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On what grounds do we speak of 'the avant-garde' in inter-war European culture? Why do we understand the conflicts and quarrels among these diverse movements as expressing a shared attitude - the culture of the manifesto, the drive to reject, to explore, to renew - that trumps the conflicts and quarrels themselves? Why do the stern rationalism of a functionalist building and the irreverent irrationalism of a Dadaist performance seem heralds of a similar spirit?The Czech avant-garde theorist Karel Teige (1900-1951) regarded architecture and film as providing the key to formulating a unified theory that would capture this 'integrity of the avant-garde'. Teige - whose thought has many points of contact with celebrated figures such as Georg Lukács and Walter Benjamin, and who was a close associate of Le Corbusier, André Breton, and Hannes Meyer - reveals how a vibrant 'alternative' avant-garde tradition can raise central questions for understanding European modernism more broadly.Peter Zusi is Associate Professor of Czech and Comparative Literature at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London.

Stephen Romer's essays range from the key figures of French and English Modernism to the contemporary practice of poetry, and its translation. At the heart of Chaos and the Clean Line is an enquiry into the talismanic power that a source of order can possess for the poet who lives in a disordered world. It is what drives Mallarmé's 'fury against the formless'. Sometimes it may be found in a longed-for sense of psychological detachment, as when Laforgue invents the figure of Pierrot. Or it may be the craft and genius of a former age, safely removed from the alienating cities of today, such as Eliot finds in Dante, or in Gautier's chiseled verse. For Pierre Reverdy, the clean line of order may come from a Cubist painting; for Ezra Pound, it may be an epiphany of angled sunlight fallen on stone in Provence; for Apollinaire, the shockingly original analogies he draws between physical eroticism and trench warfare.Stephen Romer is Associate Professor of English at the University of Tours, and Lecturer in French at Brasenose College, Oxford.

This book delves into the fascinating journey of American drama in Catalonia, exploring how the theatrical output of a world superpower has impacted (and transformed) the stages of an allegedly minor actor in the cultural scene of the 20th century. Yet, while Catalonia is the birthplace of such geniuses as Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí or Antoni Gaudí, it is also that of playwrights Joan Brossa, Manuel de Pedrolo, Fermín Cabal or Jordi Galcerán, among others. All of them grew up in, and imbibed, a theatrescape in which American borrowings were not only habitual (often the only foreign plays around) but inspiring and groundbreaking. If Alias Jimmy Valentine re-defined theatrical decorum in Catalonia in the early 1900s, The Vagina Monologues, in the 1990s, challenged prevalent sexual taboos. Throughout the 20th century, Catalonia went from a peripheral, marginalized region of a once vast empire to a booming and largely autonomous centre of culture, recognized all over the world and admired for its uniqueness and original artistic contributions. American plays accompanied, and often directly inspired, such a journey.Ramón Espejo is a Professor of American Literature at the University of Seville, Spain, and is one of the leading American drama and theatre scholars in Europe.

Crossings is a gathering of essays whose preoccupations converge in the idea that the workings of poetry and trans­lation are closely related. This is especially true in the work of Hölderlin, in whose poems the kinship is coupled with a way of reading the world and an attentiveness to transitions of all kinds: what can come over to us from the past, and what will pass on from us to posterity? What are the consequences for poetry if the present moment is understood as a perpetual transition? Translation can be a means of testing this understanding, and poetry perhaps negotiates the crossing itself. Later writers like Philippe Jaccottet, who thought of the poet's work as a work of translation, continue this line: the poem becomes a form of attention and, as such, a thing permeable to an elsewhere. Touching on bird-flight and sonnets, aqueducts and metamorphosis, what these readings have in common is a fidelity to the movement of particular poems.Charlie Louth is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the Queen's College, University of Oxford.

In the popular imagination, the pioneering explorer Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) provides the link between Romantic-era Germany and Latin America. But the reception and critical reworking of German Romantic culture reach far beyond Humboldt's legacy, and still inform contemporary Latin American writing. Initial responses to the European Romantic tradition were deeply embedded in the cultural nationalism of newly-independent nation states. Nineteenth-century Germans, however, often encountered the region through travel writing and landscape painting, in the context of a market for exotic images in the age of European empires. Today, Latin American authors problematize this historic relation, but their work also recalls German Romanticism's formal innovations: non-closure, fragmentation, genre subversion, and translation as linguistic reinvention. These become modes of resistance to a world literary market that replicates on an aesthetic level the colonial relationship between the viewer and the viewed.In its wide-ranging exploration of these cultural affinities, this volume introduces and analyses a sub-field of world literature that transcends linguistic, temporal and spatial borders.Jenny Haase is Professor of Spanish and Latin American Literatures and Cultures at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. Joanna Neilly is Associate Professor in German at the University of Oxford, and a Tutorial Fellow of St Peter's College.

In an era of social crisis and change at the end of the 19th century, the German poet Stefan George created a modern social imaginary for homosexual men. The newly-coined term 'homosexual' gave expression to an emerging category of modern man. But in discovering himself, the modern homosexual found little resonance in the society around him. Through his poetry George created a sense of connectedness and imagined possibilities of liaison, friendship and community among homosexual men where none had existed before. In volumes of verse from the early 1890s until his final volume in 1928, George created a lyric vita, tracing the contours of a homosexual life in language that moves from dark to light, loneliness to companionship. But it is not an easy journey. The period in which George wrote was an era of normative, even militant masculinity. As war raged, George's poetry engaged with tragedy and grief at the loss of the men he loved. Yet his lyric vita ends with a final poetic statement of refusal, which is also the poet at his most authentic: a refusal to mask his true self.Peter Morgan is Professor of European Studies at the University of Western Australia.

The Scandinavian countries regularly top ranking lists for happiness, and are, along with Germany, among the most desired destinations for immigration. But the journey towards them can be arduously challenging, and even on arrival the welcome is often ambiguous. Comparing three novels each from the literatures of Denmark, Germany, Norway and Sweden, this book follows the migratory journey chronologically to explore its impact on the characters' lives, bodies and self-understanding.Through these individually felt experiences, Anja Tröger sheds light on the social and political structures causing conflict and struggle for immigrants. Drawing parallels across national borders, she contends that fiction can constitute a counter-discourse to the marginalisation and othering of refugees and asylum seekers: it can reimagine the lives and voices of those who are usually unheard and unseen.Anja Tröger is Teaching Fellow in Scandinavian Studies at the University of Edinburgh.

This volume opens the world of Old Yiddish to scholars and students of Yiddish and Jewish Studies alike. It is a further step to broaden awareness that Yiddish, far from starting with the nineteenth century, can claim a history of over a thousand years. Presenting topics such as the oldest traces of Yiddish, bibliographical issues, language interaction, inter­­pretation, contextualization and research history, this vol­ume will contribute greatly to understanding of Western Yiddish literature. Uniting renowned and emerging scholars from various disciplines such as philology, history, literary criticism, comparative literature, bibliographical studies, and musicology, Worlds of Old Yiddish Literature makes Old Yiddish Studies the focus of interdisciplinary dialogue within and between its chapters.The editors are Simon Neuberg of Trier University and Diana Matut of the University Halle-Wittenberg.

Dante's works contain too much and too little blood. On the one hand, one might wonder why there is any blood in the Comedy; why are the souls - which lack flesh and blood - bleeding at all? On the other hand, we must ask: in a Christian poem that claims to be salvific, why are references to the Eucharist, and to the Passion either implicit, understated or parodic? Investigating blood across all of the poet's works, Leone shows that Dante's treatment of blood reveals a sophisticated and self-conscious metaliterary project: the poet exploits blood's connotative force in medieval culture in ways that engage with - and diverge from - the various traditions and cultural practices that inform his work: scientific, theological, devotional, classical and literary. Anne C. Leone is Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at Syracuse University.

A porous boundary zone between Europe and Africa, a space at once liminal and peripheral, both a gateway and a border defined through cultural and religious alterity - medieval Iberia challenges post-medieval notions of East, West, nationhood and Europe. Examining the ideological implications of real and fictional travels to the Peninsula in German-language texts ranging from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, Doriane Zerka considers the construction of individual and collective identities, religious, cultural and political. Combining the work of Michel Foucault, postcolonialism and network theory, she sheds light on the ideological processes contributing to the construction of any cultural entity modern audiences might call 'Spanish', 'German' or 'European'.Doriane Zerka is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics, University of Cambridge. Imagining Iberia is her first book, and has been awarded the 2020 Women in German Studies Book Prize and the 2020 Preis der Gesellschaft für interkulturelle Germanistik für jüngere Forscherinnen und Forscher.

The integration of women into public Jewish performance (Yiddish-language theater by 1877 and Hebrew-language theater by about 1918) was a revolution in modern Jewish culture. While a great deal of seasoned Yiddish-speaking male talent preexisted theater in the form of cantors, choristers, and tavern singers, East European Jewish women had no experience participating in public Jewish performance. From the theater's first days, women assumed positions of authority, security, and visibility in great numbers. Rapidly, by the 1890s, when the center of the Yiddish theater shifted from cities throughout Romania and the Russian Empire where it first launched in the late 1870s to cities across the globe - including London, Buenos Aires, and New York City by the turn of the century - substantial numbers of female Yiddish actors enjoyed celebrity on par with their male counterparts.Women on the Yiddish Stage presents an array of scholarly essays that challenge the existing historical accounting of the modern Yiddish theater; highlight pioneering artists, creators, and impresarios; and map sources and methodologies of this rich area of forgotten history.

In the quarter-century following Uruguay's transition to democracy in 1985, there was a surge in the writing and popularity of historical novels. Authors such as Tomás de Mattos, Amir Hamed, Susana Cabrera, Mario Delgado Aparaín and Marcia Collazo Ibáñez engaged with archival sources, historical works, school textbooks, monuments and other forms of material culture in their bid to re-engage with the past.In her new study, Kardak follows the trajectory of recent Uruguayan historical fiction. Though these post-transition authors do not directly represent the 1973-85 dictatorship, instead depicting events of the nineteenth century, they nevertheless use history to address very present concerns of cultural identity. Heroes of independence such as José Gervasio Artigas (1764-1850) are reassessed, and historically marginalised groups like the Indigenous Charrúas and Afro-Uruguayans are brought into the forefront of the national story.

Viewing the films of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub means looking at the construction of cinema itself: image, sound, performance, montage. Their work constitutes one of the most distinctive, beautiful, and politically radical oeuvres of modern cinema and has attracted the attention of a wide range of philosophers, filmmakers, and cineastes. Their sensual cinema of the eye and ear is as rich as the many texts and documents - musical, literary, and visual - that have served as the basis of individual works. Their films propose a Marxist critique of capitalism and suggest alternative ways of living.This volume grew out of the complete retrospective of the films of Huillet and Straub held in London in 2019 which all the authors attended. Editors Martin Brady and Helen Hughes are specialists in German, political, and documentary cinema.

Imagined as an armed old man leaping like a locust or as a young man walking in the dark, doubt occupies a prominent place in the mental landscape of Renaissance Italians. Intriguing stories of doubters, as well as allegories and tales of doubt populated sonnets, dialogues, novelle, religious tracts, and a wealth of other vernacular texts. In an age of crisis and renewal, doubt no longer pointed to an exclusively individual condition nor was it solely the object of philosophical and theological reflections. Rather, doubt became a complex cultural object at the centre of numerous cultural strategies. Why was it so? Were Renaissance Italians especially inclined to doubt? And, if so, what were the cultural and emotional consequences of such an attitude? Resorting to a large and diverse array of literary and visual sources, Marco Faini reconstructs how doubt became a privileged tool to make sense of an increasingly complex world.Marco Faini is Assistant Professor of Italian at the University at Buffalo (SUNY).

In this book, Mairéad Hanrahan examines the shifts in political focus in Genet's writing, from the intimate fantasies of the early novels to the struggle for emancipation of the Palestinians in the posthumously published Un Captif amoureux. She argues that his texts have always been centrally concerned with power relations, challenging from the very beginning the opposition that traditionally confines the political to the public sphere. Genet's writing has always been political - but Hanrahan argues also that it was never solely political. On the contrary, a tension always existed for him between the poetic and the political.Genet's changing focus from the personal to the public is explored via the shifts in his practice of genre. Analysing how genre and politics are inextricably involved in Genet's writing, Hanrahan highlights a core paradox in its evolution. This writer who remained constant over the course of his life in his opposition to hegemonic power relations grappled throughout his work with the suspicion that his art may serve to shore up the very structures he unreservedly contests. Yet his writing also testifies, in both what it says and what it does, to the idea that literature is fundamentally at odds with the social order of the world.Mairéad Hanrahan is Professor of French at University College London.

The decades after World War II saw France's look, feel and lived realities transformed by spatial planning and modernization. Aménagement du territoire was a technical and administrative project, but was also political, moral and philosophical, as well as creative and imaginative. It was driven by a powerful obsession with the future and a belief that spatial planning could create the future in the present. During the presidency of Charles de Gaulle (1958-69), it became a vehicle for reasserting France's place in the world after decolonization and expressing its grandeur as an advanced civilization.In Making Space in Post-war France, Edward Welch tracks the conceptual, ideological and discursive foundations of aménagement, mining an array of material from legislative texts to publicity brochures to investigate how visions of the future were articulated and inscribed on the ground as new towns, infrastructure and other expressions of modernity. He ranges across work by writers, filmmakers and photographers to explore how modernized landscapes and their effect on lived experience begin to permeate French culture during the 1970s and 80s, and how the legacies of spatial planning are negotiated politically, socially and culturally from the 1990s into the new millennium as the French state wrestles with the different pressures affecting its territory.Edward Welch is Carnegie Professor of French at the University of Aberdeen.

A conventional view of Russia represents it as a country where autocracy, centralised rule, and domination by the 'power vertical' both inside and outside the country are inescapable facts of the past and present. But Russia's variety is as important a feature of the place as its size, and over time, politics and culture have radically altered to accommodate historical cataclysms, as well as periods of calm. This collection of essays by Catriona Kelly examines a Russia that is 'out of focus', beyond the usual simplifying optic. It considers often overlooked areas of historical and contemporary experience such as the lives and creative culture of Russian women, of children and teenagers, and of ethnic minorities. An internationally known specialist in Russian culture acts as a guide to unexpected discoveries and unexplored territories at the margins of Empire and the fringes of Europe.Catriona Kelly is Senior Research Fellow in Russian and Soviet Culture at Trinity College and Honorary Professor of Russian and Soviet Culture in the University of Cambridge. She is also Emeritus Fellow in Russian at New College and an Honorary Faculty Research Fellow in Russian at the University of Oxford. She was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2007. She has published many books and articles on Russian history and culture, including A History of Russian Women's Writing (1994), Comrade Pavlik: the Rise and Fall of a Soviet Boy Hero (2005), Children's World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890-1991 (2008), St Petersburg, Shadows of the Past (2014), and Soviet Art House: Lenfilm Studio under Brezhnev (2021).