In his wide-ranging studies of poetic borrowing, Serrano uncovers the heterogeneity of influences in canonical texts from the Arabic, Chinese and French: Buhturi (821-97) and the Qur'an (7th century ce), Wang Wei (701-61) and the Classic of Poetry (8th century bce), StEphane MallarmE (1842-98) and Victor Segalen (1878-1919). Serrano brings methodologies developed for the study of one literature to bear on the reading of another, and often with surprising results. He shows, among other things, that MallarmE was really a Chinese poet, that ancient Chinese poets discovered the workings of film...

The nature of laughter has recently attracted the attention of a number of different disciplines. In two recent colloquia, TRIO (Translation Research in Oxford) brought together international authorities from fields as diverse as physiology, psychology, linguistics, translation and literary studies, and sociology, with scant regard for political correctness. This fascinating and often hilarious collection of essays is the result.
With the contributions:
Jane Taylor -- Introduction
Dominique Bertrand -- Anatomie et Etymologie: ordre et dEsordre du rire selon Laurent Joubert
Silke...

The concept of dilettantism has not always been associated with amateurism or superficiality. It played a significant role in French and German critical writing from the late eighteenth century until the fin de siEcle, embracing notions such as apprenticeship, fruitful error, parody, aestheticism and scepticism. Attempts to define dilettantism in a binary relationship with art have often been defeated by a fundamental ambivalence towards its values. The major texts on the subject are Goethe and Schiller's unfinished 'dilettantism project' (1799) and Paul Bourget's essay on Ernest Renan...

Between 1945 and 1975, in both France and Greece, literature provided the aesthetic criteria, cultural prestige and institutional basis for what aspired to be a higher form of popular song and the authentic representative of a national popular music. Published poems were set to popular music, while critical discourse celebrated some songwriters not only for being 'as good as poets' but for being 'singing poets' in their own right. This challenging and stimulating study is the first to chart the parallel cultural processes in the two countries from a comparative perspective. Bringing together...

The author traces the successive stages of Thackeray's contact with the German world and analyses the discourse he developed as a result. The 'German Sketch Book' which is built up embraces the fiction and criticism of Thackeray's Paris Sketch Book and the impressions related by the 'cockney' traveller in Irish Sketch Book and Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo. Thackeray's own pictorial illustrations of his writings, and those by Cruikshank, Doyle and Walker, which he supervised and supplemented, are recognised as an integral part of his German discourse.
This is the first...

A Community of Witches explores the beliefs and practices of Neo-Paganism and Witchcraft-generally known to scholars and practitioners as Wicca. While the words "magic," "witchcraft," and "paganism" evoke images of the distant past and remote cultures, this book shows that Wicca has emerged as part of a new religious movement that reflects the era in which it developed. Imported to the United States in the later 1960s from the United Kingdom, the religion absorbed into its basic fabric the social concerns of the time: feminism, environmentalism, self-development, alternative spirituality, and...