Böcker utgivna av Verlag Peter Lang

This book examines the responses of visual artists, including architects, designers and photographers, to the technological and social modernisation of Germany during the first three decades of the twentieth century. It investigates how these aspects of the modernising process inform both the subject matter and formal innovations of their work. The study analyses how these visual practices were not just the concerns of isolated and enclosed art worlds but had wider social resonances, ranging from the debates concerning the reformist objectives of the Deutscher Werkbund (1907) to the National Socialist ideological onslaught on modernist culture culminating in the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibitions of 1937. Many of the artists encountered here were radicalised by the First World War, the Russian Revolution and the November 1918 Revolution in Germany, experiences which effected change in their conceptualising of cultural production and its social function: their modes of working, however, would also set challenging markers for what forms art might take for the twentieth century. The book is, therefore, both a study of art in complex political and sociocultural contexts and a reflection on how engagement with a social imagination can challenge a tradition based on the assumptions of individual imaginings.

Until relatively recently, the Italian colonial experience was largely regarded as an incidental aspect of Italy¿s past. Studies of liberal Italy and even fascism underplayed both the significance of the state¿s colonial ambition and its broader cultural impact. In the post-war era, even less consideration has been given to how this colonial legacy still affects Italy and the countries it occupied and colonized. This book arises out of a major two-day international conference held at the Italian Cultural Institute in London in December 2001. The essays investigate the ways in which the Italian colonial experience continues to be relevant even after the end of empire. They explore the ways in which the memories of Italy¿s colonial past have been crafted to accommodate the needs of the present and the extent to which forgetting colonialism became an integral part of Italian culture and national identity. These issues have come into sharper relief of late as labour migration to Italy has led to new social and cultural encounters within Italy. The essays additionally investigate the colonial legacy from the perspective of Italy¿s former colonies, highlighting the enduring social, cultural and political ramifications of the colonial relationship. This interdisciplinary collection contains contributions from international experts in the fields of history, cultural studies (literature and film), politics and sociology.

Explores the visual, textual, performative, and perceptual aspects of this phenomenon, with particular emphasis on painting and sculpture in late medieval Cologne. This book examines the cult from the core outward, seeking to understand hagiographic texts and images in terms of their role in articulating relic cults.

This book examines the presentation of, and attitudes to, the Second World War in post-war West German prose fiction. The fierce public reactions which some of these works provoked at the time of their publication are taken into account in this study since their reception provides a picture of the psychological relationship West Germany had with its wartime past in the immediate post-war period and beyond. Writers of Unterhaltungsliteratur and Trivialliteratur are often studied within their own genre, but, this book sets such writers alongside their canonical colleagues. This approach opens up the possibility of considering whether the strategies adopted to influence contemporary society, to reflect that society and to come to terms with the Second World War are determined by the classification of these works as Kitsch or Kunst. The authors included are Alfred Andersch, Heinrich Böll, Hans Hellmut Kirst, Heinz G. Konsalik, Theodor Plievier and Erich Maria Remarque. The selected works deal specifically with the German soldier and officer, the fighting fronts, the home front and the connections between the German army and the National Socialist regime.

This book takes as its terrain the changing perceptions of evil across centuries of English Literature. Starting with the models of conflict and malevolence in the Book of Genesis, its paths are the themes of ambition, desire, survival, belief and knowledge, from the Middle Ages to the present day. As if looking through both ends of a telescope, it moves forward in time, propelled by what has been left behind and by our knowledge of what will follow. Because the cinema is so vibrant an archive of shifting images of ourselves, selected films are viewed alongside the narrative fiction, drama and poetry of each chapter. Throughout the book, résumés and quotations bring as-yet-unread writings into the same line of vision as all the others. Exploring Evil confronts the diversity of evils reflected in literary depictions of human behaviour and finds two constant elements: the abuse of free will and a denial of the humanity of others. The author argues that, however much its forms and objectives may change, the supremacy of evil in the life of the imagination remains unassailable.

This volume presents a selection of essays in English and French initially delivered at the interdisciplinary conference of the Association of Modern and Contemporary France held in Leicester in September 2000. Frontiers are defined broadly in terms of material and symbolic inter- and transnational spaces where French and Francophone artists, communities and nations face their own selves and each other. Contributors reflect on the relationships between various cross-boundary contacts and perceptions of identity, power and marginality.

A series of intertextual short stories by Joyce Carol Oates, published in 1972, constitutes the subject-matter of the present work. Having entered into ¿literary marriages¿ with beloved masters, such as Kafka, Joyce, Thoreau, Flaubert, James and Chekhov, Oates has ¿re-imagined¿ their classic masterpieces. This study aims at finding out whether Oates remains ¿faithful¿ to the original versions. What elements besides the titles are retained, or added? Why does a young American woman writer undertake a dialogue with deceased authors and their texts? Why the short story genre? What is Oates¿s relationship to intertextuality, literary tradition, or the very aesthetics of her own art? Grounded in theories of intertextuality, comparative analyses show that Oates remains ¿faithful¿ in some of her spiritual unions, while committing ¿infidelities¿ in others. For a woman writer in the 1970s transgression was a necessity for survival; these stories thus belong to the revisionary movement. While assimilating and engendering a strongly Eurocentred male literary tradition, Oates manages to unlock energy from the original stories transforming them into expressions of her very own distinct literary voice.

Refugee research and debate have focused on international agreements, border controls and the legal status of asylum seekers. The lived, daily life of refugees in different phases of their flight has thus been unduly neglected. How have refugees experienced policies of reception and resettlement, and how have they individually and collectively built up their own cultures of exile? To answer these questions the author of this study has undertaken long-term fieldwork as a community worker in a Norwegian municipality. Refugees from Chile, Iran, Somalia, Bosnia and Vietnam were on occasions subjected to exclusionary and discriminatory practices. Nevertheless, restistance was seen in the form of a Somali women¿s sewing circle, the organisation of a multi-cultural youth club, running refugee associations and printing their own language newspapers. Moreover, in activities such as these, refugees addressed and came to terms with a limited number of shared existential concerns: morality, violence, sexuality, family reunion, belonging and not belonging to a second generation. Drawing upon these experiences a general theory of refugeeness is proposed. It states that the cultures refugees create in exile are the necessary prerequisite for self-recognition and survival.

This volume, containing selected papers from a conference held by the Department of French in the University of Cambridge in 1999, addresses the exciting and challenging figure of the shifting border in modern French literature and literary theory. Using a variety of critical approaches, the contributors map the fluctuating borders in specific literary texts and explore how these moving boundaries reflect on their practice of literary analysis. Inspired by the ideas of European and American thinkers, including Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan and Jean-François Lyotard, they consider three major areas of current concern: the construction of identity, the conceptualisation of literary genres and the demarcation of geographical and cultural domains. Applying their insights to a wide-ranging corpus of francophone texts, this volume analyses the work both of canonical figures such as Mallarmé, Proust and Zola and of lesser-known writers such as Aimé Césaire, Assia Djebar and St. John Perse.