Böcker utgivna av Verlag Peter Lang

This volume presents selected papers from the conference ¿Violence, Culture and Identity¿ held at St Andrews University in 2003. It seeks to explore the ways in which French writing since 1920 has registered and reflected on the violent national traumas of the World Wars, the Occupation and decolonisation. The essays consider how these crises have led French writers to a critical, often painful reassessment of national, cultural and individual identity. Contributors trace the different challenges offered to any comfortable consensual notions of Frenchness, and to the structures of authority which invest in such a consensus. A recurrent preoccupation is the problematic issue of ¿memory culture¿, especially of how a post-conflict generation copes with an avowed or concealed inheritance of violence and guilt. The thematics, ethics, rhetoric and imagery of violence are charted through debates around surrealism and in writings by major figures, such as Malraux, Sartre, Camus, Genet and Modiano, while a final group of essays looks closely at how a new wave within the popular roman noir genre (the ¿néo-polar¿) engages emphatically and controversially with these issues and their political implications.

French film design throughout the 1930s was a period of 'ripping open' film sets to make them not just descriptive, but also expressive. This book details the elaborate paraphrasing tendencies of French film design in the period, exploring the crucial role of the set designer in the film's evolutionary process.

Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) absorbed the fertile ideas of the German Enlightenment, observed first-hand fresh developments in German Romanticism, and fostered one of Europe¿s last great Classical movements. His insights into the human condition have endured and are as valuable now as they were when he first wrote. His characterisations of human nature remain compelling and his stylistic achievements in language continue to be admired and studied. His writing spanned many genres ¿ poetry, prose, drama, history, philosophy ¿ and includes a rich correspondence with Goethe. In this volume, an interdisciplinary and international group of scholars examines the many sides that Schiller displays. The contributors illuminate key facets of his ideas by organising his writing around his various vocations: his medical training; work as a poet, young dramatist, and author of literary prose; his tenure as a university professor and historian; the mutually productive partnership with Goethe; his philosophical writings; and his final years as a mature playwright. His afterlife, what Schiller has meant to Germans for two centuries, is also considered.

Maxim Gorky was dubbed the father of socialist realism in the Soviet period, but he had forged his career as an internationally known novelist and dramatist some three or more decades earlier. Posing questions that Soviet critics found difficult to confront, the author examines the effects of exile and religion on the content and form of the plays as well as the role played by women, and the personal and political implications of motherhood. All sixteen of Gorky¿s published plays are covered, and the book explores whether this body of work has themes and styles to unify it. While conflict is central to the core political themes and also infiltrates many aspects of the dramatic style (cartoonish and grotesque), other less expected themes and styles emerge. Viewing the post-revolutionary plays as a development of earlier work leads to a question rarely posed: are the plays written by Gorky in the process of defining the new Party-inspired socialist realism in fact less about socialist realist issues of conformity, and more about Gorky¿s own painful life experience? And what is equally under the microscope is a search for the monumental style frequently associated with socialist realist theatre: the proposed origins of the spatial grandeur in Gorky¿s plays come as a surprise.

In celebrating the academic career and practice of a distinguished scholar of French literature, this volume concentrates on one of Peter Broome¿s major preoccupations and attainments: translation. Eschewing a dogmatic, theoretical approach, the contributors (former colleagues and students) tackle four rich areas of study: modern anglophone poets¿ reactions to, and translations of, authors with whom they have closely identified (Racine, the Symbolists, Saint-John Perse, Valéry); problematics of translating specific poets of recent centuries (Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Valéry, Césaire, some contemporary poets); reception and interaction in two foreign countries (Australia, Spain); and a more fluid interpretation of translation, moving the notion across into wider realms of literary expression (Mallarmé, Proust, Assia Djebar). A focalising feature, punctuating the volume, are Peter Broome¿s own translations of hitherto unpublished poems by five major contemporary French writers: Jean-Paul Auxeméry, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Louise Herlin, Vénus Khoury-Ghata and Jean-Charles Vegliante. The book thus intertwines theory and practice in a non-prescriptive manner which invites further elaboration and analysis.

During the mid-nineteenth century, Charlotte Birch-Pfeiffer pursued a fifty-year career as a playwright and theater manager in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland at a time of the transformation of court theaters and itinerant troupes into commercial establishments staffed by middle-class professionals and subject to market forces. Although she has been undervalued by some critics past and present who considered her mainly as an adapter of contemporary novels, this study shows that with her thorough knowledge of the European dramatic tradition, her skill as a playwright, and above all her professionalism she overcame institutional and gender bias to develop a form of drama that integrated the social and economic changes of her time. The analysis focuses on her use of the subversive genre of comedy, the strategies she used to evade the censor, and her employment of assertive female and working-class characters. She revived commedia dell¿arte techniques of the past while devising innovations that anticipated the subsequent course of drama as well as the film techniques of today.

This book seeks to establish the degree to which Gallicisms permeated the Russian language in the eighteenth century. The largest group of borrowings were the semantic and phraseological calques. In order to examine this influence, the author has selected scores of examples from the original works, translations and correspondence of Russian writers from the 1730s to the end of the century. The calques analysed belong to various registers of the literary language, from the prose used in essays and correspondence to the most lyrical form found in poetry and certain translations. This book concludes that the French influence was overwhelming and fully enhanced the Russian literary language that was developed during this period.

This is the first book-length account of Joseph Conrad¿s reception in Germany, a virtually unresearched area of Conrad studies. It demonstrates that Conrad was read and used by his German readers as a cosmopolitan literary and moral voice against the prevailing nationalism of Germany in the ¿dark times¿ of the 1930s and 1940s, when their own voices were being silenced. Challenging the longstanding assumption that Germany remained largely indifferent to his works, this book demonstrates that, particularly after the translation of the complete fiction commencing in the 1920s, Conrad¿s works achieved near cult status in Germany. On the basis of diaries and letters, contemporary reviews and essays, unpublished archival material as well as novels and films, the author illuminates the range and importance of Conrad¿s presence as a powerful liberating imagination within twentieth-century German culture. Championed by Thomas Mann, lauded by Hermann Hesse, and decried as ¿Conrad the Jew¿ by the Nazis, Conrad has remained an influential presence in post-war German culture. The study offers a completely fresh perspective on Conrad¿s works and speaks eloquently for the importance of recognizing the way trans-national literary cultural relations have helped to shape European cultural history.

This volume brings together a collection of essays focusing on selected aspects of inter- and multidisciplinarity in contemporary Austrian culture. These include the connections between literature and the media, literature and the visual arts, literature and travel, and the visual arts and public space. The individual contributions deal with central figures in the Austrian arts, including Thomas Bernhard, Franzobel, Elfriede Jelinek, Peter Handke, Peter Turrini and Doron Rabinovici, as well as collective ventures such as Walter Grond¿s Odysseus project and the museum in progress. They analyse the impact of connections between disciplines on the cultural landscape in contemporary Austria, as well as examining the limits of such interaction between disciplines.