Warwick Studies in the European Humanities – serie

Theatre of the English and Italian Renaissance studies interrelationships between English and Italian Theatre of the Renaissance period, including texts, performance and performance spaces, and cultural parallels and contrasts.

France has always been considered the home of traditional high culture, but increasingly we are now learning to look at other more popular aspects of modern French cultural life. In this volume, specialists from Britain and France adopt a fresh approach to the study of French culture since 1945 by focussing on the mass media and on a whole range of popular cultural forms. As well as introducing English-speaking readers to such new fields as French radio, television, science fiction and popular song, this volume also highlights how the French themselves responded to the growing importance of the mass media in postwar France.

Frank Kermode's work has always been important to students of English literature. In these essays, leading scholars critically assess Kermode's texts and question his representation of literary study, offering their own interpretative strategies.

This volume adopts a varied approach to the study of the "material world" in the French literature, thought and visual arts of the 19th century. Beginning with more purely philosphical definitions of materialism, seen as a topic within the history of ideas, it moves to a broader, more general treatment of materialism - and examines the political, social and cultural repercussions of the emergence of this consumer society.;In particular, the book tackles the question of how things, objects and the material surface of the world - for so long disdained and excluded by a deeply entrenched Neo-classical cultural tradition - came to be fully incorporated into the literature and visual arts of the period. Contributors look not only at the Romantic and Realist transcendence of the Neo-classical heritage of abstraction and idealism, but also adopt modern critical perspectives to analyze central themes such as urbanization, fetishism and the representation of the female body. By the author of "Popular Culture in Modern France: A Study of Cultural Discourse" and co-editor (with N. Hewitt) of "France and the Mass Media".

The scholars who have contributed to this book were asked to take part in a collaborative act of demystification, a reconsideration of the eschatological ideas of the 1890s in the light of the critical thought of the 1990s. Their essays draw upon a range of approaches, and are broadly interdisciplinary. All are characterized by the realization that, with a century's hindsight, the late 1800s should be seen not so much as a period of decadence as of discovery and growth.

The description or depiction of leisure activities has formed part of the subject matter of art and literature for a long time. This volume looks at funeral games in Homer, leisure as depicted in painting, and the part that literature played in promoting athleticism in public schools and Oxbridge.

Political changes between 1918 and 1939 had important implications for German writers. The essays in this volume focus on questions such as the writers' relationship to political parties and ideology, their treatment of the legacy of World War I, and their response to the rise of fascism.

Theatre of the English and Italian Renaissance studies interrelationships between English and Italian Theatre of the Renaissance period, including texts, performance and performance spaces, and cultural parallels and contrasts. Connections are traced between Italian writers including Aretino, Castiglione and Zorenzo Valla and such English playwrights as Shakespeare, Lyly and Ben Jonson. The impact of Italian popular tradition on Shakespeare's comedies is analysed, together with Jonson's theatrical recreation of Venice, and Italian sources for the court masques of Jonson, Daniel and Campion.