This collection of essays stems from the conference Nineteenth-Century Literature and Aesthetics, which was held at the University of Milan in 2006 and organised by the editors of this volume. The interface between word and image covered in these essays embraces the fields of literature, architecture, painting, photography, music and art criticism. The authors stress the role of aesthetics in a number of contexts ranging from the early 1830s to the fin de siecle and beyond, as far as the last influences of Victorian taste on the early years of the twentieth century.
During the...

The Spanish Golden Age novelist Miguel de Cervantes has long cast a shadow over the writers who have followed in his wake. This book explores the great novelist s influence on contemporary Spanish writers. The links between the Golden Age tradition and contemporary writing are examined by leading academics in the field of the Spanish contemporary novel.
The collection focuses on aspects of literary technique and metafiction, particularly the role of the narrator, the mixing of fictional and real characters, and self-reflection and literary criticism within the novel. These are all...

This first comparative study of the Symbolist use of myth in France, Germany, and Russia closely examines a selected range of poetic and pictorial works created between c. 1860 and 1910. The focus of the discussion is on a constellation of five artists, linked by a complex network of influences: Gustave Moreau, Jose-Maria de Heredia, and Jean Moreas (France); Stefan George (Germany); and Valerii Bryusov (Russia). By analysing myth in painting and poetry, the book gives a new insight into the significance of heroic and aesthetic ideals in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European...

This book presents a new account of the complex relationship between psychoanalytic theory and the key tragic dramas by Sophocles and Shakespeare in which it has often sought exemplars and prototypes. Examining the close historical and theoretical connections between Freud s interpretative appeal to tragic drama and his professed abandonment of the seduction hypothesis in 1897, the author explores the ways in which otherness has subsequently been simplified out of both psychoanalytic theory and the dramatic texts it endeavours to comprehend. Drawing on Jean Laplanche s critical reformulation...

In December 2007, to commemorate the eightieth anniversary of the publication of the final volume of Proust s A la recherche du temps perdu, an international conference, Le Temps retrouve 80 ans apres/Eighty Years After was held at Royal Holloway University of London. The essays in this volume, in English and in French, have their origins in this conference. The authors, established scholars and doctoral researchers, offer a wide range of analyses, (re)readings and critiques of Le Temps retrouve. Time, social shifts, politics, war, desire, memory, ageing, death, mourning, the...

By focusing on one particular re-education institution, this book offers a multifaceted analysis of practices of diagnosis and curing what was defined as -delinquency-, -criminality- or -disorderly behaviour- at the turn of the twentieth century. The study provides an important corrective to the existing accounts of re-education by proposing an approach in which institutional practices are analysed both from above and from below. The book draws attention to the process of reforming identities the construction of reformatory identities as the core of residential re-education. Special emphasis...

The notion of citizenship is part of a national collective memory and a memory of individuals belonging to a specific geographical, historical and cultural context. The volume seeks to investigate the importance of women s relationship with citizenship and nationality from a diachronic perspective analysing different forms of writing in various European contexts. Many themes intersect in the different essays that comprise the volume, including the construction of female identity through religious ideology, the importance of translation and cultural studies as a source of feminine knowledge,...

What does contemporary French poetry do to the subject? This book examines the means and effects of the subject s transmutation into various processes of (de-)subjectivation by looking at the works of four contemporary writers: Christian Prigent, Dominique Fourcade, Olivier Cadiot and Hubert Lucot. The author explores their work in the context of Gilles Deleuze s philosophy, building a critical apparatus a poetics of becoming that informs close readings of poems and prose. Moving beyond established criteria of classical literary criticism, the book both offers a comparative discussion of...

Fascist and colonial legacies have been determinant in shaping how Italian colonialism has been narrated in Italy till the late 1960s. This book deals with the complex problem of public memory and discursive amnesia.
The detailed research that underpins this book makes it no longer possible to claim that after 1945 there was an absolute and traumatic silence concerning Italy s colonial occupation of North and East Africa. However, the abiding public use of this history confirms the existence of an extremely selective and codified memory of that past.
The author shows that colonial...

Momentary Peace: an examination of the Catholic references in the works of Gertrud Leutenegger examines the way Catholic images, allusions and references are used by Gertrud Leutenegger, a contemporary Swiss writer, in expressing engagement with her faith, a theme developed from text to text over the period of 1975 2004. Two main religious themes run through the selected texts Vorabend, Ninive, Kontinent, Meduse, Acheron, Spharenklang and Pomona rejection of the institutionalised Church and the search for a female expression of Catholicism to counter a male dominated...