Europa kann neu gedacht werden: nicht von den Grenzen und Leitdifferenzen her, sondern von den Übergängen. Die aus vier Kontinenten stammenden Beiträgerinnen und Beiträger befassen sich mit der Frage, inwiefern die Fähigkeit, ästhetische, sprachliche und kulturelle Übergänge angesichts hoher Heterogenität hervorzubringen, Europa am ehesten ausmacht. Von Fatou Diome bis Yoko Tawada, von…
Nation and Migration provides a way to understand recent migration events in Europe that have attracted the world’s attention. The emergence of the nations in the West promised homogenization, but instead the imagined national communities have everywhere become places of heterogeneity, and modern nation states have been haunted by the specter of minorities. This study analyses experiences rel…
In Writing the Yugoslav Wars, Dragana Obradovic analyses how the Yugoslav wars of secession helped shape the region's literary culture. Obradovic argues that the crisis of the country's disintegration posed an ethical challenge to self-identified postmodernists. This book takes a transnational approach to literatures of the former Yugoslavia that have been, since the 1990s, studied separately, …
Trauma has become a hotly contested topic in literary studies. But interest in trauma is not new; its roots extend to the Romantic period, when novelists and the first psychiatrists influenced each others' investigations of the 'wounded mind'. This book looks back to these early attempts to understand trauma, reading a selection of Romantic novels in dialogue with Romantic and contemporary psyc…
Kai Evers’s Violent Modernists: The Aesthetics of Destruction in Twentieth-Century German Literature develops a new understanding of German modernism that moves beyond the oversimplified dichotomy of an avant-garde prone to aggression on the one hand and a modernism opposed to violence on the other. Analyzing works by Robert Musil, Franz Kafka, Karl Kraus, Walter Benjamin, Elias Canetti, and …
Using Vladimir Nabokov as its case study, this volume approaches translation as a crucial avenue into literary history and theory, philosophy and interpretation. It attempts to bring together issues in translation and the shift in Nabokov studies from its earlier emphasis on the metaliterary to the more recent metaphysical approach. Addressing specific texts (both literary and cinematic), the b…
With a focus on the economic, social, and political impetus for producing monuments to knowledge, this volume recognizes the encyclopedic compilation as the quintessential tool of enlightenment knowledge transfer. From its modern origins in seventeenth-century France, encyclopedic compilations met the need for the dissemination of information in a more flexible format, one that eschewed the …
The legacy of the Second World War remains unsettled; no consensus has been achieved about its meaning and its lasting impact. This is pre-eminently the case in France, where the experience of defeat and occupation created the grounds for a deeply ambiguous mixture of resistance and collaboration, pride and humiliation, heroism and abjection, which writers and politicians have been trying to di…
Research that deals with metaphors and linguistic imagery has increased in the last thirty years. However, studies that question existing theories of metaphor from a comparative perspective are less common. The reason for the present theoretical sketch was the metaphorical model of conceptualism, alias the cognitive theory of metaphor: at least with this theory, `metaphor' itself has become a m…
This is the first English translation of a pivotal work in the history of religious tolerance. In Synod on the Freedom of Conscience (1582) the Dutch humanist Dirck Volckertszoon Coornhert (1522-1590) provides one of the first book-length pleas for religious freedom published in the West. His central concern in his writings and exchanges with ministers of the Reformed Church was the safeguardin…