Studies in European Cultural Transition - Böcker

The most prolific historian of early modern German literature in the twentieth century, Klaus Garber has largely remained unknown to English-language scholars. The seven essays selected here are translated into English for the first time and represent the ’essence’ of Garber’s work. Central to Garber’s outlook is a break with the traditional canonization of culture into national categories. Moreover, he argues that literary history consists not only of intellectual history, but also political and social history. As he states in his preface to this volume: ’To bring Old Europe to life in all the variety of its cultural landscapes; to hear across space and time the voices that praised this multiplicity as a valuable possession; to be inspired by the past to respond to our own needs - these tasks constitute the noblest goal of early modern literary studies today.’

There is no doubt that the political and cultural map of Europe is in the process of being radically redrawn. Alongside the major upheavals in continental Europe, the British Isles has undergone far-reaching constitutional reform. In Devolving Identities, feminist scholars explore their personal negotiations of gender, class, ethnicity and national or regional identity through their readings of two literary and cultural 'texts'. The collection centres on the ontological experience of reading and writing 'as a feminist', and combines the discussion of texts which are inscribed - whether consciously or unconsciously - with the academics' own struggle to reconcile their 'roots' with their current 'situations' or 'identities'. This book's focus on the overlapping of gender and national or regional identity is a direct response to the devolution movements currently active in the British Isles. The contributors are drawn from Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, Ireland, Northern Ireland and selected regions of England. In its complex engagement of subject and text and its political insistence that we no longer consider key aspects of 'identity' in isolation, this volume presents a truly state-of-the-art investigation of (a) what it means to be 'regionally defined' and (b) how the complexity of our positioning in terms of class, gender and nation impacts upon our practice as literary and cultural critics.

Chaucer used the dream device to engage with the work of French and Italian authors and to explore the philosophical content of their poetry. His four dream visions therefore represent an important conduit through which the influence of European writers was received into English, enabling a profound transition in the way in which the 'self' was conceptualized in medieval courtly literature. Chaucer's Dream Visions is the first book length study to examine the poet's considered use of Aristotelian psychology to describe the mind of the courtly subject in its social context. The study shows that by drawing upon Aristotelian psychology, derived from his reading of Boethius, Dante, and the poets of the French court, Chaucer was able to articulate precisely those aspects of the courtly identity that are determined by language and empirical experience, and those which are transcendent of this determinism. A detailed engagement with the literature, language, and behaviour of the court therefore takes place in the dream visions, which are a genuine exploration of individual subjectivity in its social context. The author of this volume demonstrates that the motivation for this exploration is a product of Chaucer's Christian beliefs and philosophical awareness. Chaucer's Dream Visions thus constitutes a major contribution to the debate concerning distinctions between medieval and early modern culture.

We Europeans is the first book-length study of the original mass observation project. It is also the first detailed historical study of the formation of ordinary people's 'racial' attitudes in Britain. Drawing upon historical, literary, cultural and anthropological approaches, this book examines the sources of cultural identity in Britain in the twentieth century, and how these were shaped through the influences of family, education, and everyday 'high' and 'low' culture. The examination focuses on the archives of the British social-anthropological organization Mass-Observation, and is the first detailed history of it to be published. Founded in the 1930s by poets, psychoanalysts, surrealists, and sociologists, among others, the purpose of the organization was to create an anthropology of the British people by the 'natives' themselves, through the use of diaries, directives and special surveys. The organization was active from 1937 to 1951, then revived in the 1980s, when a new group of Mass-Observers were recruited to keep diaries and respond to directives. Both the historical archive of Mass-Observation and the more recent material provide fascinating insight into the everyday lives and formation of identities of ordinary people in Britain. Kushner places the material from these archives in the context of other contemporary writings; through them he explores grassroots identities in Britain in relation to the outside world, especially Europe but also the former Empire and the USA. This study will be of interest to scholars of sociology, cultural studies, literary studies and history who are particularly interested in 'race', race relations, immigration and cultural difference.

Translating Travel examines the relationship between travel writing and translation, asking what happens when books travel beyond the narrow confines of one genre, one literary system and one culture. The volume takes as its starting point the marginal position of contemporary Italian travel writing in the Italian literary system, and proposes a comparative reading of originals and translations designed to highlight the varying reception of texts in different cultures. Two main themes in the book are the affinity between the representations produced by travel and the practices of translation, and the complex links between travel writing and genres such as ethnography, journalism, autobiography and fiction. Individual chapters are devoted to Italian travellers' accounts of Tibet and their English translations; the hybridization of journalism and travel writing in the works of Oriana Fallaci; Italo Calvino's sublimation of travel writing in the stylized fiction of Le città invisibili; and the complex network of literary references which marked the reception of Claudio Magris's Danubio in different cultures.

Ranging from the early modern to the postcolonial, and dealing mainly with encounters in Europe, the Americas and the Middle East, Perspectives on Travel Writing is a collection of new essays by international scholars that examines some of the various contexts of travel writing, as well as its generic characteristics. Contributions examine the similarities between autobiography and memoir, fiction, and travel writing, and attempt to define travel writing as a genre. Utilising a variety of approaches, the essays display a shared concern with what travel writing does and how it does it. The effects of encounter and border-crossing on gender, 'race', and national identity are considered throughout. The collection begins with a review of some of the problems and issues facing the scholar of travel writing and moves on to a detailed discussion of the qualities of travel writing and its related forms. It then presents in chronological order a number of case studies, before closing with a critical discussion of approaches to the subject. An essay collection with broad historical and geographical coverage, this volume should appeal to students and researchers of travel and travel-related literatures from across the Humanities.

The first full-length, scholarly study of the Société des auteurs dramatiques (SAD), this book describes the form, the meaning, the achievements, and the failures of the first professional association for creative writers in European history. Founded by the well-known playwright Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais in 1777 under the protection of prominent aristocrats at the court of King Louis XVI, the SAD comprised the playwrights most closely associated with the royal theater of the kingdom, the Comédie Française. Its two dozen members discussed and worked to advance both their collective interests under the royal theater regulations (which governed such issues of literary property, creative control, and remuneration) and to promote their public image as playwrights and men of letters more broadly - while at the same time competing with each other, sometimes intensely, for control over that image. Gregory Brown traces the story of the SAD from its conception in the mid-1770s through to the French Revolution, exploring first the Society's founding in 1777, then its trajectory until its dissolution at the end of 1780, and finally discusses a revival of the group during the Revolution. In each chapter, Brown analyzes the strategic efforts of Beaumarchais and his associates, to shape regulations and legislation concerning droits d'auteur (authorial remuneration and literary property) and their efforts to reshape the public status and identity of playwrights through correspondence, print and face-to-face encounters with the troupe of the Comédie Française, the theater's aristocratic supervisors at court, its lawyers and government administrators, its commercial publics, and other, authors. Brown argues against previous treatments of the SAD, which have presented it as a spontaneous, dissident challenge to constituted social and political authority under the Old Regime. He demonstrates instead how the SAD emerged from within existing lines of authority in e

This lively and intellectually vigorous conspectus of studies approaches the subject of exile from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. The contributions to this volume give due attention to the twentieth century migratory phenomena, theorised by Edward Said, Julia Kristeva and Salman Rushdie. They also show that the discourse and experience of exile is not the stuff of modernity alone. The volume illustrates that the waning of the Middle Ages, Reformation and Restoration politics, and the importation of Egyptian mummies into a nineteenth-century England hungry for imperial exotica reveal displacement, dislocation, otherness and the uncanniness of observing strangers-on-display to have long been part of European cultural currency. The essays range across a variety of disciplines: literary studies, modern languages, history of science, philosophy and museum studies.

Proust's Cup of Tea analyzes Proust's reading of various Victorian authors and shows how they contributed to A la recherche du temps perdu. This book proves that British literature and art played a fundamental role in Proust's writing process by citing from the manuscript versions of his novel, as well as from his correspondence, essays and the lengthy critical appartus accompanying his translations of Ruskin. Eells reflects here on why Proust was attracted to Victorian culture, and how he incorporated it into his novel. The works of the British novelists he was most interested in-Thomas Hardy and George Eliot-address questions of gender which Proust develops in his own work. He builds Sodome et Gomorrhe I, the section of his novel focusing on homosexuality, on a series of explicit citations and guarded allusions to Shakespeare, Darwin Walter Scott, Oscar Wilde and Robert Louis Stevenson. Eells explores how Proust followed in the pioneering footsteps of those British writers who had ventured beyond the boundaries of conventional sexuality, though he took pains to erase their traces in the definitive version of his work. This study also highlights how Proust made his fictitious painter Elstir into a master of ambiguity, by modeling his art on Turner, the Pre-Raphaelites and Whistler. Eells shows that Proust drew on Victorian culture in his depiction of sexual ambiguity, arguing that he confounded eroticism and aestheticism in the way he inextricably linked the man-woman figure with British art and literature. As Proust aestheticized male and female homosexuality using references to British art and letters, Eells coins the term 'Anglosexuality' to refer to his characters of the third sex. She defines Anglosexuality as an intersexuality represented through intertextuality, as an artistic sensitivity, an aesthetic stance, and a new way of seeing. Proust's Cup of Tea thus demonstrates that Victorian culture and homoeroticism form one of the cornerstones of Proust's monumental work.

In recent years the twin themes of travel and translation have come to be regarded as particularly significant to the study of early modern culture and literature. Traditional notions of 'The Renaissance' have always emphasised the importance of the influence of continental, as well as classical, literature on English writers of the period; and over the past twenty years or so this emphasis has been deepened by the use of more complicated and sophisticated theories of literary and cultural intertextuality, as well as broadened to cover areas such as religious and political relations, trade and traffic, and the larger formations of colonialism and imperialism. The essays collected here address the full range of traditional and contemporary issues, providing new light on canonical authors from More to Shakespeare, and also directing critical attention to many unfamiliar texts which need to be better known for our fuller understanding of sixteenth-century English literature. This volume makes a very particular contribution to current thinking on Anglo-continental literary relations in the sixteenth century. Maintaining a breadth and balance of concerns and approaches, Travels and Translations in the Sixteenth Century represents the academic throughout Europe: essays are contributed by scholars working in Hungary, Greece, Italy, and France, as well as in the UK. Arthur Kinney's introduction to the collection provides an North American overview of what is perhaps a uniquely comprehensive index to contemporary European criticism and scholarship in the area of early modern travel and translation.

Using Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy's groundbreaking study of the persistence of German Idealist philosophy as his starting point, Justin Clemens presents a valuable study of the links between Romanticism and contemporary theory. The central contention of this book is that contemporary theory is still essentially Romantic - despite all its declarations to the contrary, and despite all its attempts to elude or exceed the limits bequeathed it by Romantic thought. The argument focuses on the ruses of 'Romanticism's indefinable character' under two main rubrics, 'Contexts' and 'Interventions'. The first three chapters investigate 'Contexts', examining some of the broad trends in the historical and institutional development of Romantic criticism; the second section, 'Interventions', comprises close readings of the work of Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Ian Hunter and Alain Badiou. In the first chapter Clemens identifies and traces the development of two interlocking recurrent themes in Romantic criticism: the Romantic desire to escape Romanticism, and the problem posed to aesthetico-philosophical thought by the modern domiciliation of philosophy in the university. He develops these themes in the second chapter by examining the link forged between aesthetics and the subject in the work of Immanuel Kant. In the third chapter, Clemens shows how the Romantic problems of the academic institution and aesthetics were effectively bound together by the philosophical diagnosis of nihilism. Chapter Four focuses on two key moments in the work of Jacques Lacan - his theory of the 'mirror stage' and his 'formulas of sexuation' - and demonstrates how Lacan returns to the grounding claims of Kantian aesthetics in such a way as to render him complicit with the Romantic thought he often seems to contest. In the following chapter, taking Deleuze and Guattari's notion of 'multiplicity' as a guiding thread, Clemens links their account to their professed 'anti-Platonism', showing how they find themselves forced back onto emblematically Romantic arguments. Chapter Six provides a close reading of Sedgwick's most influential text, Epistemology of the Closet. Clemens' reading localizes her practice both in the newly consolidated academic field of 'Queer Theory' and in a conceptual genealogy whose roots can be traced back to a particular anti-Enlightenment strain of Romanticism. Clemens next turns to the professedly anti-Romantic arguments of Ian Hunter, a major figure in the ongoing re-writing of modern histories of education. In the final chapter he examines the work of the contemporary French philosopher Alain Badiou. Clemens argues that, if Badiou's hostility to the diagnosis of nihilism, his return to Plato and mathematics, and his expulsion of poetry from philosophical method, all place him at a genuine distance from dominant Romantic trends, even this attempt admits ciphered Romantic elements. This study will be of interest to literary theorists, philosophers, political theorists, and cultural studies scholars.

This study compares text/image interaction as manifested in emblem books (and related forms) and the modern bande dessinée, or French-language comic strip. It moves beyond the issue of defining the emblematic genre to examine the ways in which emblems - and their modern counterparts - interact with the surrounding culture, and what they disclose about that culture. Drawing largely on primary material from the Bibliothèque nationale de France and from Glasgow University Library's Stirling Maxwell Collection of emblem literature, Laurence Grove builds on the ideas of Marshall McLuhan, Elizabeth Eisenstein and, more recently, Neil Rhodes and Jonathan Sawday. Divided into four sections-Theoretics, Production, Thematics and Reception-Text/Image Mosaics in French Culture broaches topics such as theoretical approaches (past and present) to text/image forms, the question of narrative within the scope of text/image creations, and the reuse of visual iconography for diametrically opposed political or religious purposes. The author argues that, despite the gap in time between the advent of emblems and that of comic strips, the two forms are analogous, in that both are the products of a 'parallel mentality'. The mindsets of the periods that popularised these forms have certain common features related to repeated social conditions rather than to the pure evolution over time. Grove's analysis and historical contextualisation of that mentality provide insight into our own popular culture forms, not only the comic strip but also other hybrid media such as advertising and the Internet. His juxtaposition of emblems and the bande dessinée increases our understanding of all such combinations of picture and text.

Film established itself as an artistic form of expression at the same time that Proust started work on his masterpiece, A la recherche du temps perdu. If Proust apparently took little interest in what he described as a poor avatar of reductive, mimetic representation, the resonances between his own radical reworking of writing styles and the novelistic forms, and cinema as the art of time are undeniable. Proust at the Movies is the first study in English to consider these rich interconnections. Its introductory chapter charts the missed encounter between Proust and the cinema and addresses the problems inherent in adapting his novel to the screen. The following chapters examine the various cinematic responses to A la recherche du temps perdu attempted to date: Luchino Visconti and Joseph Losey's failed attempts at adapting the whole of the novel in the 1970s, Volker Schlöndorff's Un Amour de Swann (1984), Raoul Ruiz's Le Temps retrouvé (1999), Chantal Akerman's La Prisonnière in La Captive (2000), and Fabio Carpi's Quartetto Basileus (1982) and Le Intermittenze del cuore (2003). The last chapter tracks the echoes of Proust's writing in the work of various directors, from Abel Grace to Jean-Luc Godard. The approach is multidisciplinary, combining literary criticism with film theory and elements of philosophy of art. Special attention is given to the modernist legacy in literature and film with its distinctive aesthetic and narrative features. An outline of the history and recent evolution of contemporary art cinema thus emerges: a cinema where the themes at the heart of Proust's work - memory, time, perception - are ceaselessly explored.

This book presents a cross-disciplinary and methodologically innovative study, combining historical macro-sociology and a sociology of emotions with historical anthropology and cultural studies. Drawing on the concepts and theories of Norbert Elias on the Civilizing Process, it sets out to pin down and compare qualities that are simultaneously instantly recognisable and highly elusive, that is a kind of typical 'Englishness' and of 'Austrianness' that developed contemporaneously in the period up to the First World War. The authors chart the development of political authority structures in their varied historical manifestations, as well as their affective sedimentation as collective habitus ( national character ), comparing England and Austria from 1700 to 1900 as a case study. Their argument is based on an analysis of literary sources, mainly novels and plays, applying a sociology of literature approach. Axtmann and Kuzmics argue that the very different national characters formed in England and Austria during this time are related to differences in the affective experience of power and powerlessness, in short, of authority. They show that the formation of national character is determined partly by the different mixture of authoritative external constraints and milder self-restraint, and partly by the affective experience of human beings in uneven power balances. Specifically, they show how the formation of the bureaucratic state with strong patrimonial features in Austria, and of a self-organizing civil society with strong bourgeois-liberal features in England resulted both in different institutional structures of authority, and in different modes of the affective experience of this authority. Employing empirical detail of individual cases and texts to analyse and illuminate broad processes, the authors reach a clearer and deeper understanding of seemingly intangible and irrational aspects of national identity.

Focusing on European tragicomedy from the early modern period to the theatre of the absurd, Verna Foster here argues for the independence of tragicomedy as a genre that perceives and communicates human experience differently from the various forms of tragedy, comedy, and the drame (serious drama that is neither comic nor tragic). Foster posits that, in the sense of the dramaturgical and emotional fusion of tragic and comic elements to create a distinguishable new genre, tragicomedy has emerged only twice in the history of drama. She argues that tragicomedy first emerged and was controversial in the Renaissance; and that it has in modern times replaced tragedy itself as the most serious and moving of all dramatic genres. In the first section of the book, the author analyzes the name 'tragicomedy' and the genre's problems of identity; then goes on to explore early modern tragicomedies by Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Massinger. A transitional chapter addresses cognate genres. The final section of the book focuses on modern tragicomedies by Ibsen, Chekhov, Synge, O'Casey, Williams, Ionesco, Beckett and Pinter. By exploring dramaturgical similarities between early modern and modern tragicomedies, Foster demonstrates the persistence of tragicomedy's generic markers and provides a more precise conceptual framework for the genre than has so far been available.

Philosemitism, Antisemitism and 'the Jews' both honours and carries on the work of The Rev. Dr. James Parkes (1896-1981), a pioneer in the many different fields involving the study of Jewish/non-Jewish relations. The collection is designed to examine both the specific and broader themes of Parkes' life work in relation to tolerance and intolerance. From antiquity to today, Jews have often been defined as 'aliens'; these essays consider the effects of such legislative and socio-cultural exclusion on the self-definition of the dominant society. Philosemitism, Antisemitism and 'the Jews' employs an interdisciplinary framework, bringing together the work of scholars from both sides of the Atlantic and Israel, who work in history, theology, political philosophy, legal theory and literary studies. Eminent historians and theorists of tolerance and intolerance, including Gavin Langmuir, David Theo Goldberg, Norman Solomon and Tony Kushner, are joined by younger scholars researching new developments in the field.

In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, legions of English citizens headed north. Why and how did Scotland, once avoided by travelers, become a popular site for English tourists? In Tourism and Identity in Scotland, 1770-1914, Katherine Haldane Grenier uses published and unpublished travel accounts, guidebooks, and the popular press to examine the evolution of the idea of Scotland. Though her primary subject is the cultural significance of Scotland for English tourists, in demonstrating how this region came to occupy a central role in the Victorian imagination, Grenier also sheds light on middle-class popular culture, including anxieties over industrialization, urbanization, and political change; attitudes towards nature; nostalgia for the past; and racial and gender constructions of the "other." Late eighteenth-century visitors to Scotland may have lauded the momentum of modernization in Scotland, but as the pace of economic, social, and political transformations intensified in England during the nineteenth century, English tourists came to imagine their northern neighbor as a place immune to change. Grenier analyzes the rhetoric of tourism that allowed visitors to adopt a false view of Scotland as untouched by the several transformations of the nineteenth century, making journeys there antidotes to the uneasiness of modern life. While this view was pervasive in Victorian society and culture, and deeply marked the modern Scottish national identity, Grenier demonstrates that it was not hegemonic. Rather, the variety of ways that Scotland and the Scots spoke for themselves often challenged tourists' expectations.

In 1767, more than a century before Germany was incorporated as a modern nation-state, the city of Hamburg chartered the first Deutsches Nationaltheater. What can it have meant for a German playhouse to have been a national theater, and what did that imply about the way these theaters operated? Michael Sosulski contends that the idea of German nationhood not only existed prior to the Napoleonic Wars but was decisive in shaping cultural production in the last third of the eighteenth century, operating not on the level of popular consciousness but instead within representational practices and institutions. Grounding his study in a Foucauldian understanding of emergent technologies of the self, Sosulski connects the increasing performance of body discipline by professional actors, soldiers, and schoolchildren to the growing interest in German national identity. The idea of a German cultural nation gradually emerged as a conceptual force through the work of an influential series of literary intellectuals and advocates of a national theater, including G. E. Lessing and Friedrich Schiller. Sosulski combines fresh readings of canonical and lesser-known dramas, with analysis of eighteenth-century theories of nationhood and evolving acting theories, to show that the very lack of a strong national consciousness in the late eighteenth century actually spurred the emergence of the German Nationaltheater, which were conceived in the spirit of the Enlightenment as educational institutions. Since for Germans, nationality was a performed identity, theater emerged as an ideal space in which to imagine that nation.

For the past 30 years, the so-called 'Troubles' thriller has been the dominant fictional mode for representing Northern Ireland, leading to the charge that the crudity of this popular genre appropriately reflects the social degradation of the North. Aaron Kelly challenges both these judgments, showing that the historical questions raised by setting a thriller in Northern Ireland disrupt the conventions of the crime novel and allow for a new understanding of both the genre and the country. Two essays on crime fiction by Walter Benjamin and Berthold Brecht appear here for the first time in English translation. By demonstrating the relevance of these theorists as well as other key European thinkers such as Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, and Slavoj Zizek to his interdisciplinary study of Irish culture and the crime novel, Kelly refutes the idea that Northern Ireland is a stagnate anomaly that has been bypassed by European history and remained impervious to cultural transformation. On the contrary, Kelly's examination of authors such as Jack Higgins, Tom Clancy, Gerald Seymour, Colin Bateman, and Eoin McNamee shows that profound historical change and complexity have characterized both Northern Ireland and the thriller form.

This study commences with a simple question: how did Russia matter to England in the age of William Shakespeare? In order to answer the question, the author studies stories of Lapland survival, diplomatic envoys, merchant transactions, and plays for the public theaters of London. At the heart of every chapter, Shakespeare and his contemporaries are seen questioning the status of writing in English, what it can and cannot accomplish under the influence of humanism, capitalism, and early modern science. The phrase 'Writing Russia' stands for the way these English writers attempted to advance themselves by conjuring up versions of Russian life. Each man wrote out of a joint-stock arrangement, and each man's relative success and failure tells us much about the way Russia mattered to England.

In his monumental study, Christopher Braider explores the dialectical contest between history and truth that defines the period of cultural transition called the 'baroque'. For example, Annibale Carracci's portrayal of the Stoic legend of Hercules at the Crossroads departs from earlier, more static representations that depict an emblematic demigod who has already rejected the fallen path of worldly Pleasure for the upward road of heroic Virtue. Braider argues that, in breaking with tradition in order to portray a tragic soliloquist whose dominant trait is agonized indecision, Carracci joins other baroque artists, poets and philosophers in rehearsing the historical dilemma of choice itself. Carracci's picture thus becomes a framing device that illuminates phenomena as diverse as the construction of gender in baroque painting and science, the Pauline ontology of art in Caravaggio and Rembrandt, the metaphysics of baroque soliloquy and the dismantling of Cartesian dualism in Cyrano de Bergerac and Pascal.

Feces, urine, flatus, phlegm, vomitus - unlike ourselves, our most educated forebears did not disdain these functions, and, further, they employed scatological references in all manner of works. This collection of essays was provoked by what its editors considered to be a curious lacuna: the relative academic neglect of the copious and ubiquitous scatological rhetoric of Early Modern Europe, here broadly defined as the representation of the process and product of elimination of the body's waste products. The contributors to this volume examine the many forms and functions of scatology as literary and artistic trope, and reconsider this last taboo in the context of Early Modern European expression. They address unflinchingly both the objective reality of the scatological as part and parcel of material culture - inescapably a much larger part, a much heavier parcel then than now - and the subjective experience of that reality among contemporaries.

The essays in this collection explore the concept of 'transubstantiation', its adaptations and transformations in English and European culture from the Elizabethans to the twentieth century. Favoring an interartistic and comparative perspective, a wide range of critical approaches, from the philosophical to the semiological, from cultural materialism to gender and queer studies, are brought to bear on authors ranging from Descartes, Shakespeare and Joyce, to Macpherson, Madox Ford, and Winterson, as well as on contemporary sculpture and an Italian adaptation of Conrad for the screen in an unusually comic vein. The volume, edited by Douglas Burnham of Staffordshire University and by Enrico Giaccherini of Pisa University, will be of interest to those concerned with the cultural history of Christianity and with the remarkable critical and theoretical insights generated by contemporary approaches to this traditional theme.

Maria Scott's study of the operation of irony in Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris contends that the principal target of the collection's spleen is its own readership. Baudelaire, as one of the most perceptive cultural commentators of the nineteenth century, was naturally very keenly aware of the growing dominance of the bourgeoisie in France, not least as a market for art and literature. Despite being dependent on this market for his own writing, the poet was highly critical of bourgeois values and attitudes. Scott builds on existing criticism of the collection to argue that these are indirectly mocked in Le Spleen de Paris, often in the person of the poet's supposed textual alter ego. The contention is that the prose poems betray the trust of readers by way of an apparent transparency of meaning that functions to blind us to their embedded irony. Though focused on Le Spleen de Paris, Scott's study engages with the full range of Baudelaire's writings, including his art and literary criticism. Her book will be of interest not only to Baudelaire scholars but also to those engaged more generally with nineteenth-century French culture.

In Ovid and the Cultural Politics of Early Modern England, Liz Oakley-Brown considers English versions of the Metamorphoses - a poem concerned with translation and transformation on a multiplicity of levels - as important sites of social and historical difference from the fifteenth to the early eighteenth centuries. Through the exploration of a range of canonical and marginal texts, from Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus to women's embroideries of Ovidian myths, Oakley-Brown argues that translation is central to the construction of national and gendered identities.

The essays in this collection explore the concept of 'transubstantiation', its adaptations and transformations in English and European culture from the Elizabethans to the twentieth century. Favoring an interartistic and comparative perspective, a wide range of critical approaches, from the philosophical to the semiological, from cultural materialism to gender and queer studies, are brought to bear on authors ranging from Descartes, Shakespeare and Joyce, to Macpherson, Madox Ford, and Winterson, as well as on contemporary sculpture and an Italian adaptation of Conrad for the screen in an unusually comic vein. The volume, edited by Douglas Burnham of Staffordshire University and by Enrico Giaccherini of Pisa University, will be of interest to those concerned with the cultural history of Christianity and with the remarkable critical and theoretical insights generated by contemporary approaches to this traditional theme.

Philosemitism, Antisemitism and 'the Jews' both honours and carries on the work of The Rev. Dr. James Parkes (1896-1981), a pioneer in the many different fields involving the study of Jewish/non-Jewish relations. The collection is designed to examine both the specific and broader themes of Parkes' life work in relation to tolerance and intolerance. From antiquity to today, Jews have often been defined as 'aliens'; these essays consider the effects of such legislative and socio-cultural exclusion on the self-definition of the dominant society. Philosemitism, Antisemitism and 'the Jews' employs an interdisciplinary framework, bringing together the work of scholars from both sides of the Atlantic and Israel, who work in history, theology, political philosophy, legal theory and literary studies. Eminent historians and theorists of tolerance and intolerance, including Gavin Langmuir, David Theo Goldberg, Norman Solomon and Tony Kushner, are joined by younger scholars researching new developments in the field.

Ranging from the early modern to the postcolonial, and dealing mainly with encounters in Europe, the Americas and the Middle East, Perspectives on Travel Writing is a collection of new essays by international scholars that examines some of the various contexts of travel writing, as well as its generic characteristics. Contributions examine the similarities between autobiography and memoir, fiction, and travel writing, and attempt to define travel writing as a genre. Utilising a variety of approaches, the essays display a shared concern with what travel writing does and how it does it. The effects of encounter and border-crossing on gender, 'race', and national identity are considered throughout. The collection begins with a review of some of the problems and issues facing the scholar of travel writing and moves on to a detailed discussion of the qualities of travel writing and its related forms. It then presents in chronological order a number of case studies, before closing with a critical discussion of approaches to the subject. An essay collection with broad historical and geographical coverage, this volume should appeal to students and researchers of travel and travel-related literatures from across the Humanities.

Feces, urine, flatus, phlegm, vomitus - unlike ourselves, our most educated forebears did not disdain these functions, and, further, they employed scatological references in all manner of works. This collection of essays was provoked by what its editors considered to be a curious lacuna: the relative academic neglect of the copious and ubiquitous scatological rhetoric of Early Modern Europe, here broadly defined as the representation of the process and product of elimination of the body's waste products. The contributors to this volume examine the many forms and functions of scatology as literary and artistic trope, and reconsider this last taboo in the context of Early Modern European expression. They address unflinchingly both the objective reality of the scatological as part and parcel of material culture - inescapably a much larger part, a much heavier parcel then than now - and the subjective experience of that reality among contemporaries.