Hofmannsthal's comedy An Impossible Man is by common consent considered his stage masterpiece and has assumed the status of a classic in German-speaking countries. It is a play both about the passing historical moment which marked the end of the Habsburg era, together with its culture and class structure, whilst it is also a finely gauged critique of language as the badge of that culture. The highly polished, crafted diction the playwright employs shows up language as the flawed but indispensable vehicle of social communication. Hofmannsthal's dramatic technique is comparable to...

Thursdays with Leila exemplifies the slapdash style and narrative verve, piety and subversion, timeless myth and topicality that made CorIn Tellado the queen of the Spanish romance. Of a later generation than Britain's Barbara Cartland or France's Delly, she, like them, nevertheless wrote in a society tensed between the inexorable development of modernity and a deep-rooted social conservatism.

Tellado's tales of love, and of women's difficult quest for material and emotional wellbeing, clearly gave great pleasure to her millions of readers throughout and beyond the Franco...

Set in Paris in the 1780s, REtif de la Bretonne's novel IngEnue Saxancour is a thinly veiled account of his daughter's disastrous marriage to an abusive husband. From the time of her marriage in January 1780, until she left her husband in July 1785, AgnEs REtif suffered continually from severe physical, sexual, and emotional abuse. Published in 1789, REtif's novel scandalized the public with its graphic descriptions of his son-in-law's sexual perversity and brutal violence.
REtif's novel remains shocking even two centuries later and continues to raise disturbing questions...