Peter Lang International Academic Publishers – förlag

Gardens provoke thought and engagement in ways that are often overlooked. This book shines new light on long-held assumptions about gardens and proposes novel ways in which we might reconsider them. The author challenges traditional views of how we experience gardens, how we might think of gardens as works of art, and how the everyday materials of gardens – plants, light, water, earth – may become artful. The author provides a detailed analysis of Tupare, a garden in New Zealand, and uses it as source material for his analysis of the philosophical issues art gardens raise. His new account of gardens highlights the polymodal, multi-sensual, and improvisatory character of the garden experience, it offers an ontological comparison between gardens and humans and other animals, and it explains how identical plants, and arrangements of plants, may be mundane when encountered beyond the garden but artful, meaningful, and aesthetically valuable when experienced within it.

«With astuteness and feeling, Stina Barchan captures the wonderful friendship between Hannah Höch and Kurt Schwitters and their artistic affinities. She deftly traces how each threaded together archival treasures and different forms of three-dimensional montage in their homes and workspaces to create living art in difficult times.»(Maud Lavin, Professor Emerita, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and author of Cut with the Kitchen Knife: The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch)«Focusing on Hannah Höch’s archive (rather than her artworks) and her post-Second World War activities (rather than the Dada period), Stina Barchan bypasses conventional approaches to the artist and compellingly argues that Höch’s holistic approach to art and life in this period was among the most fundamentally subversive and radical of her career.»(Adrian Sudhalter, author of Dadaglobe Reconstructed)The archive of the German artist Hannah Höch (1889–1978) has long been an important source of material for historians researching the interwar avant-garde and artists associated with Berlin Dada. This book explores Höch’s practices of organisation when assembling the documents in her house outside Berlin from 1939 until her death. Through extensive research, the author argues that Höch’s archive should be considered not just a collection of documents but a work in its own right, intimately connected with the artist’s daily life. Noting the importance of understanding the mechanisms of this work, the book suggests that Höch took charge of both preserving and exploring the possibilities of Dada long after the group had been officially dissolved.The file that Höch assembled on her friend, the artist Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948), plays an important part in the book, its content revealing how domestic habits infused both artists’ practices. Juxtaposing Höch’s archive and Schwitters’s Merzbau, the author argues for an interactive movement between the two that has fundamental implications for how we understand both artists’ oeuvres.

Budapest in the autumn of 1944 was a city full of terror, tension and conspiracies. Members of the SS and the Hungarian Arrow Cross movement roamed the streets looking for Jews and other opponents. The German and Hungarian Nazis planned to exterminate the last surviving large Jewish population in Nazi-occupied Europe. Ranged against them was a loosely knit network of neutral diplomats, lower-level church activists and a fragile but growing resistance movement. In an inferno of intrigue, a low-key civil war was taking shape between pro- and anti-Nazi Hungarians. Meanwhile, the Soviet army was approaching the city and the biggest urban battle since Stalingrad was imminent.That summer, a young Swedish diplomat named Raoul Wallenberg had arrived in the Hungarian capital, throwing himself into the dramas and intrigues raging in Hungary under the German occupation. Wallenberg soon became an important part of the networks desperately scrambling to save the Jewish population in Budapest. Through Wallenberg’s story, the reader follows the dramatic events that took place between the summer of 1944 and the beginning of 1945 and meets the many individuals and groups that were crucial to this unique and ultimately largely successful action.Dark Skies over Budapest is a true story of resistance and rescue and of one of the greatest humanitarian efforts of the Second World War. Casting new light on Raoul Wallenberg’s work, the book also tells the story of hitherto unknown but important people – who in many cases never received any recognition for their endeavours – and of actions that have remained undiscovered for many years. This book offers a comprehensive account of what really happened in Budapest in 1944–1945.

‘This book excellently advocates for considering intermediality not just as a hybrid form, but as a mode of critical thinking that emerges from versatile aesthetic strategies capable of intertwining multiple perspectives on complex issues and cultural connections in our world. A unique contribution to the field that maps out new and exciting areas of study.’ – Ágnes Pethő, Professor of Film Studies, Sapientia UniversityThis collection of essays asks what it means to think intermedially across art forms and media, continents and cultures, research fields and disciplines. Highlighting the intercultural and sociopolitical aspects of artistic creation, the contributors investigate intermedial practice as a potent means to interrogate constructions of identity, challenge power differentials, and unveil the ethical and aesthetic dimension of images. From the immersive visual attractions of the eighteenth-century eidophusikon to online drawing during the Covid-19 epidemic, the essays explore a diverse range of intermedial phenomena, including screen adaptation, the theatrical tableau, phototexts and cross-cultural translation. Casting new light on celebrated figures such as Louise Bourgeois, Marguerite Duras, Jacques Derrida, Orhan Pamuk and Yoko Tawada, as well as lesser-known artists, the book offers a unique perspective on intermediality as a vehicle for intercultural exchange and critical intervention.

This book chronicles Greece’s turbulent history during the first half of the twentieth century as it both shaped and was shaped by one of its most distinguished political figures, Evangelos Averoff-Tossizza. Written by his daughter, the book is part historical biography, part coming-of-age novel, part memoir. It draws extensively on Averoff’s prolific literary oeuvre and personal archives, while weaving seamlessly back and forth from past to present in a voice all its own. We follow the protagonist from his birth in 1908, when Greece was still a monarchy reeling from the losses of the Greco-Turkish War of 1897, to the late 1940s and the Civil War, by which time Averoff had become a seasoned, cosmopolitan politician. In the interim, as the protagonist contends with the vagaries of history and a captivating cast of supporting characters, we see him grow into a living, breathing person, endowed with the complexity and humour so often denied the one-dimensional figures of official history. A labour of love and a meditation on loss and transcendence, the book celebrates the raw pain, passion, ambition, love and, at times, sheer luck that shape who we are.

What is Cli-Fi?Climate change fiction is a new literary phenomenon that emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century in response to what may be society’s greatest challenge. Climate change is already part responsible for extreme weather events, flooding, desertification and sea level rise, leading to famine, the spread of disease, and population displacement. Cli-fi novels and films are typically set in the future, telling of disaster and its effect on humans, or they depict the present, beset by dilemmas, conflicts or conspiracies, and pointing to grave consequences. At their heart are ethical and political questions: will humankind rise to the challenge of acting collectively, in the interest of the future? What sacrifices will be necessary, and is a green dictatorship our only hope for survival as a species? Each chapter in this volume offers a way of reading a particular literary text or film, drawing attention to themes, formal features, reception, contribution to public debate, and issues for class discussion. Popular novels and films (Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capitol trilogy, Michael Crichton’s State of Fear, Ian McEwan’s Solar, and The Day after Tomorrow) are examined alongside lesser known writing (for instance J. G. Ballard’s «proto-climate change» novel The Drowned World and Antti Tuomainen’s Finnish thriller, The Healer), and films not generally thought of as being about climate change (Frozen and Take Shelter). The book, which includes an introduction tracing the emergence and influence of cli-fi, is directed towards general readers and film enthusiasts as well as teachers and students. Written in an accessible style, it fills the gap between academic studies and online blogs, offering a comprehensive look at this timely new genre.

Just once in a while, actors and performers change the whole way in which they approach the words in their scripts. Such a change happened in the early-to-middle years of the twentieth century; and the person behind it was "Dadie" Rylands. He was a man with an ear acutely attuned to the nuances of poetry, and he insisted that it was the ear and not the eye that mattered most in productions of Shakespeare. It was Rylands who taught an exceptional generation of Shakespearean actors how to speak. Gielgud, Olivier, Ashcroft, Redgrave – all owed their superb diction to him. Moreover, they adored him as a person.Amazingly for a man with such influence, Rylands was not ensconced in the established Theatre. He taught undergraduates at Cambridge and his own productions were with the amateur Marlowe Dramatic Society there. Nor was his life confined to dramatics and the academic world. He was a fringe member of the Bloomsbury set – firm friends with Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf and John Maynard Keynes, all regular correspondents. And his circle of notable friends stretched to a wider group of literati including Maurice Bowra and T. S. Eliot. Rylands died, aged 97, in 1999. We no longer have his irrepressible presence, but he left a palpable legacy in gramophone recordings of all Shakespeare’s plays in which he directed star-studded casts. Now that legacy is augmented by Peter Raina’s study, with its admirable selection of Rylands’ marvellously lucid radio talks (hitherto unpublished) and its sampling of the multitude of letters he wrote and received.

The coming of Islam marks a watershed in world history. A new movement arose from the sands of Arabia. It destroyed old empires and reshaped lands that had been the very cradle of civilisation in its own image. Debate on the origins of Islam is fierce. Far from being born in the full light of history, fundamental issues remain obscure and basic questions, like how the Arabian backwater of the ancient world generated an all-conquering state, often go unasked.This book offers a new and bold explanation for these momentous events. It investigates the growth of a community of believers around their prophet in an Arabian oasis before looking at how their interactions with surrounding nomads set in store truly transformative developments. These developments took on a deeper significance given wider changes witnessed in the late antique Near East, which created the context for the earthshattering events of the seventh century.At the Origins of Islam: Muḥammad, the Community of the Qurʾān, and the Transformation of the Bedouin World unites the near and far horizons of early Islam into one story. It embraces a broad range of sources and comparative evidence to set new courses in the study of Late Antiquity and early Islam.

The genre of crime fiction – so often rooted in the details of a place, time and subculture – enjoys significant international popularity and provides readers with a unique opportunity to explore the different cultural identities represented in its texts. This book offers a convincing rationale to illustrate how crime fiction in translation can be especially productive when examining the projection of a specific cultural identity to a new, foreign readership. Focusing on the intercultural transcreation of Australian cultural identity for a new francophone readership, the book offers a comprehensive and accessible theme-based analysis highlighting how the choice of translation strategy can significantly affect representations of cultural identity. The author asks important questions about the compromises that are necessary in finding creative solutions to translation problems and discovers some unexpected and surprising consequences of the decisions made for the new readers who believe they are gaining insights into another culture through reading crime fiction in translation.

The on-going debate on the legacies of modern European Orientalism has yet to fully consider its Italian context. Italian Orientalism is an interdisciplinary and transnational study both of the reception of European Orientalism in Risorgimento Italy, and of the development of an Italian Orientalist expression in the post-unification and fascist periods. The pan-European phenomenon is approached in its epistemological, aesthetic and political dimensions, while focusing on India and Indology as triggers of the so-called «Oriental Renaissance» and the Indo-European or Aryan idea. Fabrizio De Donno analyses the relationship between Orientalist scholarship and literary aesthetics in their related European and Italian contexts, mapping their interaction with linguistic, racial, religious and colonial thought. Paying particular attention to some of the major Italian intellectual, academic and literary figures of the time – from Giovanni Berchet, Giacomo Leopardi and Carlo Cattaneo, to Angelo De Gubernatis, Cesare Lombroso, Carlo Conti Rossini, Giosuè Carducci, Guido Gozzano and others – the book explores how Orientalism and Aryanism emerge as major if controversial discourses of modernity. They provide the rhetorical tools of identity politics which, it is argued, are central to notions of Italian nationhood, cosmopolitanism and Euromania.

This edited volume showcases essays revolving around diverse translation discourses and practices in China, Korea and Japan. Knowledge transfer and cultural exchanges have historically flourished in East Asia and translation functions as an important social, cultural and political tool to this day. The essays in this volume discuss a wide range of historical and contemporary subjects, each examining distinctive translational activities and foregrounding their cultural significance in their respective time and place. They give a voice to various translational traditions in East Asia, where regional particularities and interlinkages are in effect. The contributors bring together different areas of expertise, such as the history of translation, political activism and translation, literary translation, transcreation and the translation profession.

This book is the first to focus specifically on the highly original contribution to the field of Critical Pedagogy made by the sometimes «irritable» French philosopher Jacques Rancière. The book represents a significant addition to the growing body of work on Rancière as well as to the field of Critical Pedagogy. While introducing and contextualising Rancière for those unfamiliar with him, the book also develops an understanding of the singularity of his conception of pedagogy for those already acquainted with his work. Central to the book is Rancière’s vision of education as a «practice of equality» – a method grounded in an assumption of intellectual equality between students and teachers. Throughout the chapters of the book, the contemporary relevance of this vision is drawn out for educators in schools and universities, adult and popular educators, as well as for political activists. For anyone and everyone with an interest in teaching and learning, this book contains vital insights for the survival and development of education as a democratic, critical and emancipatory project.

In the first three decades of the twentieth century, artists, writers, musicians, and architects from both sides of the Atlantic interacted to create a modern style for Brazil. Their works shaped Brazilian national expression and self-definition for the twentieth century and into the present, with renewed relevance as Brazil plays an increasingly important role in global affairs. Artists such as Tarsila do Amaral and Roberto Burle-Marx are appearing for the first time in museums in the United States and Europe, along with the concept of antropofagia from the «Cannibal Manifesto», a theory of cultural autonomy and a model for fusion, hybridity, and assimilation. This book offers a cultural history and interpretation of Brazilian modernism in the arts and letters, exploring how modernism depends on transatlantic negotiation and develops through interchanges between Brazilians and Europeans.

This reader investigates the changing face of the notion of culture, tracing how it emerged in some of the most important and controversial phases of the lively Anglo-American debate on the subject from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, including the crucial years of Modernism. Shedding light on the cross-disciplinary approaches that characterized the debate and focusing especially on the legacy of anthropology, the volume presents a selection of some of the most distinguished voices from such assorted fields as literature, linguistics, anthropology, sociology and ethnology, whose interests and areas of enquiry apparently converged and partly overlapped. A selection of primary sources from leading figures such as Matthew Arnold, Bronisław Malinowski, Ruth Benedict, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Aldous Huxley provide an overview of the crucial issues raised on a wide array of topics: civilization, race, nation, progress, evolution, education, art, science, literature and politics. The primary sources are accompanied by critical essays that offer new insights into these classic texts. This reader will be of use to undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as to scholars exploring the cross-disciplinary or transatlantic nature of the study of culture.

«The Scandinavian Invasion offers an important and timely interrogation of Nordic Noir. Putting the concept under a microscope in a series of diverse chapters, it reveals that Nordic Noir is still teeming with vigorous life as it has emerged, proliferated and travelled across borders, becoming in the process a cultural phenomenon that has had significant implications for global television in the new millennium.»(Sue Turnbull, University of Wollongong)You might think you know what Nordic Noir is. Brutal crimes. Harsh landscapes. Brilliant but socially dysfunctional protagonists. Stylish knitwear. Yet, as a generic category and cultural phenomenon, Nordic Noir has always been far more complex. The story of its success owes as much to adaptation and evolution as it does to geographical migration or cosmopolitan curiosity.But how did this happen? What was it about the genre that struck such a chord with international audiences and readers? How did it build on previous trends and influences? And how has the category changed in order to survive in a cutthroat commercial landscape? Has it become less «Nordic »? Less «noir »? Has its proverbial moment in the sun passed?Featuring twelve original chapters and an editorial introduction, The Scandinavian Invasion brings together leading media and literature scholars from the UK, Denmark and Australia to critically examine how the phenomenon took shape and what we can learn from it. By exploring the cultural, aesthetic and industrial forces that propelled Nordic Noir across borders, the book provides a kaleidoscopic look at a disruptive cultural phenomenon in transition.Nordic Noir is dead. Long live Nordic Noir!

Self-portraiture is a singular form within the broad field of first-person film and video – not so much an account of the filmmaker’s intimate life as a representation of the artist at a given instant. With deep roots in the Western tradition of painting and literature, self-portraiture in the moving image can be considered to be a hybrid practice, not fitting into the traditional definition of documentary or fiction, as it breaks the boundaries of both genres.The investigative and self-reflexive stance of the self-portrait raises questions about intimacy, the appearance and corporeality of the subject and, more importantly, the medium itself. Today the understanding and definition of this practice is being challenged by the emergence of new forms of self-portraiture brought about by digital media, such as the selfie phenomenon. Against this backdrop, this book reassesses the significance of the self-portrait in the moving image and new media by exploring a varied and international body of works.

The Picture Postcard, a new window into Edwardian Ireland uses the material culture of the picture postcard as a lens through which to examine life on the island of Ireland during the Edwardian period (1902-10). Picture postcards became extremely popular worldwide at the start of the twentieth century, when literally hundreds of billions of them were produced and sold.This book draws on postcard collections to access the everyday lives of people who rarely make it into conventional historical narratives, and to make connections in an Irish context between their «small histories» and broader, well-studied discourses such as identity, nationalism, empire, modernity, emigration, tourism and the roles of women.

This book breaks new ground in drawing on evolutionary psychology in support of advocacy for music education, and the presentation of innovative musical pedagogy. The book adopts the perspective that musical experience is the birthright of all human beings through the decisive role it played in the evolution of our species, the traces of which we carry in our genes. The author draws on scientific developments in acoustics, neuroscience, linguistics, archaeology and anthropology to examine theories that have emerged powerfully during the last twenty years and which argue for the significance of the practice of music as foundational to human culture. This position is examined in parallel with research into how children learn musically, and the role that creative decision making plays in this. A series of strategies is presented that explores collective creativity which draws on vocalisation, the use of gesture, and instinctive responses to harmony to develop musical imagination.

This book follows the life and work of Thomas Chalmers (1780–1847) from his childhood in Anstruther to the end of his ministerial career in Glasgow in 1823. He became a theologian, minister and Scottish reformer and is best remembered for his involvement in the Disruption of 1843. Following Chalmers’ career up to the end of his Glasgow period offers a range of valuable insights into the human, spiritual and theological dimensions of a man who was once described by Thomas Carlyle as «the chief Scotsman of his age». It has been decades since Chalmers and his work have received any notable scholarly attention and this book attempts to unravel his complicated nature by pursuing a forensic investigation into his communitarian ideology and attitude towards social reform. New facts have come to light, not least the apparent reversion of Chalmers’ conversion, recognised and discussed here for the first time, allowing the reader to form a more accurate picture of his legacy within Scottish religious history. As the author meticulously unravels his subject’s disturbing psychological mindset, he provides a compelling critique of the Church of Scotland and examines the role of John Bunyan’s Mr Christian as Chalmers’ model and mentor.

Comme l’a noté le philosophe Jacques Derrida, l’enregistrement des voix a été l’un des évènements marquants du siècle passé. Le sociolinguiste William Labov s’est intéressé aux motivations sociales des variations phonologiques, mais non pas à la voix en tant que telle. Les recherches effectuées sur la texture et la qualité de la voix ou la relation entre la voix et l’affect sont beaucoup plus rares. Le sujet est mentionné dans les discussions sur la musique, le doublage, le théâtre et la traduction, sans toutefois être analysé en profondeur. Les articles sur la voix correspondent en outre à un développement relativement récent dans les domaines de la psycholinguistique et de la psychoacoustique, lié à un regain d’intérêt pour les études sur l’émotion de manière générale. Le présent recueil d’articles offre une perspective pluridisciplinaire au carrefour entre la sociolinguistique, la phonologie et les études cinématographiques.

The entry of the capital relation into its epoch of structural crisis forms the basis for the development of the author’s conception of revolutionary agency. Drawing on the work and achievements of both Marx and Hungarian socialist thinker István Mészáros, May relates the emergence and deepening of the structural crisis to the decline of trade unionism as the traditional and universal form of organization deployed economistically by workers against capital. In the relationship between the «defensively-structured», universal, trade union form and the growing contradictions of the global capitalist system, May seeks to unearth the possibility of a higher form of agency which is more adequately adapted to address the immediate and long-term objectives facing millions of people today worldwide in the age of capital’s «destructive self-reproduction». Looking back in order to look forward, he also subjects the form of agency within the Russian Revolution to a critique which relates it directly to the conditions prevailing in Russia at the time. In so doing, he questions its supposed validity as a form of revolutionary agency for the struggle to put an end to the global capitalist system today.

This anthology is a collection of four contemporary Chinese plays by the playwright Wan Fang, presented in the original Chinese and in English translation. Since the 1990s, modern Chinese drama has experienced a revival, and these plays are representative of the kind of theatre which audiences in China now enjoy. The time is ripe for them to be staged internationally through the medium of translation. This book provides Chinese and English versions consecutively, to enable the plays to be used for study or performance. The volume also offers an introduction to the development of modern Chinese drama over the twentieth century, as a background to the plays included here. In addition, Wan Fang’s own introduction to the writing of plays, and these plays in particular, gives us insights into the mechanisms of writing and staging in a twenty-first-century Chinese context.

«This is a rich, suggestive, and long overdue study of a life cut tragically short, and an insightful study of the intellectual intersections of multiple disciplines in the 1880s. Stainthorp achieves a powerful recalibration of Naden’s life and career, and promises to inspire a slew of further studies on this fascinating figure. Equally, it yields an important case study on the issue of interdisciplinarity at a critical period in its history, and a specific and particularly ambitious approach to the longheld problem of achieving ‘unity in diversity’.» (Adelene Buckland, Women: A Cultural Review, 31:3)«It offers a deft mixture of archival research, historicism, and close reading, introduces readers to previously unknown writing by Naden, carefully reconstructs the details of late-Victorian science education, and provides a useful overview of late-Victorian philosophical debates.» (Monique R. Morgan, Victorian Studies 64:3)«This book represents a much-needed, full-length study of the brilliant intellectual trail Constance Naden blazed as a student and scholar: of the many facets of her brilliant career, and of her expansive synthetic mode of thinking. Naden’s career interlaced so many issues and disciplines in such a fascinating way that, in this timely work, she acts as a case study for thinking about the value and practice of interdisciplinarity itself. This is an astute, lucid and illuminating analysis.» (Marion Thain, Professor of Literature and Culture, King’s College London)«Stainthorp’s study of Constance Naden both reveals and revels in the interdependence of disciplines that was her subject’s tragically short-lived contribution to nineteenth-century thought. In doing so she thoughtfully synthesizes the variant parts of Naden’s intellectual life. The result is a book of insightful combinations and cross-readings which illuminate the unity in diversity that was Naden’s driving force.» (Martin Willis, Professor of English Literature, Cardiff University and editor of the Journal of Literature and Science)«This is an important, meticulously researched book. Stainthorp is marvellously alert to Naden’s desire to find unity in diversity in her writing. She puts Naden’s poetry, prose and unpublished notebooks to work and the result is a ground-breaking analysis of Naden’s synthetic thinking. A boon to scholars working on Naden.» (Ana Parejo Vadillo, Reader in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, Birkbeck College, University of London) Constance Naden (1858–1889) is a unique voice in Victorian literature and science. This book, the first full-length critical account of her life and works, brings into focus the reciprocal nature of Naden’s poetry, philosophical essays and scientific studies. The development of Naden’s thinking is explored in detail, with newly discovered unpublished poems and notes from her adolescence shedding important light upon this progression.Close readings of Naden’s wide-ranging corpus of poetry and prose trace her commitment to an interdisciplinary world-scheme that sought unity in diversity. This book demonstrates how a rigorous scientific education, a thorough engagement with poetry and philosophy of the long nineteenth century, an involvement with the Victorian radical atheist movement, and a comic sensibility each shaped Naden’s intellectual achievements. Naden sought to show how the light of reason is made even brighter by the spark of poetic creation and how the imagination is as much a tool of the scientist and the philosopher as the artist.Taking a comprehensive approach to this complex and overlooked figure of the Victorian period, Stainthorp demonstrates how Naden’s texts provide a new and important vantage point from which to consider synthetic thinking as a productive and creative force within nineteenth-century intellectual culture.This book was the winner of the 2017 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Nineteenth-Century Studies.

This book introduces the works of a German Jewish female author and provides a detailed analysis of the early twentieth century as she witnessed it. Although a prolific writer and leader in the women’s movement, Clementine Krämer (1873–1942) is relatively unknown today. Krämer’s life and works offer a fascinating insight into a challenging period for this community, as she experienced at first hand moments of enormous significance for Germany’s history: the First World War, the German Revolution of 1918, the polarisation of German political life andthe growth of the far right, and the rise to power of the National Socialists in the 1930s. Rather than focusing on one period, this book examines the full range of Krämer’s writings to uncover continuities and changes over her lifetime.The book explores the following questions: how did Krämer understand herself and her role in light of her German Jewish identity? How did she challenge societal expectations for women and what limits did she perceive? How did she respond to the violence facing German Jews during this time? This important contribution to the scholarship reveals a fresh perspective on this tumultuous time in German history.

Over the centuries, drama has been an influential and imaginative medium for presenting, analysing and offering ways of resolving real or fictional battles. This volume provides readers with a timely study of inter-generational conflicts and crises as seen through the eyes of male and female British and Irish playwrights from the medieval period to the twenty-first century. The contributions suggest that at the heart of inter-generational discord lies various crises between (the) age(d) and youth or, more generally, the idea of what is «old» and «new». The interaction and co-existence of age and youth in their embodied, symbolic or conceptual forms is the topic of this volume. The collection is built around the words «age(d)»/«young», which denote both the biological age of the characters and the more conceptual potential of these terms. Ultimately, the contributors to this collection of essays analyse not only the idea of inter-generationality within selected dramatic works but also inter-generational conflicts seen in clashes of cultures, artistic visions, concepts and aesthetic idea(l)s.

The sesquicentenary of the Great Irish Famine saw the emergence of seminal, often revisionist, scholarship addressing the impact of the catastrophe on Ireland’s economy (including its relations with Britain) and investigating topics such as the suffering of the rural classes, landlord and tenant relations, Poor Laws and relief operations. The Great Irish Famine and Social Class represents a significant new stage in Irish Famine scholarship, adopting a broader interdisciplinary approach that includes ground-breaking demographical, economic, cultural and literary research on poverty, poor relief and class relations during one of Europe’s most devastating food crises. The volume incorporates a comparative European framework, as well as exploring the issue of class in relation to the British and North American Famine diaspora.

QUEER(ING) GENDER IN ITALIAN WOMEN’S WRITING is the first study of its kind to systematically use queer theory as a theoretical framework of analysis of Italian women’s writing. Focusing especially on the writers Dacia Maraini, Goliarda Sapienza and Elsa Morante, and delimiting the field of enquiry to works written in the 1970s and 1980s, the book positions its chosen texts in their historical and cultural backdrop and illustrates the ways in which the authors responded in highly original ways to the debates of the day in matters of gender and sexuality, bringing them close to current «queer» formulations. Judith Butler is a key interlocutor here, as in the few existing critical contributions offering a «queer» reading of texts from the Italian literary tradition, but rather than rely predominantly on her theorisation of the performative quality of gender, this book incorporates additional concepts that are key to Butler’s notion of queer, such as «parody», «citationality», «drag» and «undoing gender». It further seeks to enrich existing critical debates on Italian women’s writing, and on Maraini, Sapienza and Morante in particular, by considering them in relation to other influential queer theorists – including Teresa de Lauretis, Jack Halberstam, Lee Edelman, Sara Ahmed and (the author’s queer reading of) Julia Kristeva – in the belief that the plurality intrinsic to the formulation of «queer» is crucial for its potential as a tool for critical inquiry.This book was the Joint Winner of the 2017 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Modern Italian Studies.