Interkulturelle Begegnungen: Studien Zum Literatur- Und Kulturtransfer – serie

During the English Restoration, London unlicensed health carers printed handbills as the easiest way to advertise their medical practices. In order to increase our awareness of irregular medical practitioners as a cultural phenomenon and examine their language, two collections of handbills have been transcribed. The study analyses the lexicon used to address readers, the traits of orality in written communication as well as the places where proprietary medicines were sold. Furthermore it looks closely at the visual impact of some handbills and the role of anti-quack satire at the end of the seventeenth century.

Italy often suffers from its cultural heritage. Certain themes have passed into stereotype and popular consumption, while others have been overlooked. This volume discusses teaching choices and topics on the implementation of a US study abroad business programme in Italy. The authors first have a look at business questions, then at culture through a chapter on the fashion industry. The final section focuses on methods in teaching Italian culture, language, history, and intercultural communication. This volume highlights non-traditional aspects of Italian culture, and focuses on the intercultural dimension of teaching and learning for study abroad students. The points of view found herein should promote a more contextualized and contemporary view of what studying Italy can be about.

The discourse on Physiognomy had an important influence and impact on European theatrical culture at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. The book discusses the debate about the scientific nature of Physiognomy. Starting from the concept that Physiognomy refers to particular signs on the face, it looks for evidence of a knowledge and awareness of this pseudo-scientific theory. The author researches among various acting manuals and theatrical works in English, German, French and Italian. She points out that Physiognomy makes an appearance in many different guises. In the so-called «physiognomical portraits», for instance, where we find animated discussions on the passions to be displayed, and also direct references to Johann Caspar Lavater and his science.

Klaus Mann (1906-1949) was a prolific author who engaged in constantly different fields, from journalism to novels, plays and autobiographies. An exile in the United States, he had to reinvent himself as an Anglophone author.This publication sets out to present a new portrait of Klaus Mann as a cultural mediator between Europe and America, starting from his own definition of himself as an American author of European tradition and cosmopolitan mentality. It primarily focuses on his lesser-known and unpublished works, including his second attempt at an exile journal, Decision, his American and German autobiographies, The Turning Point and Der Wendepunkt, and his attempts at incorporating American characters and plots into his fiction.

Guido Cavalcanti, the first thirteenth-century author to gain the reputation of an auctoritas while still alive, has been handed down by literary tradition mainly for his Canzone Donna me prega, a dense philosophical treatise about love. This book looks at the Rime from the perspective of the ‘minor’ poems, in which Cavalcanti demonstrates his theoretical conclusion by staging the venture of a lover inescapably doomed. Mired in his sensations, the lover exemplifies an existence that falls short of the faculty of imagination, therefore of the vision of God. The terrestrial perfection available to humans also affects language. The Voices of the Body are the nonverbal signs that Cavalcanti employs to articulate a grammar that is delimited by the lover's sensorial capacities. Federica Anichini focuses on two corporeal modes of speaking, spirits and tears. Her investigation of Cavalcanti’s lines is grounded in the pages of the most popular medical handbook of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Avicenna’s Liber Canonis, as well as in the linguistic theories of the Modistae. This study outlines Guido Cavalcanti as the forger of a special grammar that stands as a revolutionary invention in the field of poetic language.