Böcker utgivna av Verlag Peter Lang

Until relatively recently, the Italian colonial experience was largely regarded as an incidental aspect of Italy¿s past. Studies of liberal Italy and even fascism underplayed both the significance of the state¿s colonial ambition and its broader cultural impact. In the post-war era, even less consideration has been given to how this colonial legacy still affects Italy and the countries it occupied and colonized. This book arises out of a major two-day international conference held at the Italian Cultural Institute in London in December 2001. The essays investigate the ways in which the Italian colonial experience continues to be relevant even after the end of empire. They explore the ways in which the memories of Italy¿s colonial past have been crafted to accommodate the needs of the present and the extent to which forgetting colonialism became an integral part of Italian culture and national identity. These issues have come into sharper relief of late as labour migration to Italy has led to new social and cultural encounters within Italy. The essays additionally investigate the colonial legacy from the perspective of Italy¿s former colonies, highlighting the enduring social, cultural and political ramifications of the colonial relationship. This interdisciplinary collection contains contributions from international experts in the fields of history, cultural studies (literature and film), politics and sociology.

Explores the visual, textual, performative, and perceptual aspects of this phenomenon, with particular emphasis on painting and sculpture in late medieval Cologne. This book examines the cult from the core outward, seeking to understand hagiographic texts and images in terms of their role in articulating relic cults.

This book examines the presentation of, and attitudes to, the Second World War in post-war West German prose fiction. The fierce public reactions which some of these works provoked at the time of their publication are taken into account in this study since their reception provides a picture of the psychological relationship West Germany had with its wartime past in the immediate post-war period and beyond. Writers of Unterhaltungsliteratur and Trivialliteratur are often studied within their own genre, but, this book sets such writers alongside their canonical colleagues. This approach opens up the possibility of considering whether the strategies adopted to influence contemporary society, to reflect that society and to come to terms with the Second World War are determined by the classification of these works as Kitsch or Kunst. The authors included are Alfred Andersch, Heinrich Böll, Hans Hellmut Kirst, Heinz G. Konsalik, Theodor Plievier and Erich Maria Remarque. The selected works deal specifically with the German soldier and officer, the fighting fronts, the home front and the connections between the German army and the National Socialist regime.

This book explores Jewishness in the writings of Isaac Bashevis Singer. The author makes a close examination of Singer¿s literary works, Judaism, Jewish history and related criticism to illustrate Singer¿s unique but ambiguous position in American Jewish literature. The book offers a discussion of Singer¿s modernity. Singer¿s Jewishness finds its major expression in challenging the notion of covenant and the concept of «the coming modern consciousness» of Spinozäs philosophy. The book also focuses on Singer¿s representation of Jewish assimilation in the past and present, both in Poland and in America and on the de-Americanisation of the Holocaust. After an examination of Singer¿s narrative strategies the author also discusses the similarities and diversities of four major American Jewish writers, Singer, Bellow, Malamud and Roth in terms of Jewish identity and Jewish historical consciousness.

This wide-ranging and provocative study focuses on the importance of the mother in the genealogical and social frameworks of the Old French and Occitan chanson de geste. The masculine dominance of these narratives of warfare and conflict is questioned, reassessed, and redefined, as the complexity and significance of the maternal character is revealed through the study of a contrasting range of epic texts, with Raoul de Cambrai providing a key focus. The study draws upon medieval theological and scientific doctrine and modern psychoanalytic and feminist theory, especially the works of Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Jaques Lacan, to illuminate the tensions and ambiguities consistently inherent in the perception of the mother and the maternal body. Authority, continuation, violence, and death are key topics, revealing the problematic nature of gender roles and their relation to the structures of power that shape both medieval society and epic narrative.

This book brings together a number of ground-breaking essays that explore the interface of language and gender-consciousness in foundation texts of Judaism and Christianity. Using critical perspectives that derive from a feminist revaluation of traditional religious discourse, the contributors to this volume address basic questions of meaning and interpretive freedom that are integral to a contemporary reading of Scripture and liturgy. They raise such issues as the relevance of a liturgical tradition in which the Deity is addressed in exclusively masculine terms, and the continued viability of scriptural texts that reflect consistently androcentric values. In each of these essays the authors can be seen to respond to the challenge of the feminist critique of patriarchalism in the Western religious tradition, as well as to the perceived need, within contemporary Judaism and Christianity, for new interpretive models for the reading of sacred texts.

The male homosexual appears in many guises in postwar West German literature: whether he is a sexually predatory soldier, corrupt teacher, decadent artist, purveyor of kitsch, or powerful industrialist, he appears almost always as an insider of the social and political system. Writers such as Heinrich Böll, Wolfgang Koeppen and Alfred Andersch utilized images of homosexuality in order to examine the Nazi past and to critique the Federal Republic of Germany. Their literary depictions are informed by discourses that circulated in the early twentieth century, including the scientism of Magnus Hirschfeld, the masculinism of the German youth movement and the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen, and the literary irony of Thomas Mann. Pre-Nazi images of homosexuality reappear in postwar West German literature in a new sociohistorical context, in which the meaning of the Nazi past and its relationship to the new Federal Republic is debated on many levels. The Nazi Abduction of Ganymede traces the development of a postwar West German literary tradition that participated in parallel developments in philosophy, psychoanalysis, and popular culture, all of which continued to find new ways to link homosexuality with fascism.

This book takes as its terrain the changing perceptions of evil across centuries of English Literature. Starting with the models of conflict and malevolence in the Book of Genesis, its paths are the themes of ambition, desire, survival, belief and knowledge, from the Middle Ages to the present day. As if looking through both ends of a telescope, it moves forward in time, propelled by what has been left behind and by our knowledge of what will follow. Because the cinema is so vibrant an archive of shifting images of ourselves, selected films are viewed alongside the narrative fiction, drama and poetry of each chapter. Throughout the book, résumés and quotations bring as-yet-unread writings into the same line of vision as all the others. Exploring Evil confronts the diversity of evils reflected in literary depictions of human behaviour and finds two constant elements: the abuse of free will and a denial of the humanity of others. The author argues that, however much its forms and objectives may change, the supremacy of evil in the life of the imagination remains unassailable.

This is a study of the sociopolitical role of the belief in chen prophecy in early medieval China. The chen prophecies discussed in this work are not confined to the traditional prophetic-apocryphal texts. Many contemporary prophecies emerged and circulated in association with current events; personal names, reign titles, poems, folk and children¿s rhymes, even rumor-rhymes were recognized as heavenly revelations. Although prophetic utterances were used as psychological weapons in politics, it would be wrong to regard chen prophecy as simply political propaganda. Chen prophecies were believed to be genuine prophetic messages at the time. Chen prophecy was an indispensable part of a symbolic ritual of legitimation of mandate-transfer. It was recognized as a coded revelation that derived its prophetic power from the primitive belief in the magic power of words. The emphasis on winning public acceptance may have been another source of its prophetic power. Social integration, legitimation of dynastic change, and the hopes for a better future in an age of tumult thus depended on the belief in the interaction between Heaven¿s mandate and man¿s destiny.