Oxford Modern Languages and Literature Monographs – serie

Dante's Masterplot and Alternative Narratives in the 'Commedia' questions the familiar narrative arc at play in the writings of Dante Alighieri and opens his masterpiece to three alternative models that resist it. Dante's masterplot is the teleological trajectory by which the poet subordinates the past to the authority of a new experience. The book analyses the masterplot's workings in Dante's text and its role in the interpretation of the poem, and it documents its overwhelming success in influencing readings of the Commedia over the centuries. The volume then explores three competing narrative models that resist and counter its monopoly which are enacted by paradoxes, alternative endings and parallel lives, and the future. By focusing on these non-linear modes of storytelling and testing the limits of linear narration, the book questions critical paradigms in the scholarship of the Commedia that favour a single normative master truth, exposes their problematic authoritarian implications, and highlights the manifold poetic, theological, and ethical tensions that are often neglected due to the masterplot's influence. The new picture of a vulnerable author and open-ended text that emerges from this study thus doubles as a metacritical reflection on the state of the field. The book's impassioned argument is that, alongside established notions of his trademark plurality of linguistic registers and styles, Dante's narrative pluralism can, and should, come to play a key role in contemporary and future readings of the Commedia.

This book presents the first sustained analysis of the reception of the Aristotelian golden mean and related ideas of moderation in the literature and thought of early modern Spain (1500-1700). It explores the Golden-Age understanding of Aristotle's doctrine as a prolegomenon to literary study, and its allegorical reformulation in the myths of Icarus and Phaethon, before arguing that scrutiny of how the mean and the related concept of ethical moderation are treated by early modern authors represents a vital but underexploited tool for literary analysis. Particular attention is paid to detailed case studies of works by three canonical authors--Garcilaso, Calderón, Gracián--demonstrating the value of the mean as a locus of critical attention, as analysis of its presentation allows several long-standing disputes in the scholarship on these authors to be newly resolved.

This is the first study of Thomas Mann's landmark German modernist novel Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain, 1924) that takes as its starting point the interest in Mann's book shown by non-academic readers. It is also a case study in a cluster of issues central to the interrelated fields of transnational German studies, global modernism studies, comparative literature, and reception theory: it addresses the global circulation of German modernism, popular afterlives of a canonical work, access to cultural participation, relationship between so-called 'high-brow' and 'low-brow' culture, and the limitations of traditional academic reading practices. The study intervenes in these discussions by developing a critical practice termed 'closer reading' and positioning it within the framework of world literature studies.Mann's Magic Mountain centres around nine comparative readings of five novels, three films, and one short story conceived as responses to The Magic Mountain. These works provide access to distinct readings of Mann's text on three levels: they function as records of their authors' reading of Mann, provide insights into broader culturally and historically specific interpretations of the novel, and feature portrayals of fictional readers of The Magic Mountain. These nine case studies are contextualized, complemented, enhanced, and expanded through references to hundreds of other diverse sources that testify to a lively engagement with The Magic Mountain outside of academic scholarship, including journalistic reviews, discussions on internet fora and blogs, personal essays and memoirs, Mann's fan mail and his replies to it, publishing advertisements, and marketing brochures from Davos, where the novel is set.

Portugal was not always the best place for poets in the sixteenth century. Against the backdrop of an expanding empire, the country's annexation by Spain in 1580, and ongoing religious controversy, poets struggled to articulate their worth to rulers and patrons. This did not prevent them, however, from persisting in their craft. Indeed, many of their works reflected precisely on the question of what poetry could do and what, ultimately, its value was. The answers that poets like Luís de Camões, Francisco de Sá de Miranda, António Ferreira, and Diogo Bernardes offered to these questions, and which are explored in this book, ranged from lofty ideals to the more practical concerns of making ends meet when one depended on the whims of the powerful. This volume articulates a 'pragmatics of poetry' that combines literary analysis and book history with methods from sociology (network analysis, sociology of professions, valuation studies) to explore how poets thought about themselves and negotiated the value of their verse in the court, with patrons, or in the marketplace for books. It reveals how poets compared their work to that of lawyers and doctors and tried to set themselves apart as a special group of professionals. It shows how they threatened their patrons as well as flattered them and tried to turn their poetry from a gift into something like a commodity or service that had to be paid for. While poets set out to write in the most ambitious genres and to better their European rivals, they sometimes refused to spend months composing an epic without the prospect of reward. Their books of verse, when printed, were framed as linguistic propaganda as well as objects of material and aesthetic worth at a time when many said that non-devotional poetry was a sinful waste of time. This is a book about the various ways in which poets, metaphorically and more literally, tried to turn poetry and the paper it was written on into gold.

The book investigates the notion of ecstasy in Italian culture and literature from the country's unification in 1861 to its entry into World War I in 1915. Combining historical and cultural investigation with literary analysis, it traces the circulation and spreading of ecstatic phenomena in a variety of different discourses, specifically, those related to religion, science, and 'occulture', and the ways in which they were portrayed by Italian writers of the period.Focusing on mystical ecstasies, magnetic ecstasies, mediumistic trances, hypnotic trances, and hysterical extases, it shows how ecstatic subjects were regarded as abnormal, disorderly individuals in need to be overseen, governed, or repressed. It also discusses how some of the most prominent authors of Italian post-unification literature, namely Matilde Serao, Antonio Fogazzaro, Luigi Capuana, and Gabriele D'Annunzio, delivered literary depictions of ecstasy, finding in the latter a fundamental trope to explore the disorderly, inner tensions of the self, anticipating Freud's theorisations of the unconscious and the death drive.Ultimately, the book proposes the existence of an 'ecstatic Italy' between 1861 and 1915, providing a new theoretical frame to analyse Italian modernity in a pivotal period in the country's history. This theoretical frame uncovers a dialectical tension between, on the one hand, an 'ecstatic dis-order', manifesting itself through ecstatic subjectivities (mostly female) that undermined the order the establishment was striving towards, pervading it with chaos and disarray, and, on the other hand, a static order (usually masculine), exerting, through different agencies, a power of repressive and normative surveillance upon these ecstatic subjectivities, in order to maintain the cohesion and steadiness of Italian citizens and of the newly unified country.

European modernist studies currently face a double pressure. On one side, the global turn has reframed European literature as one regional tradition among many, shrinking its perceived cultural significance. On the other, broader developments in literary studies have fragmented the study of European literatures into localized specialties, attending so closely to specific circumstances around texts that comparison has become difficult to sustain. The result is a field that struggles to articulate what European modernists share, and one whose analytical frameworks have moved steadily away from the literary text itself.The Anxious Body of Modernism offers a corrective. It argues that anxiety is the defining feature of European modernism, and that the body^—or, more precisely, the distorted image of the body^—is its most consistent literary expression. Using evidence-based cognitive psychology to guide close reading, it reframes anxiety not as a vague existential condition but as an interpretative mode shaped by distortions in how experiences are selected, framed, and evaluated. By clearly separating the physical body from the psychological construct of body image^—still not an established practice^—Eveliina Pulkki generates a methodology that hinges on critical close reading, the core strength of literary studies.By foregrounding psychological similarity over linguistic and material difference, the book shows European modernism to be a generative and coherent comparative field, bound not by shared context but by a demonstrable pattern of interpretive distortion. The Anxious Body of Modernism shows what is distinct and significant about European modernism in a world of many other important literary movements.

This is the first systematic attempt to trace the beginnings of modern literary Yiddish, an issue of great significance in the linguistic, literary, and social history of the Yiddish language. The eighteenth century marked the turning point in the history of literary Yiddish, a period of rapid linguistic assimilation to German and Dutch in the West and, by sharp contrast, the increasing cultural autonomy of Eastern European Jewry. Books printed in the West reflected the impact of New High German and contemporary Western Yiddish. Books published in Eastern Europe, the new centre for Yiddish printing, used Eastern Yiddish both for new works and for new editions of old Yiddish works. Dr Kerler examines hitherto neglected Yiddish books from the period in order to analyse the linguistic changes manifest in both the transition and shift from old to nascent Modern Literary Yiddish within the broader context of genre and literary traditions and in the framework of Yiddish dialectology, grammar, and sociolinguistics. Many of the grammatical norms of nineteenth and early twentieth-century literary Yiddish are shown to have their origins in the eighteenth century. A major work of linguistic scholarship, The Origins of Modern Literary Yiddish is an important contribution to the study of the crystallization process of literary languages, highlighting in the case of Yiddish the dynamics of emergence in the absence of the usual governmental support.

This book rescues Joubert from the ranks of minor French moralistes, and, by tracing the development of his thought from his time as secretary to Diderot through to the period of his association with Chateaubriand, demonstrates that he was a writer on aesthetics of considerable sensitivity.Examination of his manuscripts and of his annotation to books in his library shows that Joubert's primary concern, during the period that witnessed the gradual but profound change from the intellectual values of the Enlightenment to those of the Romantic period, was to establish the status and nature of art and poetry. Reading widely among philosophers and poets from Plato and Homer to Kant and André Chénier, Joubert consigned his thoughts and perceptions to a series of carnets which form the basis of this study and bear witness to an unusually eclectic and enquiring mind.Joubert's significance is not confined to the Enlightenment and Romantic periods. He is unique among writers of his day in the way that his own interrogation of the very act of writing anticipates the aesthetic of later, highly influential writers such as Mallarmé.

France's greatest tragedian, Jean Racine, is often admired for his poetic and tragic qualities. This book, on the other hand, explores the theatrical qualities of Racine's language and takes as its analytical tool two neglected parts of rhetoric, inventio and dispositio. How does Racine write exciting dialogue? He makes the persuasive interaction of characters a key feature of his dramatic technique and Word as Action shows how he deploys persuasion in well-defined contexts: trials, embassies, and councils; informal oratory as protagonists try to manipulate each other and their confidants in order to make their own views and wishes prevail; self-persuasion in monologues; and narrations, often used by characters with persuasive intent. The book draws illuminating and provocative comparisons with other playwrights and offers a closer and better documented description of the specific nature of Racine's theatrical language than has previously been available in any one study.

The first book in English to attempt a full theoretical analysis of Hegel's philosophy of art, Beauty and Truth examines Hegel's central thesis: that both beauty and truth can be understood in terms of systematic coherence, and that art, as a purveyor of truth, embodies and reflects the beliefs of the societies from which it comes.

Pascal's Pensées is generally acknowledged as one of the greatest masterpieces of seventeenth-century France, an unfinished work which has both inspired and perplexed readers in succeeding centuries.Playing with Truth is the first comprehensive book on Pascal to be devoted to his use of key terms depicting the central subject of the Pensées, the human condition. Nicholas Hammond explores such fundamental notions as language and order, proceeding with a detailed analysis of the words inconstance, ennui, inquiétude, bonheur, félicité, and justice. Developing and challenging the most recent scholarship about the text, Hammond identifies the crucial notion of play (as exemplified in the term divertissement) which underlies all these words and applies his findings to the notoriously unstable concept of truth. Through the fragmentary nature of the Pensées and the shifting meaning of terms, Pascal is shown to be deliberately engaging the reader in a game to make sense of the text. Giving an in-depth account of a many important critical controversies of the day, as well as offering a novel and provocative insight into the persuasive purpose of the Pensées, this study will be of interest to specialist and undergraduate readers alike.

For many readers in the English-speaking world, Goethe is somehow separate from the European intellectual and literary tradition. In this unique and wide-ranging study, Matthew Bell aims to correct this view by showing how Goethe portrayed human beings as part of a natural continuum, very much in the spirit of the Enlightenment. Dr Bell's fresh readings of Goethe's major and lesser-known texts are set against the background of the science and philosophy of the age, and the writer's debts to other thinkers are analysed. The development of Goethe as a writer and thinker is traced from his sentimental epistolary novel Werther - read in the context of the rise of psychological theory in the Englightment - to the emergence of his own theory of `empirical psychology' in the great roman a clef of 1809, Die Wahverwandtschaften. In a major new interpretation of Wilhelm Meisters Lehriahre, Matthew Bell follows the ideal of organic growth from the novel's origins in Engligtenment optimism to its revision in an atmosphere of post-revolutionary scepticism. Placing Goethe in an anthropological context, Goethe's Naturalistic Anthropology demonstrates that eighteenth-century anthropological thought provides an essential, hitherto overlooked context for the understanding of Goethe's literary enterprise from Werther to Die Wahllverwandtschaften.

The concept of imitatio - the imitation of classical and vernacular texts - was the dominant critical and creative principle in Italian Renaissance literature. Linked to modern notions of intertextuality, imitation has been much discussed recently, but this is the first book to offer a comprehensive survey of Italian Renaissance ideas on imitation, covering both theory and practice, and both Latin and vernacular works.Martin McLaughlin charts the emergence of the idea, in vague terms in Dante, then in Petrarch's more precise reconstruction of classical imitatio, before concentrating on the major writers of the Quattrocento. Some chapters deal with key humanists, such as Lorenzo Valla and Pico della Mirandola, while others discuss each of the major vernacular figures in the debate, including Leonardo Bruni, Leon Battista Alberti, Angelo Poliziano, and Pietro Bembo. For the first time scholars and student have an up-to-date account of the development of Ciceronianism in both Latin and the vernacular before 1530, and the book provides fresh insights into some of the canonical works of Italian literature from Dante to Bembo.

One of the great innovators of medieval literature, Dafydd ap Gwilym's poetic voice is as distinctive and resonant as those of his more celebrated contemporaries Chaucer and Boccaccio. This book - the first major study of the largely submerged popular verse tradition of medieval Wales and its likely enriching effect on the repertoire of the professional poets - examines Dafydd's use both of the native popular verse tradition and of the persuasive convention of northern French verse to forge a new kind of poetry for a new age. Composing in the wake of the Edwardian conquest of Wales, Dafydd (fl. c. 1330-70) and a few kindred spirits sought to adapt and revitalize an already sophisticated bardic culture by expanding its subject matter to include a surprising variety of entertainment as well as formal praise. Huw M. Edwards sets out the first detailed comparison of Dafydd's verse with the highly influential poetry of northern France, in terms of themes, motifs and poetic genres since the publication of the authentic canon in 1952. The poet's bold and often playful handling of borrowed conventions will be of interest to all students of medieval poetry.

This book examines the pivotal role of Johann Joachim Winckelmann as an arbiter of classical taste. It identifies the key features of Winckelmann's treatment of classical beauty, particularly in his famous descriptions, and investigates his teaching of the appreciation of beauty. The work identifies and examines the point at which theory and descriptive method are merged in a practical attempt to offer aesthetic education. The publications and correspondence of Winckelmann's pupils are offered as criteria for judging the success of his mission, eventually casting doubt upon his concept of aesthetic education, both in theory and practice. The final chapter of the book is concerned with Goethe's reception of Winckelmann, which shows unusual sensitivity to his work's aesthetic core. It also shows how Goethe's own writing on Italy reveals a process of independent aesthetic education akin to Winckelmann's and distinct from his pupils. The work is founded in close textual analysis but also covers the principles of the aesthetic education, the value of the Grand Tour and the role of Rome in the European imagination.

Nietzsche's Die Geburt der Tragodie and Schiller's Asthetische Briefe are two texts which make a vital contribution to the history of aesthetic and cultural theory. This is the first work to make a comparative study of the texts, bringing a mutually illuminating perspective to bear on them.Dr Martin counters the widespread belief that Nietzsche and Schiller represent a black-and-white contrast, showing the wide extent of the early Nietzsche's debt to Schiller's aesthetics, and drawing a convincing picture of the common aesthetic ground shared by the two writers. The four key aspects of their aesthetic theories are compared: the brilliant diagnoses of cultural crisis; the historical framework of each theory; the catalytic function of the Greek experience in both theories; and the metaphysical and psychological underpinnings by which the theories stand or fall. At the heart of the study lie the claims of both Nietzsche and Schiller for the `untimeliness' of their texts. Dr Martin concludes that, whatever the shortcomings of the texts, they remain outstanding and enduringly relevant contributions both to aesthetic theory and to our understanding of what it is to be human.

Descriptions of imaginary buildings abound in late medieval and early modern texts in France as in other European countries. The vogue for allegorical buildings was, however, more than a literary fashion: by deploying familiar metaphors of the building in new contexts, writers gained a powerful tool of persuasion. This book explores the complex relationship between metaphor and allegory in the largely neglected but extremely rich corpus of writing that spans the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century in France, and concentrates on the output of Jean Lemaire (c.1473-after 1515), whose fascination with architecture played a crucial role in defining his self-image as a writer. By exploiting the semantic richness of the image of the temple, Lemaire was able to combine panegyric of his patrons with advertisement of his own talents and to promote an ideology of the self-conscious and self-confident writer that was to characterize the stance of Ronsard and the Pléiade in the poet-architect debate of the later sixteenth century.

Narrative and Fantasy in the Post-War German Novel, a study of novels by Uwe Johnson, Max Frisch, Christa Wolf, Jurek Becker, and Günter Grass, investigates the fictions and fantasies invented by five narrators, examining the purpose which the fictions serve within each text and the means by which each author deliberately draws attention to them. All five authors are shown to be concerned with the kinds of stories which ordinary people tell about themselves and their past lives. While some of the texts demonstrate the positive power of imagination, others point to the dangers of fiction: its tendency to falsify reality and to encourage escapist and violent fantasies. This is the first major study of this distinctive trend in post-war German fiction.

Spanning seven decades, Nathalie Sarraute's literary career has established her as one of the most prominent and highly respected French writers of the twentieth century. From the outset she has sought, through consistent formal innovation, to develop a mode of literary expression adequate to an endlessly mobile and mutable self stifled as much in public discourse as in traditional fictional characterization. Central to that enterprise is the dream of full and transparent communication with another, and ultimately with an ideal reader. This study is the first to explore in detail the interaction between the increasing move towards dialogue in Sarraute's prose works (Tu ne t'aimes pas is an extreme example), and the dialogue those works initiate with their readers. Intensely aware of the pitfalls of communication, both spoken and written, Sarraute's prose writings illuminate not only the dynamics of conversation, but also those of the reading process.

Literary studies cannot neglect the study of books, the physical objects through which literary texts are transmitted. Book form is especially relevant to the literature of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, which saw the crucial shift from manuscript to print in Western Europe. This book examines manuscripts and printed editions of three major French writers of this key period: Jean Molinet, Jean Lemaire de Belges and Jean Bouchet. Presentational features which influence the reading of poems, such as layout, illustration, anthologization and paratext, are analysed. The development of these features reflects a gradual change in the ways in which literary self-consciousness is manifested. In earlier texts, produced within an essentially manuscript culture, poets' creative investment in their work is exhibited primarily as formal virtuosity. As printing becomes dominant, such virtuosity tends to be rejected in favour of self-commentary and an apparently more personal discourse.

Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu is a hybrid, a novel-essay, a capacious work of fiction containing a commonplace-book. It might, as Roland Barthes has suggested, be thought of as the product of profound and cherished indecision, Proust's indecision between two styles of writing, the moralistic and the fictive/novelistic/romanesque. Structure and Science is an exploration of this indecision. The shorter Proust, Proust the moraliste, is a prolific writer of maxims, from the laws of the passions to the aesthetic manifesto of the Temps retrouvé to the [?rapacious] teeming/fertile/spawning/exuberant/luxuriant reflection(s) on sexuality, politics, society. Yet these maxims, whose grammar lays claim to timelessness, are bound up in narrative, the story of their evolution. And disintegration. Proust's moralizing exposes our affective relationship with law statements, with authority, and it is this question that engages A la recherche in an epistemological debate which crosses the boundaries between the two cultures, art and science. What might be called the epistemological alertness of Proust's text is explored at this interface between 'modernist' science and literature.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal became famous at the age of sixteen for poetry and lyrical drama of almost uncanny facility and beauty. Yet he ceased to write lyric poetry almost completely in the early 1900s and his fictional farewell to poetry, the so-called 'Chandos Letter', is a paradigm for the uncertainty and instability of Modernism. The verse of the 1890s, the 'lyrical decade', is generally felt to have been enhanced by his interest in the French Symbolists and the Symbolist-inspired tutelage of Stefan George. However, with analyses of verse and prose poetry from the 1890s, this book argues that Symbolism was a fundamentally inhibiting influence, ultimately responsible for the crisis in Hofmannsthal's poetic writing. 'Das Gespräch über Gedichte', written soon after 'Ein Brief', in 1903, makes it clear how the crisis was a personal one and does not imply the general impossibility of future writing, as is often suggested. As a theory of poetry, it acknowledges the importance of French Symbolism but suggests how it was ultimately a dummy aesthetic that had previously overlaid and stifled Hofmannsthal's own Romantic leanings.

Proust's Gods explores two interweaving networks of imagery which are vital to key thematic areas of Proust's fictional construct. These are Christian and biblical, and classical and mythological figures of speech. Proust's metaphorical vision plucks legends and figures drawn from these sources out of their original settings and thrusts them with all their persistent resonances into new and often unlikely contexts. Yet these deliberately incongruous juxtapositions and the sliding scale of tones they produce are also strangely apt, and amongst the richest sources of humorous effects in the novel. The study also analyses the increasing sophistication of Proust's imagery from his earliest writings onwards, and re-evaluates the role of the largely-ignored Correspondance in his development as a writer. Considered as texts rather than biographical documents, the letters are identified as a flexible stylistic 'stamping ground' and an arena for experimentation for later works.

Linguistic' theories in the eighteenth-century are also theories of literature and art, and it is probably better, therefore, to think of them as 'aesthetic' theories. As such, they are answers to the age-old question 'what is beauty?', but formulated, also, to respond to contemporary concerns. Edward Nye considers a wide range of authors from these two perspectives and draws the following conclusions: etymology is a theory of poetry, dictionaries of synonymy, prosody and metaphor are theories of preciosity, and Sensualism is a theory of artistic representation. The background to these contentions is outlined in Chapter One, in which Edward Nye traces the rise of the term 'nuances' as an attempt by contemporary authors to understand representation in art as a rationalization of chaotic reality. The demise of these contentions at the end of the century is described in the last chapter, in which the dominant language theory of the day, idéologie, is shown to be antagonistic to the study of art and literature. Theories of language are no longer an answer to the question 'what is beauty?'

This book offers a study of the whole of Duras's written oeuvre, covering journalism and lesser-known works as well as more famous texts. It brings out the constant presence of ethical questions in and around the experiences of passion and excess with which her work is always concerned, and subjects Duras's texts to an unprecedented level of close reading, carrying her beyond the terms of her usual reception. On the basis of this approach, and with reference to Duras's involvement with her intellectual and political contexts, the book demonstrates the detailed engagement of Duras's writing in the ethical and political issues of her day. Careful textual analysis shows the particular, fragile nature of this engagement, as well as the intricate textures of Duras's work; this leads to a striking new model of the relation between the literary text and the ethical life of its readers, which will be of importance not only to specialists in French Studies, but to all those interested in ethical criticism and modern literary studies.

This book sheds light on the complexity of medieval German literary culture as it evolved in the course of the thirteenth century (c. 1220-1290) by analysing the attitudes of narrative poets towards the issue of authorship. It describes the various ways in which vernacular writers could address the theme of their own authorship within their literary works, and explores the tensions that arose between such authorial strategies on the one hand and their subsequent manuscript transmission on the other. The first part of the book deals with the presentation of authorship in the works of two poets who stand at the heart of literary tradition (Rudolf von Ems; Konrad von Würzburg), and involves discussion of such topics as authorial signature, acrostics, author portraits, and patronage; the second part deals with two genres (heroic epic; short story) that evince a rather more problematic relationship with the figure of the author.

This book is the first major study of French Caribbean literature in light of the concept of postcoloniality. Postcolonial theory debates have developed in the anglophone domain, and have not as yet referred prominently to francophone literature. Jeannie Suk investigates how the literature of Martinique and Guadeloupe provides a kaleidescopic view of the paradoxes at the heart of postcoloniality. Through subtle and provocative readings of Aimé Césaire, Edouard Glissant, Maryse Condé, Baudelaire, Freud, and others, she illuminates how the development of French Caribbean literature and debates about négritude, antillanité, and creolité contribute to theories of in-betweenness and incompleteness central to postcolonial modes. In each chapter, lively and detailed analyses of literary and critical texts reveal connections between key thematic, conceptual, rhetorical, and psychic issues that form the interface of Caribbean and postcolonial concerns. The first part paves theoretical ground, focusing on readings of two seminal texts, Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal and Glissant's Discours antillais; the second part concentrates on Maryse Condé's exemplary work. Lucidly articulating the overlap and interplay of the distance of oceanic crossing, the discontinuities of allegorical signification, and the gap at the heart of trauma, Suk probes the paradoxical dynamic of impossible yet inevitable returns in space, time, and the psyche. She shows how literal and metaphorical "crossings" both produce and impede history and representation. The result is a new framework for understanding the intersection of postcolonial, psychoanalytic, deconstructive, and French Caribbean problems in a language attentive to improbable recurrences across theories and registers. Postcolonial Paradoxes is a major contribution to criticism and theory, of interest to scholars and students of postcolonialism, Caribbean and African diaspora literature, French literature, and psychoanalysis.

This is the first comprehensive study of Yiddish in the former Soviet Union. A chronicle of orthographic and other reformsfrom the state of the language in pre-Revolutionary Russia, through active language-planning in the 1920s and 1930s, repression, and subsequent developments up to the 1980sis recreated from contemporary publications and archival materials. Later chapters draw on the author's own experience as a Yiddish writer and lexicographer in Moscow. At a time when the Bolshevik party's Jewish sections held an influential position, Yiddish attained a functional diversity without precedent in its history; but underlying contradictions between ideas expressed in the slogans `Proletarians of all countries, unite!' and `The right of nations to self-determination' led to extremes in language-planning. A golden mean was achieved after the 1934 Yiddish language conference in Kiev. Using contemporary literary works as a source of linguistic and sociolinguistic information, Gennady Estraikh charts the development of the resultant variety of the language, `Soviet Yiddish'; the effects of severe repression in the late 1930s and 1940s; and the subsequent decline in usage. Comparisons are drawn between Soviet Yiddish language-planning and concurrent reforms in Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian, and German; and the features and types of Soviet Yiddish word-formation are analysed, notably univerbation, or compressing a phrase into one word.

The Rhetorical Feminine takes a fresh look at theatre - including the important new genre of opera - in early modern Germany. Central to this study is the relationship of the stage with ideas of order or social control. Early German school drama was designed to teach rhetoric to boys: a detail which has up to now been accepted by scholars without further questioning. This investigation focuses on how that rhetoric was used, with particular reference to ideas of the feminine and of the Islamic world. Both are constructed as the potentially threatening others of early modern patriarchal Christendom. In containing the threat, the stage becomes the controllable version of the early modern theatrum mundi.In opera, the dynamic of the text is supported by music. The author has found it necessary to cross the boundary of traditional literary scholarship by looking not only at the libretti, but also at the rhetoric of the score. The suggestion here is not that the construction of alterity is an isolated phenomenon in early modern Germany; men have always used their relative monopoly of the arts for self-definition. While feminist scholarship has tended to concentrate on the relevance of this for women, it has also pertained to non-Christians or `the Orient', which is often portrayed as analogous with the feminine.