Böcker utgivna av Vernon Press

Contemporary society has witnessed radical changes in the field of communications in terms of how messages and meanings are disseminated. Digitalization and the Internet have signalled an exponential rise in the circulation of multimodal texts in which different semiotic resources are orchestrated together to construct meaning in all areas of social life, across languages and cultures, and in diverse specialized discourse domains. This has foregrounded the need to examine the semiotic functions, affordances, and issues at stake in a range of multimodal discourse forms, while simultaneously highlighting the importance of critical multimodal literacy in audiences and learners. This volume develops and extends pioneering research on the intersection between multimodality and specialized discourse. Seven newly commissioned studies offer innovative perspectives on multimodal research methodologies and applications in a variety of ESP (English for Specific Purposes) contexts for practitioners and scholars alike. The volume offers a glimpse at future directions in this dynamic and ever-evolving area of investigation focusing on the synergy between verbal and non-verbal modes of communication in the digital age. Each chapter explores an original area of application: academic, economic, scientific, marketing, legal, medical, and political. The contributors approach multimodality from a range of theoretical and methodological viewpoints including synchronic and diachronic corpus-based and corpus-aided studies, critical discourse analysis, and systemic functional linguistics. Analytical tools such as multimodal (critical) discourse analysis, multimodal transcription, and multimodal annotation software capable of representing the interplay of different semiotic modes - speech, intonation, direction of gaze, facial expressions, gesturing, and spatial positioning of interlocutors - are employed. The diversity of research strands contained in the volume illustrates just some of the vast areas of multimodal knowledge dissemination that are still unmapped. As a cornerstone of communication, multimodality needs exploring in all its facets. These contributions aim to further that cause.

During the Second World War, approximately 25,000 Dutchmen served within the ranks of the military branch of the German SS: the Waffen-SS. They volunteered to fight to secure the victory of Nazi Germany. These Dutch volunteers fought mainly on the Eastern Front, and to a lesser extent, within their own national borders. After the war, the Allied victors regarded them as part of a criminal organization and jointly responsible for the atrocious transgressions of the Nazi regime. In the Netherlands, these men were reviled, branded as traitors and became pariahs in their own country. Those who had devoted themselves to the Nazi regime caused so much grief to the Netherlands that they had to be held accountable. Despite their military achievements, their reputation was damaged forever.The Netherlands supplied the largest contingent of SS soldiers from the occupied North-western European territories. Who were these people? What led them to enlist, and what were the consequences of their choice? An important part of this study involves the autobiographical texts of nineteen Dutch volunteers in the Waffen-SS. These ego-documents recount their own immediate experiences and are mainly fragments from diaries, but there are also letters, individual notes, and memoirs. The ego-documents are placed within the larger historical context to provide an answer to the question of whether these men were only ideologically motivated and unconditional Nazi sympathizers, and for this, their criminal records are also researched. Among other topics, the book discusses their choice to enlist, their experiences at the front, and their involvement in genocide, providing a new perspective on the Eastern Front.

Despreciado por la crítica por su condición de literatura popular y femenina, el género romántico no solo continúa imbatible en el mercado editorial con su elevado índice de ventas, sino que en las últimas décadas está siendo objeto de interesantes estudios académicos. "Discursos e Identidades en la Ficción Romántica" se suma a esta corriente, al abordar el análisis interdisciplinar de un corpus de novelas publicadas en lengua inglesa entre 1955 y 2004. Ambientados en las islas atlánticas de Madeira y Canarias, estos textos encierran una variedad de discursos que ponen de manifiesto una visión muy anglófona de los lugares visitados por las protagonistas. Además del esperado discurso de género, en sus páginas se detecta un discurso del paraíso que resalta el exotismo de las islas, despertando en ocasiones la concienciación medioambiental, aunque también se perciben actitudes lingüísticas e incluso raciales, a medida que las autoras indagan en el descubrimiento del Otro. Ni los personajes ni los narradores son ajenos al choque de identidades y al contacto lingüístico (anglo-español y anglo-portugués), de manera que los conflictos que generan la identidad nacional, la identidad de género y la identidad étnica se vislumbran claramente tras la aparente sencillez de la intriga amorosa de este tipo de novelas. Disdained by critics for its status as popular and feminine literature, romance fiction not only remains unbeatable in the publishing market in terms of sales, but has also been the subject of interesting academic studies in recent decades. "Discourses and Identities in Romance Fiction" joins this trend by addressing the interdisciplinary analysis of a corpus of novels published in English between 1955 and 2004. Set on the Atlantic islands of Madeira and the Canaries, these texts develop a variety of discourses that reveal a very Anglophone vision of the places visited by their protagonists. In addition to the expected gender discourse, these romances tend to include a paradise narrative that highlights the exoticism of the islands, sometimes awakening environmental awareness. Linguistic and even racial attitudes also come to the forefront, as the writers explore and describe the features of the Other. Neither the characters nor the narrators are oblivious to the clash of identities and the linguistic contact (English-Spanish and English-Portuguese) exposed in this type of novels, revealing the conflicts generated by national, gender and/or ethnic identities behind the apparent simplicity of their love plots.