Bücher der Reihe Anthem Impact

This book is about the presence of music in novels. More specifically, it is about music in the early modern novel, with an emphasis on seventeenth-century musical prose from The Netherlands. The essay provides a concise and an accessible introduction into the subject and presents an overview of this compelling and fascinating new research area. In recent years the interest in this subject has substantially increased both among literary criticswho coined a special term for the phenomenon and speak of 'music novels'and academics, who started doing systematic and in-depth musico-literary research. Initially, the research was focused mainly on the influence of music in novels from the period around 1900, the works by modernist writers like Thomas Mann, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Later, also the novelistic oeuvre of twentieth- and twenty-first-century 'musical' authors like Milan Kundera, Simon Vestdijk and Toni Morrison became subject of study. It is remarkable that up until now the presence of musical elements in prose works from earlier centuries received almost no attention from academic researchers. This essay wants to contribute to filling this lacuna. The book offers the reader an impression and overview of this intriguing interdisciplinary field. First, it presents an exploration of the role and function of musical elements in seventeenth-century Dutch prose fiction. Many examples from primary literature are discussed and are consistently considered in the light of contemporary European developments. Secondly, the publication serves as an introduction to a fascinating new research area, that is at an international level, too, virtually unexplored. This makes it the first transnational study devoted to musical practices in the Golden Age novel. Accordingly, the text investigates several options for future research.

Gulf Gothic moves through deep time across languages and borders, presenting haunted, secret-laden narratives that emerge from the gulfs between people all along the Gulf of Mexico and on both sides of the Rio Grande. Collaborating in an interdisciplinary manner, literary and cultural critics Dolores Flores-Silva and Keith Cartwright chart the Gulf as a unified region and ground zero of North American (and global) transculturation.The Gulf of Mexico has been inadequately appreciated as the dynamic transnational region that it is (taking in the Gulf states of Mexico and the U.S., as well as western Cuba), a cultural matrix that nourished the spread of maize agriculture and the rise of a two-thousand-year-old literary historical tradition that has responded to traumas of colonial conquest and plantation slavery. In this study, the Gulf signifies metaphorically and symbolically-as undead space of contacts and supposed impasses between peoples-as well as topographically. Its gothic modalities carry an urgent charge that demands to be addressed in holistic formGulf Gothicaddresses modes of representing all that is blocked from free movement and aspiration. Here, the figure of La Llorona haunts boundary waters and shorelines, voicing much that has been occulted by colonial power and national narrative. La Llorona's Indigenous prototypes, plantation/hacienda atmospherics, and heated storm patterns show up repeatedly in variations of an originary undeadness unconstrained byattempted quarantines and border walls.The authors turn to cinematic horror and the double gaze of ancient Maya texts, to folk-fable and legal documents and popular song, as well as to works by Gloria Anzalda, Sandra Cisneros, Leslie Marmon Silko, Joy Harjo, LeAnne Howe, Kate Chopin, James Weldon Johnson, William Faulkner, Carlos Fuentes, Vicente Riva Palacio, Jesmyn Ward, and Fernanda Melchor, to attend to forces unbound by traditional gothic modalities and their foundational gulfs.

The book explores the Gothic tradition in Swedish literature - including Swedish-language literature by Finland-Swedish writers. It aims to give an overview of the development of Swedish Gothic from the Romantic age until today, and to highlight the characteristic features of the Swedish tradition of Gothic in relation to transnational developments, in particular in relation to the Anglo-American tradition. By using a contextualising comparative perspective, it highlights the most prevalent and prominent feature of Swedish Gothic, the significance of the Nordic landscape, the wilderness and local folklore. In Swedish fiction, the Gothic castle is replaced by the wilderness, and the monster is representative of untamed nature and a barbaric past. The terror is not pointing to the medieval period but is located in pre-Christian, pagan times. Especially in today's Gothic narratives, the presence of mythical creatures and nature beings, such as trolls, tomtes, or vittras, enhances the Gothic atmosphere. Another domestic trend since the mid-nineteenth century, which has become increasingly popular in the last decade, is Gothic crime stories, where the formula of a modern detective story is combined with a Gothic mystery plot. In these stories, supernatural creatures and the interference of paranormal powers constantly obstruct the modern crime investigation. Another predominant feature of Swedish Gothic that will be expanded on is its use of gendered and female monsters. In these kinds of narratives, Swedish writers and filmmakers manipulated the established Gothic conventions of female Gothic in order to make societal anxieties and gender issues visible.Drawing on a theoretical framework of gender theory and intersectionality, mainly theories on gender, race and eco-criticism, in combination with a transnational perspective used in today's comparative literature, the book explores the characteristics of Swedish Gothic. It analyses and contextualises a selection of individual narratives to explore in what way representative Swedish writers modify, transform and domesticize the established Gothic conventions. One chapter is devoted to the significance of the Nordic wilderness and the use of local folklore. Next chapter explores the dominance of gendered female monsters and in what way female and male writers adapt the Gothic elements and aesthetics to a Swedish context. The last chapter on Gothic crime expands on the use of Gothic modes and aesthetics to explore the working of the human mind in relation to crime, repressed collective memories, and cultural taboos.

This book builds on Le Bon's classic, The Crowd, to evaluate the role of crowds in American culture, society and politics.

This book focuses on two significant architectural elements in traditional Chinese buildings, that is, dougong and zaojing. Dougong is a bracket set often sitting above columns and beams as a key component in the great buildings and tombs of imperial China. Variously translated as "caisson," "cupola," and "lantern ceiling," zaojing is a specially constructed coffered ceiling, often profusely decorated with carvings and colourful paintings in various motifs. As sumptuary laws from imperial China stipulated, dougong (in its multiple form) and zaojing used to be constructed only in the great halls of royal palaces and major religious temples. There is ceaseless research on dougong and zaojing by modern architectural scholars. This is also facilitated by the heated architectural heritage conservation movement in contemporary China. As unique features that define the characteristics of Chinese traditional architecture, dougong and zaojing not only widely appear in numerous counterfeit historic structures, but are also creatively revived in many cultural and commercial buildings. This book inquiries about the origin of dougong and zaojing in the Chinese Bronze Age, and their heavenly interpretation in the Han dynasty (206 BCE-220). Compared to their later technically oriented development during the Tang to the Qing dynasties (c. 618-1912), and their modern preservation and innovative reinterpretation, the rich cultural meanings originally embodied in dougong and zaojing have almost disappeared. If the important architectural elements dougong and zaojing are taken for granted as a defining identity of Chinese traditional architecture, then they are feebly reflected in modern architecture practice as a mere visual element. Considering the transcendental quality that dougong and zaojing had in the Han dynasty in effectively expressing a mystical and magical world-view, there is a tangible loss of Chinese architectural heritage today.

Tasos Leivaditis (1922-88), one of the undiscovered greats of Modern Greek literature, entered the poetic scene in the middle of the last century with three short poetry books, presented here in English translation for the first time. These works, received with both popular and critical acclaim upon publication in 1952-53, give compelling testimony to the violence of the twentieth century, witnessed by Leivaditis and his generation in the Nazi occupation of Greece in World War II and the subsequent civil war (1946-49) between the left and right-wing factions. The latter, internecine battle found Leivaditis, a committed communist, on the defeated side, and he was exiled to concentration camps on various islands for more than three years. Soon after his release, he published a remarkable triptych of poetic works that evoke the horrors of war and, in the midst of this, the yearning for justice and peace. The first work in the trilogy, Battle at the End of the Night, is set on the Aegean island of Makronisos, which functioned in the civil war years as an internment camp for leftist dissidents. The entire action takes place over a single, seemingly endless, wintry night reeking of terror and death. But the narrator defiantly retains his faith in our common humanity and his conviction that justice will prevail. The second work, This Star Is For All of Us, is also set during the civil war, but this time the focus is the author''s beloved, Maria. Although imprisoned, he is confident that they will meet again, and his love for her becomes by the end universal in scope. The sense of solidarity also deeply marks the final work, The Wind at the Crossroads of the World, the shortest of the three but the most controversial. The book was banned and Leivaditis thrown into prison once again, the authorities unable to tolerate the book''s "subversive proclamation" of freedom and peace.

The book discusses so-called real socialism and offers an alternative conceptualization of it as authoritarian collectivism, making use of an analytical and developmental methodology, that is, presenting it in categorical terms as well dwelling on its genesis, development and demise. The political dimension stands out in the conceptual articulation, with 'democratic centralism' and the prominence of the Communist Party, working from the top down. The book concentrates on the principles of 'real socialism', particularly in the Soviet Union but also globally, analysing also its present embrace of capitalism, particularly in China, but also elsewhere, taking account of how those political principles remain however in place today. A new civilization was intended, which was supposed to be the first step in the journey towards communism, leading however to an oppressive sort of state/society articulation and to new forms of hierarchy and appropriation of material benefits by the political upper layers.The historical genesis of Soviet 'socialism', through Stalinism and to post-Stalinism, furnished the model to be analysed, but its global spread in China, Vietnam, Africa, Cuba and elsewhere enriched the original experience, but at its core the political system and the state structure that allowed for the prominence of a powerful and exclusivist political bureaucracy was always reinstated. The failure of the system - economically and politically - to withstand the competition which the liberal and capitalist world sustained led to its disappearance in the Soviet Union and other countries or to a transformation that brought back capitalism, which is now combined with the former political structure. China is the foremost example of this new reality, which is however reproduced elsewhere.The book closes with a discussion of the motivation of revolutionary actors, including communism, anti-colonialism and nationalism, the role of unintended consequences in history and what emancipation and socialism might mean today.

Arthur Asa Berger''s Shakespeare''s Comedy of Errorsuses semiotics along with a psychoanalytic approach to offer a granular analysis of one of Shakespeare''s funniest and most interesting comedies. It is distinctive in that it offers a discussion of the basic techniques found in comic literature of all kinds and applies these techniques to events in the play. It also offers a discussion of the basic theories of humor and a syntagmatic and paradigmatic analysis of the play. It provides an overview of the theories of humor, what the author calls why theories, to provide a general understanding of how humor works. This is contrasted with his 45 techniques which deal with what makes people laugh.

An escalating ecological catastrophe is befalling the biosphere in the twenty-first century.The philosophical roots of this catastrophe lie in the deep structural dualism that has characterized the Western tradition. Dualism conceptually divides mind from matter, culture from nature and the human from the animal, thereby giving rise to an exclusively instrumentalist attitude to the natural environment. Science as the engine of modernity is now the chief global vector of dualism and by its means the instrumentalist attitude has spread around the world. According to the author, this foundational flaw in Western thinking may be traced ultimately to the Greek discovery of philosophia; that is to say, it may be traced to philosophy itself and to the theoretic orientation to which philosophy led. Any escape from dualism thus requires training in an altogether alternative mode of cognition, a strategic and synergistic mode cultivated not via abstract theorizing but by visceral, sensory, agentically engaged practices of responsive attunement to one's immediate environment. Such practices were the province of pre-agrarian societies that relied on foraging, and hence on intimate attunement to local ecologies, for their livelihood. Vestiges of this earlier pattern of practice were also preserved in the indigenous Chinese tradition of Daoism via a repertory of psychophysical exercises designed to induce attuned responsiveness to environmental cues. First-hand opportunities for responsive engagement with local ecologies must rather be routinely available to people today just as they were to earlier peoples. Societies must reconfigure economic praxis so that human agency, in its most routine daily forms of expression, interacts synergistically with the biosphere rather than imposing its own abstractly preconceived designs upon it. This is required not only because such reconfigured praxis will serve and sustain life on earth at a biological level but also because it is what is needed to induct people themselves into ecological awareness. The book includes instances of such alternative, synergistic modes of praxis - in agriculture, manufacture and architecture. As an emerging super-power whose thought-roots are in strategic as opposed to theoretic modes of cognition, China is in a position to assume world leadership in this connection. The author appeals directly to China to reclaim its Daoist heritage, apply this heritage to the problem of praxis today, and thereby light the way towards forms of civilization more appropriate to our times.

How have human rights been entangled with state control of the body? And how have they failed to intervene effectively on tipping points such as the US's endorsement of torture that removes the victim's control over their own body? This book explores the way institutional human rights have glossed over such abuses and been complicit in security politics which see the Muslim body, especially the Muslim woman's body, as an object of control.

This book explores the philosophy of economic forecasting under uncertainty. In economics the extreme events are difficult and often impossible to predict, especially when leaning upon the past only. Events can be approximately evaluated, as they may be sudden and erratic. The presentation of programs for years ahead is of little value because the uncertainty intervals expand when economic volatility increases, forming uncertainty bands. This book presents the effect of an expanding uncertainty band.This book reasons that the economic system has sensitivity thresholds - critical states of economic processes at which they significantly alter their characteristics. In those critical states, economic phase transitions may occur. A slowdown in economic growth, especially a tangible recession, can result in negative qualitative changes in the economy, which can have a long-term impact. As in medicine, in economics, the diagnosis must not be rigid and permanent. Vital indicators could and will change throughout therapy. A rigid forecast resulting in an attempt to ensure the rigid stability of indicators is dangerous and fraught with irreparable economic losses.To solve the issue of inflexible programs, this book presents the minimal uncertainty interval. This method is to open a logical path from the predicament of explaining its quantitatively precise indefinability of the indicators. The aim is to contribute to the flexible and realistic concept about possible dynamics of economic processes with interval forecasts and probabilistic evaluations of those events' outcomes. It is indicated that exiting the allowable intervals of regulatory indicators contributes to the emergence of economic diseases. This book tries to explore and systematize economic diseases, presents the factors that affect forecast efficiency, and makes the forecast satisfactory. Based on the systematization of the conducted research, this book formulates the ten principles of forecasting, which are necessary for forecasting the economic processes and decision-making under uncertainty.

The first chapter is an overview of the current "e;crisis"e; of literary study, brought about by downsizings following the crash of 2008 (from which literary studies never really recovered), compounded by the Covid pandemic, and rocked by the bedrock questions put to the academic study of literature by the Black Lives Matter protests. This chapter also looks at why theory matters in the present - as an introduction to modes of questioning and ways of life, which the author opposes to the English department's understanding of literature as a series of disciplinary objects to be understood or appreciated.The second chapter is a specific exploration of the novel, the current reigning form of literature and literary study in both popular and academic contexts, and the novel's relation to the present (of new materialism) and the past (the European history of the novel as the official form for warehousing bourgeois subjective experience). If new materialism (including anti-racist critiques) questions the world-view of bourgeois Eurocentric humanism, it also brings into question the centrality of that world view's primary artistic form, the novel.

The idea of occupational devotion, or devotee work, was conceptualized and incorporated in the serious leisure perspective as one of the two serious pursuits. The other pursuit is serious leisure itself, with both forms being anchored in activities that are immensely appealing and fulfilling. Despite such desirable qualities the serious pursuits constitute a minority of all work and leisure, these two domains being dominated by disagreeable work and hedonic casual leisure activities. The devotee occupations serve as full-time or part-time livelihoods for people fortunate enough to have found them. Such work has so far been observed to exist in four sectors of the economy: the liberal professions, consulting occupations, craft-like trades, and creativity-based small businesses. In ways to be set out in the coming chapters, devotee work roots in serious leisure, and many participants in the latter have no desire to pursue the former. Moreover, some of those who do "e;quite their day job"e; to try to make a living at their leisure passion fail to achieve this dream and are forced to return to pure amateur, hobbyist, or career volunteer status. That is, these aspirants fail to make enough money to live as they need to, whether at a level of poverty or near-poverty (eg, the starving artist), passable living, or comfortable living.Neither type of serious pursuit offers an unalloyed life of positiveness. Nevertheless, both are hugely attractive, even while the enthusiasts invariably face some costs and unpleasant requirements that weigh against the powerful rewards. So it is that, unlike casual leisure, perseverance and effort number among the defining qualities of the serious pursuits.

On Becoming Reasonable" explores the contributions that 18th Century Scottish philosophers Thomas Reid, Adam Smith, and David Hume make to our understanding of important factors in the development of children as they gradually acquire central features of reasonableness.

The book begins with a background reference to the importance and impact that both teaching and research activities have traditionally had on a university's status in terms of its reputation and standing. It focuses on the political changes in the United Kingdom and highlights how the shifts in political thinking in recent years has changed the demographics of students entering higher education. Higher education is funded and the shift from being state funded to the student-funded model has meant that focus has shifted for higher education institutes to one in which the student is now being viewed as a fee-paying customer seeking value for money. As a consequence, universities are expected to be held more accountable to the service they are providing. With the introduction of the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) in the United Kingdom, the importance and status of teaching is being raised by attempting to rebalance the dominance of research and the Research Excellence Framework (REF) which for so long has been the main focus of higher education Institutions. The book explores the potential controversy that has arisen around the assessment of teaching quality used as a metric from the TEF outcomes to allow higher education institutes to increase tuition fees for students. The book explores a range of student-centered approaches to teaching and learning that are proving to be very effective in enhancing the overall student teaching experience and also examines the argument that a one-size-fits-all model does not necessarily work well in higher education. With the ever more advances in digital technology, the book considers ways in which this technology can assist academics in helping to enhance the teaching and learning in the classroom as well as in cases of emergency scenarios such as the shutdown of education institutions in March 2020 due to COVID-19.

Cornwall as Strange Fiction is focused on written and visual culture that is made in, or made about, Cornwall and where there is affinity with Gothic. Cornwall and the Scilly Isles (known as 'Kernow' in the Cornish language) have a special relationship with Gothic, one that has been overlooked in the literature on regional Gothic. In 1998, Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik coined the term 'Cornish Gothic' in relation to the work of Daphne du Maurier. Since then, however, there have been few discussions of the distinctive types of Gothic engendered by cultural and imaginative re-creations of Cornwall or where it has played a generative role within creative practice. Cornwall as Strange Fiction argues that a persistent imaginative romance with the peninsular has produced a specific and distinctive set of Gothic fictions and creative outputs that mark an exciting new departure in the discussion of regional and media-aware Gothic studies.In his chapter on 'Regional Gothic', Jarlath Killeen cites the Celtic fringes as 'Ireland, Scotland and Wales' (2009, pp. 92-3). Cornwall is forgotten in this account, but it is this often continued absence of Cornwall that at least in part defines it as a Gothic space. Cornwall as Strange Fiction argues that Cornwall has a culturally acquired liminality, becoming a space of ambivalence, absence, excess and loss. Cornwall is too far away and yet at the same time too near (at least for British scholars of Gothic). It has an excess of history, mythic non-history and identity, uncanny light and sublime sculptural stones, all representing both creative plenitude and its lack. This book looks to the visual, the digital and to adaptation, to contemporary as well as traditional platforms, in pursuit of our argument that Kernow thrives as a dark economy for the creative imagination. We address the ways in which different platforms, the novel, film or painting, shape articulations of Gothic Kernow, alongside our attention to the threads of intertextual dialogue that weave among such diversity.Central to our argument and method is the fact that Gothic Kernow is always situationally produced as a framework within which different aesthetic, psychological and social agendas sit. As we will show, the texts and artefacts that we discuss are shaped by a confluence of medial formats and aesthetic concerns, political and social contexts, all filtering through the perceived magics, mysteries and myths of Cornwall. We are therefore intent on demonstrating how, as both an imagined and real space, Cornwall becomes the subject of Gothic concerns, particularly in terms of otherness, animism and the sublime. Offering new insights into the relationships between place and Gothic, this book aims to engender and encourage greater debate through our argument that Cornwall plays a potent role in the landscape of regional Gothic and that it needs to be considered more fully as a major catalyst in the Gothic imagination. Most importantly, this book argues and demonstrates that Gothic Kernow needs to be considered as a powerful force in the development of Gothic grammar generally.

In 1955 'Jedda' was released in Australian cinemas and the international film world, starring Indigenous actors Rosalie Kunoth and Robert Tudawali. That year Eric Bell watched the film in the Liberty Cinema in Yass. Twelve years later he was dismayed to read a newly erected plaque in the main street of the Yass Valley village of Bowning. It plainly stated that the Ngunnawal people, on whose country Bowning stood, had been wiped out by an epidemic of influenza. The local Shire Council was responsible for the plaque; they also employed Bell's father. The Bells were Ngunnawal people. The central paradox of 'Dispossession and the Making of Jedda (1955)' is the enthusiasm of a pastoral community, made wealthy by the occupation of Ngunnawal land, for a film that addressed directly the continuing legacy of settler-colonialism, a legacy that was playing out in their own relationships with the local Ngunnawal people at the time of their investment in the film. While the local council and state government agencies collaborated to minimize the visibility of Indigenous peoples, and the memory of the colonial violence at the heart of European prosperity, a number of wealthy and high-profile members of this pastoral community actively sought involvement in a film that would bring into focus the aftermath of colonial violence, the visibility of its survivors and the tensions inherent in policies of assimilation and segregation that had characterized the treatment of Ngunnawal people in their lifetimes. Based on oral histories, documentary evidence, images and film, 'Dispossession and the Making of Jedda (1955)' explores the themes of colonial nostalgia, national memory and family history. Charles Chauvel's 'Jedda' (1955), a shared artefact of mid-twentieth-century settler-colonialism, is its fulcrum. The book newly locates the story of the genesis of 'Jedda' and, in turn, 'Jedda' becomes a cultural context and point of reference for the history of race relations it tells.

California has always represented new beginnings and opportunities in a golden land. In constructing the California Dream, much has been omitted or repressed. This study explores the dark side of the dream, as revealed in the state's rich tradition of Gothic literature and film.

Using a local land reclamation project of the later eighth century, this book explores the interaction between a local culture of the southeast coast and the Sinitic culture of the north.

Peruvian Foreign Policy in the Modern Era is a chronological treatment of Peruvian foreign policy from 1990 to the present. It focuses on the impact of domestic politics, economic interests, security concerns, and alliance diplomacy on contemporary Peruvian foreign policy.