Bücher der Reihe Studies on Themes and Motifs in Literature

The Novels of Zsigmond Móricz in the Context of European Realism is the first English-language monograph on one of Hungary¿s¿and Central Europe¿s¿most important modern authors. Using a thematic approach that privileges literary characters as stand-ins for real human beings, Virginia L. Lewis investigates Móricz¿s thematization of individual agency in seven realist novels that form the foundation of the author¿s reputation as a major twentieth-century novelist. Lewis does an outstanding job of showcasing the research results of the many Hungarian scholars who have studied Móricz¿s narrative output over the past century, while also bringing decidedly new perspectives to the table in introducing the author to an English-speaking audience. Utilizing the theoretical impulses of scholars such as Horst and Ingrid Daemmrich, Margaret Archer, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Ibrahim Taha, among others, Lewis forges a new and productive path in Móricz scholarship, while also making his oeuvre accessible to a global audience. Any reader with an interest in Hungarian and Central European narrative will find this study enormously useful for the revelations it brings regarding Móricz¿s poignant and brilliant critique of the corrosive influence of commodification and greed on human agency in modern society. "Informed by theory and grounded in a critical understanding of Hungarian social history in the first half of the twentieth century, Lewis¿s engaging study of the realist novels of Zsigmond Móricz compels readers to think in new ways about questions of human agency amongst Hungary¿s lower and middle classes as this played out against the backdrop of capitalist transformation and pronounced social conflicts and injustices in the decades leading up to World War II. Skillfully structured around succinct analyses of seven of Móricz¿s key texts, Lewis¿s book addresses a sizable gap in the English-language scholarship on one of Hungary¿s greatest writers, and will be a welcome addition to the libraries of literary scholars and social and intellectual historians alike." ¿Steven Jobbitt, Associate Professor of Central and Eastern European History, Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, Canada

This book is a collection ofessays which discuss fourbrilliant and impressive investigators and detectives in literary masterpieces by Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy Bowers.

The self as a primary literary element can be identified as an axis of symmetry, similar to a central section of a wheel, which connects to all related themes.

Essays in this book deal with Western intellectuals, Arab intellectuals and Arab literary and cultural concerns, the spread of Islamophobia, and the division of what may be called the international intelligentsia into radicals, pundits, renegades, and imposters.

Domestic Biographies

Mutating Idylls examines the surprising presence of the antique literary topos of the idyllic landscape, the locus amoenus, in European literature from the latter half of the nineteenth century.

By situating Gustav Meyrink on the periphery of social and spiritual spheres and by identifying the sleepwalker as a seminal figure of the period as well as in Meyrink's work, Somnambulistic Lucidity echoes Meyrink's own attempts to find lucidity in the ambiguity of somnambulism.

This study posits that ekphrasis and dream interpretation are similar due to both analyzing a visual image and attempting to translate the visual into the verbal in order to gain a better and more complete understanding of it.

This book is an introduction to the theory and a survey of topics pertinent to the evolutionary view on literature.

Becoming Fiction: Reassessing Atheism in Durrenmatt's Stoffe sets forth a clarification of the importance of Friedrich Durrenmatt.

This book is an introductory examination of the Hermetic tradition in the Renaissance and how James Joyce made use of certain of its salient features in his four works of fiction: Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake.

Voices of the Headland: Robinson Jeffers and the Bird of Prey explores the image of the raptor in the poetry of Robinson Jeffers.

In Seven Essays: Studies in Literature, Drama, and Film, Abdulla Al-Dabbagh's unique approach to literary and cultural issues succeeds in casting new light on these subjects, revealing innovative fields of research and investigation.

Negotiating Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Turkey is an essential tool for scholars and students of Middle Eastern literature, Turkish literature and culture, gender and sexuality studies, modern and postmodern literature, postcolonial and feminist literature and studies, cultural studies, religious studies, and women's studies.

Using literary criticism, theory, and sociohistoric data, this book brings into conversation black migrations with mystery novels by African American women, novels which explore fully the psychic, economic, and spiritual impact of mass migratory movements.

This interdisciplinary collection of essays advances the study of anagnorisis («recognition»), a quintessential concept in Aristotelian poetics. This book explores narrative structure and epistemology by examining how anagnorisis works in narrative fiction, music, and film. Contributors hail from the fields of cinema; opera; religion; medieval and modern English, German, and French literatures; comparative literature; and Indian (Sanskrit) and Islamic (Arabic) literatures, both classical and modern.

This interdisciplinary volume centers on the interrelations of storytelling and various manifestations of cultural identity, from written to oral and from autobiographical to regional and national. Indigenous storytelling, as well as storytelling for and by children and the elderly, are the main focus of these essays. Together, these fifteen texts make a significant contribution toward a deeper understanding of various aspects of textual and oral narrative: they broaden the lines of inquiry into multidisciplinary and multicultural interests, particularly those centering on the construction, expression, and contextualization of various types of identity; and they illustrate the deployment of storytelling not only as testimony, contestation, and subversion ¿ but also as peacebuilding. Many countries, languages and cultures are herein represented ¿ from the United States and Canada to Japan, Singapore, and Malaysia, from English to Japanese to Greek to Italian to the languages of indigenous peoples of Latin America and the Philippines.

Islands, both literal and figurative, recur in fiction authored by many prominent Canadian women writers. Using a critical lens based on Northrop Frye and Julia Kristeva, this book closely examines fourteen novels by eight twentieth-century authors, emphasizing works by L. M. Montgomery, Margaret Laurence, and Margaret Atwood. Several of the novels, such as Montgomery¿s Anne of Green Gables, Laurence¿s A Jest of God and The Diviners, Atwood¿s Surfacing and Bodily Harm, Alice Munro¿s The Lives of Girls and Women, and Gabrielle Roy¿s The Tin Flute, are among Canadäs most well-known. Some of the works discussed present the island as a redemptive retreat, but in most cases the island¿s role is ambiguous, ranging from a temporary respite from life¿s pressures to a nightmarish trap.

Frequenting circuses in Paris and Berlin, Frank Wedekind, best known for "Spring Awakening" and the Lulu plays, learned that trapeze artists and tightrope walkers rely on different artificial reference points in space, in order to maintain their balance and orient themselves and to create their own sensorial and phenomenal worlds.

This volume comprises a collection of insightful essays exploring the theme of sanctuaries in Washington Irving's The Sketch Book. These are sanctuaries of natural beauty, peacefulness, architectural splendor, and mythical vitality. In addition, the book presents a short history of sanctuaries in nineteenth-century American and European literature.

Silence and the Silenced: Interdisciplinary Perspectives comprises a collection of essays from North American and European scholars who examine the various ways in which the theme of silence is developed in literary narratives as well as in such visual media as photography, film, painting, and architecture.

Explores how contemporary female authors attempt to save their own world by telling compelling stories that disseminate ideas of justice and equality for all living things, a philosophy called ecofeminism. This book dissects the power of literature to convert minds and hearts in a direction that has the potential.

A collection of essays that explores the theme of magnificent and aesthetically interesting houses in twentieth century European literature. It focuses on important works by Thomas Mann, Evelyn Waugh, J R R Tolkien, and Siegfried Lenz, while also discussing other significant houses in modern European literature.

Weimar and Work: Labor, Literature, and Industrial Modernity on the Weimar Left analyzes writing about work that was published in communist and anarchist newspapers during the Weimar Republic.

Beginning with Joyce and continuing with Woolf and Stein, Gender, Genre, and the Myth of human Singularity addresses the gender-genre law breaking that transcends the rigidity of either term-drama or fiction; it is the transgressive message itself that, ultimately, links these hybridic performances with modernism.

Offers a major reassessment of the French Revolution's impact on the English novel of the Romantic period. This book focuses particularly - but by no means exclusively - on women writers of the time, it explores the enthusiasm, wariness, or hostility with which the Revolution was interpreted and represented for then-contemporary readers.