The Second World War was a common experience of cultural and historical rupture for many European countries, but studies of this period and its after-images often remain locked in national frameworks. Jones comparative study of national memory cultures argues for a more nuanced view of responses to shared issues of remembrance. Focusing on the 1960s and 1970s, two decades of great change and debate in French and German discourses of memory, it investigates literary representations of the Second World War, and in particular the Holocaust, from France and both Germanies. The study encompasses...

Exile has become a potent symbol of Polish and Irish cultures. Historical, political and cultural predicaments of both countries have branded them as diasporic nations: but, in Adorno's dictum, for an exile writing becomes home. Olszewska offers a multifaceted picture of the figure of exile in postwar Poland and Ireland, juxtaposing politics and culture: whereas Irish exile appears more in an economic and cultural context, the essence of Polish exile is political. This comparative study of works by Polish and Irish authors -- Stanisław Barańczak, Adam Zagajewski, Marek Hłasko,...

Three years spent in France, during the 'Second Empire' of Napoleon III, gave Henry James an early mastery of the French language and its literature. When he settled in Europe, as an adult, it was not in Britain but, briefly yet crucially, in Paris. This study identifies the 'missing link' in the history of James's literary engagement with France, between Balzac, revered throughout his career, and later French writers. It was Second Empire writers who spurred James's own contribution to the novel. While realism courted official displeasure, culminating in the prosecution of Flaubert's Madame...

Accounts of travel to England reached unprecedented levels of popularity in the German states in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Competition therefore increased for travel writers to produce travelogues which offered the most authentic, original and vibrant picture of England. The wider range of narrative strategies which travellers consequently deployed increasingly drew on the emotional responses of their audience - whether to serve a political purpose, show concern for the darker side to the Industrial Revolution or simply demonstrate the humanitarian interests of the...

Alienation (Vefremdung) is a concept inextricably linked with the name of twentieth-century German playwright Bertolt Brecht -- with modernism, the avant-garde and Marxist theory. However, as Phoebe von Held argues in this book, 'alienation' as a sociological and aesthetic notion avant la lettre had already surfaced in the thought of eighteenth-century French philosopher and writer Denis Diderot. This original study destabilizes the conventional understanding of alienation through a reading of Le Paradoxe sur le comEdien, Le Neveu de Rameau and other works by Diderot, opening up new ways of...

The ambivalent curiosity of the young poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) towards Plato -- 'but I love Plato -- his dear gorgeous nonsense ' -- soon developed into a philosophical project, and the mature Coleridge proclaimed himself a reviver of Plato's unwritten or esoteric 'systems'. James Vigus's study traces Coleridge's discovery of a Plato marginalised in the universities, and examines his use of German sources on the 'divine philosopher', and his Platonic interpretation of Kant's epistemology. It compares Coleridge's figurations of poetic inspiration with models in the Platonic...

Viktor Shklovskii (1893-1984) is best known as an inventor of Russian Formalism, the literary theorist responsible for ostranenie, defamiliarisation. Just after the 1917 Revolution, Shklovskii claimed Tristram Shandy to be 'the most typical novel in world literature'; he then proceeded to theorise Sterne's formal experiments with plot; to chronicle his own wartime exploits in an autobiographical 'Sentimental Journey'; and to promote Tristram Shandy as a prototype for the new Soviet novel. His reading of Tristram Shandy and his lifelong relationship with its author, Laurence Sterne...

W. B. Yeats and Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) regarded style as a tool for metaphysical inquiry and, consequently, they adopted distinct poetic styles to convey different attitudes towards experience. Silva-McNeill's study examines how the poets' stylistic diversification was a means of rehearsing different existential and aesthetic stances. It identifies parallels between their styles from a comparative case studies approach. Their stylistic masks allowed them to maintain the subjectivity and authenticity associated with the lyrical genre, while simultaneously attaining greater objectivity and...

Walter Pater, best known as the author of The Renaissance (1873) and as Oscar Wilde's tutor and friend, was a leading figure in European aestheticism and British fin-de-siecle culture. Despite this, he has received only limited critical attention, and has tended to be read conservatively. Drawing on Pater's unpublished manuscripts, Giles Whiteley challenges this view of Pater as a closeted don who spent the remainder of his life regretting the excesses of his Renaissance.

Focusing on Pater's reading of the German idealist philosopher, G. W. F. Hegel, Whiteley argues that Pater's response...

How are we to define what is grotesque, in art or literature? Since the Renaissance the term has been used for anything from the fantastic to the monstrous, and been associated with many artistic genres, from the Gothic to the danse macabre. Shun-Liang Chao's new study adopts a rigorous approach by establishing contradictory physicality and the notion of metaphor as two keys to the construction of a clear identity of the grotesque. With this approach, Chao explores the imagery of Richard Crashaw, Charles Baudelaire, and RenE Magritte as individual exemplars of the grotesque in the Baroque,...