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 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.

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

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.

Body Language

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), perhaps the most famous European poet of the twentieth century, exemplifies how the crisis of language inherent in literary Modernism also constitutes a crisis of religious discourse. This book offers readings of major texts such as "The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge" and "The Duino Elegies".

Africana Women Writers: Performing Diaspora, Staging Healing focuses on contemporary literary works, plays in particular, written after 1976 by Africana women writers. DeLinda Marzette explores the numerous ways these women writers create black female agency and vital, energizing communities.

Domestic Biographies

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 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.

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.

Considers rhetoric of burial reform, cemeterial customs, and epitaphic writing in Great Britain from mid-nineteenth century through Great War. This book studies mid- and late-Victorian responses to death and burial, including epitaph collections, and fictional representations of burial and epitaph writing, especially in novels of Charles Dickens.

Beautiful Sanctuaries in Nineteenth- and Early-Twentieth-Century European Literature

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 book is a collection of great and insightful essays which discuss heroic endeavors to save endangered heirs and estates by searching devotedly for the truth in various criminal and civil situations.

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.

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.

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.

The Final Crossing: Death and Dying in Literature compiles fifteen in-depth, scholarly, and original essays on death and dying in literature from around the globe and from different time periods. Written from a variety of critical perspectives, the essays target both scholars and serious students.

This unique work of scholarship explores contemporary issues of male spectatorship and the importance of biography for art criticism in the work of Tracy Chevalier, Eunice Lipton, Anna Banti, Kate Braverman, and Susan Vreeland.