Durham Modern Languages Series – serie

Provides students with a clear narrative overview of the period which will enable them to form critical opinions. Introduces students to the historical controversies of the period and communicates the results of recent specialist studies to a student readership in an easily understood manner. An accessible, clearly written account accompanied by useful bibliography, chronology, tables and maps, and written by an author teaching in the field.

Since its publication in 1962, Carlos Fuentes' novel, Aura, remains not merely an object of academic interest but a continuous source of controversy in Mexico. It was the explosive combination of sex and religion that incensed the Ministro de Hacienda, Salvador Abascal, and linked Aura to the recent polemical Mexican film El crimen del Padre Amaro. Aura is preoccupied with the place and persistence of the sacred in modern Mexico rather than simply the secret abuses of institutional Catholicism. This critical edition of the work is accompanied by an introduction and notes on the text.

Odoyevsky’s cycle of short stories, Pyostryye skazki (1833), is a transitional work between his writings of the 1820s (in particular his contributions to Mnemozina, 1824–5) and his mature period which culminated in Russkiye nochi (1844). Pyostryye skazki thus represents a romantic amalgam of elements drawn from fairy-tale and folklore, the fantastic and the society tale, serving didactic, satirical and whimsical purposes. The narration supposedly comes from an authorial alter ego, one Iriney Modestovich Gomozeyko, who occupies a place in Russian literature of the 1830s alongside Pushkin’s Ivan Petrovich Belkin and Gogol’s Rudyy Pan’ko. While individual stories from the cycle reappeared during the Soviet revival of interest in Odoyevsky, this edition, which includes an introduction, notes and a short bibliography, was the first integral (re)publication since 1833 of one of the basic texts of Russian Romanticism.

The humanist Hermann Schotten, or Hermannus Schottennius Hessus (c. 1503–1546), student, schoolmaster, and university lecturer in Cologne, was the author of a number of works on humanist pedagogy. His Confabulationes tironum litterariorum of 1525, a collection of Latin dialogues designed to help schoolboys master Classical Latin conversation, was written in admiring imitation of the colloquies of Erasmus. But Schotten had his own distinctive style: a natural ear for dialogue, and a sympathetic understanding of the schoolboy world. As a result, he produced one of the liveliest pedagogical works of the century and a vivid and valuable cultural document of life in the early modern metropolis of Cologne. This critical edition of the Confabulationes, the first since the sixteenth century, makes this one-time best-seller available and comprehensible to modern readers. It presents the Latin text, a full English translation, and extensive notes on the language and on Schotten’s many literary and cultural allusions, accompanied by a detailed investigation of the early printing history of the collection.

This study, a companion to Peter Macardle’s edition of the Confabulationes, examines the ways in which the colloquies relate to their Cologne background, to the major contemporary colloquy collections (particularly Erasmus’s Colloquia and Mosellanus’s Paedologia), and to the humanist renewal of Classical Latin. It also looks in detail at the documentary traces of Schotten’s career, and of his networks of friendship and patronage, and tries to understand how he fitted into the structures of a university which has often been (wrongly) understood as hostile to humanism. Based on primary archival material, this is the only full-length study of this underrated German humanist’s life and work.

The book provides a ‘flâneur’s eye view’ of Parisian life in the first half of the nineteenth century: dress, cafés and restaurants, but also shops and passages, the omnibus, bals publics and carnival. The author provides general conclusions about the private and public spheres in ‘le vieux Paris’. Like the flâneur, the author concentrates less on factual information for its own sake – which may be found in the secondary works cited in the text and footnotes – than on the ‘semiological’ or anthropological significance of the cultural forms in question. Links are drawn between cultural institutions and class relations in pre-1850 Paris, with particular emphasis on cultural inequality, on the persistence of cross-class contacts, and the growing differences between classes as reflected in behaviour and attitudes.

This volume offers a representative yet concise selection of the work of the seventeenth-century poets, Malherbe, de Viau and Saint-Amant. It also provides supporting documentation to bring out the unique literary personality of each, and to help make their poetry as accessible as possible to a modern reader. It is designed to fill the gap between scholarly complete editions and more general anthologies which are rarely able to devote much space to any one author. The present volume was prompted by the success that this poetry enjoyed with readers who were relative newcomers to French verse.

This volume of essays is the first to be dedicated to the subject of intertextuality in modern Arabic literature. Beginning with a general overview of the topic by Roger Allen, it brings together essays on a range of writers from all parts of the Arab world, including, among others, Edwar al-Kharrat, Sa'd Allah Wannus, Najib Mahfuz, Rabi' Jabir, Salim Matar and the recently deceased Sudanese writer al-Tayyib Salih, whose seminal work Season of Migration to the North heralded a new phase in the modern Arabic literary tradition. The volume, which also includes two essays on aspects of intertextuality in Gulf literature, also discusses transformations of popular medieval literature such as the Alf Layla wa-Layla (the Thousand and One Nights) in modern Arabic literature.

Published in Rouen in 1767 and reprinted two years later, Voltaire’s Candide en Dannemarc, ou l’optimisme des honnêtes gens wraps up the adventures of Candide. Turning his back on both Voltairean satire and scepticism, the novelist proposes a moralistic fable – the focal point of which is a rehabilitation of Leibniz’s Theory of Optimism. The main body of the novel tells the story of Candide and his new wife, the noble Zénoïde, in their sumptuous Copenhagen townhouse. Before achieving this happy state, however, the couple endures various trials and tribulations reminiscent of the newly minted gothic genre. Candide en Dannemarc also features a satirical portrait of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

This volume analyses major French plays of the 1830s, focusing on their theatricality, and on the ways in which they expose the workings of the theatre rather than conceal them. Through an examination of performance within these plays, the study posits that the stage is a privileged site of demonstration, a literal ‘proving ground’ that lends a physical reality to abstract values announced in the text and shared or questioned by the audience. Negotiating between the literary study of drama and performance theory, this work breaks new ground in nineteenth-century theatre scholarship while proposing a fresh direction in the study of text and performance. The limits of performance ‘challenges conventional wisdom’, offering ‘a novel take on the mal du siècle, that thematic hardy perennial of French Romanticism and the nineteenth century in general’, combined with ‘eminently readable and, therefore, compelling’ analysis of plays – ‘a thought-provoking addition to work in the field’ (Glyn Hambrook, Modern and Contemporary France, November 2008).

Over the course of a career spanning five decades, Jane Taylor has shown a commitment to the rehabilitation of the more neglected aspects of later medieval French literature. This volume brings together original contributions from scholars who have worked alongside Taylor and directly or indirectly benefitted from her example. The chapters demonstrate their authors’ link to this legacy, and concomitantly underline the vibrancy and breadth of approach which is the hallmark of current later medieval studies. The essays in the collection centre on a number of key issues in the field: notions of literary self-consciousness and what it means to come after an avatar; issues of intertextuality and the appeal to past models in the creation of a new literary aesthetic (or a new literary criticism); and interdisciplinary questions of translation, reworking, and continuation. Essays in later medieval French literature seeks not only to illustrate the buoyant state of later medieval French literary studies but also, in so doing, to show how in broader terms responding to the legacy of an illustrious predecessor has not pejorative but positive consequences.

The Republic of Letters emerged during the seventeenth century as a concept to describe the interaction between scholars across Europe and beyond. While the concept was an imaginary one, it was firmly grounded in a reality of close circles of interaction between intellectuals, which had always existed but which was now endowed with a renewed sense of collaboration and participation within this community without barriers of statehood or creed. These fifteen essays explore differing aspects of collaboration and interdisciplinarity in the context of the radical change in mindset that the emergence of the Republic of Letters had fostered. Essays deal with French and English theatre, travel writing, the identity of the woman writer, the nature and function of gossip, scholarly interaction, and political and theological ideologies. The concluding essay provides a synthesis of the nature of seventeenth-century scholarship. The volume offers new insights into the mechanisms and workings of the Republic of Letters and charters the transition of scholarly pursuit being classified, even by some scholars themselves, as a solitary and sometimes pedantic pursuit to the notion of a network of ideas and interchange. This self-identification with a transnational league which knew no limits of geography, resources, gender or class marks a radical transition in the history of ideas and was to have far-reaching consequences, solidly preparing the way for the Enlightenment.

The Lettre sur la comédie de l'Imposteur is the only work of any length which does full justice to comedy in the 17th century as a serious dramatic form. It is an important document in its own right and because it is inseparable from the historical context of Molière's Le Tartuffe ou l'Imposteur and the circumstances which influenced its development.

Saramago’s labyrinths is the first book-length study to focus on the relationship between form and the content in Saramago’s writing, paying particular attention to Ensaio sobre a Cegueira (Blindness) and Todos os Nomes (All the Names). Atkin provides a close textual analysis of Blindness and All the Names, and suggests that the labyrinth pervades Saramago’s work, both in the form of the text, and as a literary and philosophical trope. She makes clear connections between these novels and Saramago’s other literary works, and identifies ways in which Saramago causes the reader to return to and consider the philosophical, epistemological and ethical concerns and dilemmas that are recurrent in his literary output. Atkin’s jargon-free approach to Saramago’s complex ideas, and her thorough understanding of Portuguese history, culture and society, make this an accessible yet challenging guide to Saramago’s fiction, for undergraduate and postgraduate students and scholars with or without prior knowledge of the Portuguese context.

The Second World War and the German Occupation remain a major focal point in French culture and society, with new and sometimes controversial titles published every year – Irène Némirovsky’s Suite française and Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes, both rapidly translated into English, offer just two examples of this significant phenomenon. Gathering within one volume studies of genres, visual cultures, chronology, narrative theory, and a wealth of narratives in fiction and film, Framing narratives of the Second World War and occupation in France 1939-2009 brings together an internationally distinguished group of contributors and offers an authoritative overview of criticism on war and occupation narratives in French, a redefinition of the canon of texts and films to be studied and a vibrant demonstration of the richness of the work in this area. Edited by two leading specialists, the book includes contributions by William Cloonan, Richard J Golsan, Leah Hewitt, Colin Nettelbeck and Gisèle Sapiro.

An innovative, interdisciplinary, incisive scholarly study remapping and redefining domains and dynamics of modernism, EccentriCities: Writing in the margins of modernism critically considers how geo-historically distant and disparate urban sites, concentrating Russian and Luso-Brazilian cultural dialogue and definition, give rise to peculiarly parallel anachronistic and alternative fictional forms. While comparatively reframing these literary traditions through an extensive survey of Russian and Brazilian literature, cartography, urban design and development, foregrounding innovative close readings of works by Gogol, Dostoevsky, Bely, Almeida, Machado de Assis, Lima Barreto, Mário de Andrade, the book also redefines new constellations (eccentric, concentric, ex-centric) for understanding geo-cultural and generic dimensions of modernist and post-modern literature and theory.

This book gives a picture of a year's activities at the Théâtre des Variétés. It includes an account of the financial side of the Theatre and impressions of the principal actors and actresses, as well as a month-by-month overview of what was actually performed.

Early in the twentieth century, Russia was experiencing a decadent period of cultural degeneration just as science was developing ways to identify medical conditions which supposedly reflected the health of the entire nation. Leonid Andreev, the leading literary figure of his time, stepped into the breach of this scientific discourse with literary works about degenerates. The spirited social debates on mental illness, morality and sexual deviance which resulted from these works became part of the ongoing battle over the definition and depiction of the irrational, complicated by Andreev’s own publicised bouts with neurasthenia. This book examines the concept of pathology in Russia, the influence of European medical discourse, the development of Russian psychiatry, and the role that it had in popular culture, by investigating the life and works of Andreev. It engages the emergence of psychiatry and the role that art played in the development of this objective science.