. Situating contemporary Derridean critiques of humanism within the Hegelian tradition, this work demonstrates that post-modern anti-essentialism does not succeed in escaping totalisation. Furthermore, it contextualises the fractured modernity of the Western humanist tradition in relation to the works of key twentieth-century thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Hannah Arendt and Emmanuel Levinas, arguing that these authors problematise the common reduction of humanism to a totalising outlook, due to their revelation of the gaps and fissures prevalent in the modern. Combining insights drawn from Fanon¿s emphasis on lived experience, Arendt¿s enlarged mentality and Levinas¿s non-ontological transcendence, this study aims to deconstruct the complicity between humanism and colonialism.

The nature of religion on the domestic front in Britain during the Second World War has, hitherto, been relatively unexplored. This study focuses on Birmingham and describes wartime popular religion, primarily as recounted in oral testimony. The difference the War made to people¿s faith, and the consolation wrought by prayer and a religious outlook are explored, as are the religious language and concepts utilised by the wartime popular media of cinema and wireless. Clerical rhetoric about the War and concerns to spiritualise the war effort are dealt with by an analysis of locally published sources, especially parish magazines and other religious ephemera, which set the War on the spiritual as much as the military plane. A final section of the study is devoted to measuring the extent of the influence of the churches in the creation of a vision for post-war Britain and Birmingham.