This study reads Auden's poetry and plays through the shifts from modernism to postmodernism. It analyses the experiments in Auden's writings for their engagement with crucial contemporary problems: that of the individual in relation to others, loved ones, community, society, but also transcendental truths. It shows that rather than providing firm answers, Auden's poetry emphasises the absence of certainties. Yet far from becoming nihilistic, it generates hope, affection, and most importantly an ethical challenge of responsibility out of its discoveries.

This study reads Auden's poetry and plays through the shifts from modernism to postmodernism. It analyses the experiments in Auden's writings for their engagement with crucial contemporary problems: that of the individual in relation to others, loved ones, community, society, but also transcendental truths. It shows that rather than providing firm answers, Auden's poetry emphasises the absence of certainties. Yet far from becoming nihilistic, it generates hope, affection, and most importantly an ethical challenge of responsibility out of its discoveries.

This interdisciplinary study analyzes the ways in which signs of masculinity have been performed across a wide variety of contexts and genres - including literature, classical ballet, sports, rock music, films and computer games - from the early nineteenth century to the present day.

An interdisciplinary and transcultural study of comedy in a pan-European perspective that include East, West, and Southern European examples. These range from humour in Polish poetry via jokes about Italian migrants in English-speaking TV commercials to Turkish comedy, literature and cartoons in Germany, Turkish, Surinamese, Iranian and Moroccan literary humour in the Netherlands, Beur humour in many media in France, and Asian humour in literature, film, and TV series in Great Britain. The volume is prefaced and informed by contemporary postcolonial theories that show humour not as an...

Since its inception in the 1980s, postcolonial theory has greatly enriched academic perspectives on culture and literature. Yet, in the same way that colonial goods and services have long contributed to economic and political growth, postcolonial topics have also become a profit-generating commodity. This is highly apparent in the success of the postcolonial novel or in the ability of film to cross over from Asia, Africa and elsewhere to paying audiences in Europe and America. The contributions in this volume, in their various ways, take a critical look at artistic responses to the...