After Romanticism explores the ground common to European romanticism and American modernism, a space of translation and echoing where gulfs of ironic difference open between islands of topographic similarity, where literary history is subject to fictive renegotiation. Robert Eisenhauer situates Truman Capote s texts within the artistic/philosophical orbit of Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel, at the same time reading Answered Prayers as a validation of Baroque mysticism, a revisiting of controversies surrounding Lucinde, and a modernist take on Shelley s Triumph of...

Sport, Beer, and Gender: Promotional Culture and Contemporary Social Life brings together a group of esteemed international scholars to focus on the important, complex, and mutually reinforcing relationships between sport, beer, and gender in fashioning promotional strategies and shaping global cultures of consumption. Collectively, the book examines a well-known social constellation that has received little specific scholarly attention although it sits at the axis of many lines of expanding inquiry in sport studies, media studies, gender studies, cultural studies, consumer studies,...

The suitors in the Odyssey strikingly resemble a very specific audience of iambic poets such as Archilochus or Semonides. Justifying these young men s deaths, the Odyssey engages in a polemic intertext with Archilochus attacks against the threatening epic discourse. This study is concerned with reading both the traces of this often hidden quarrel in the Odyssey and the answers we can find within the iambic texts. Although iambus and epos have been connected in earlier studies, the direct portrait of the iambic audience within the Odyssey has not been examined. This...

Gendered Passages is the first full-length book devoted to the gendered analysis of the lives of French-Canadian migrants in early-twentieth-century Lowell, Massachusetts. It explores the ingenious and, at times, painful ways in which French-Canadian women, men, and children adjusted to the challenges of moving to, and settling in, that industrial city.
Yukari Takai uncovers the multitude of cross-border journeys of Lowell-bound French Canadians, the centrality of their family networks, and the ways in which the ideology of the family wage and the socioeconomic realities in Quebec...

Designed to cater for the growing interest in French studies, this volume assembles contributions about various aspects of change in a number of contemporary French-speaking societies. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the book expands on the traditional concepts of French studies focusing on language and literature and embraces politics, economics and cultural studies. The volume is divided into four parts and includes contributions from leading European specialists. Collectively, the contributions span the broad fields of Politics and Society, Arts and Culture, the French Language, and...

Governance structures are the institutional elements of labour markets. They provide the rules for the employment relationship. In principle, this relationship may be governed by individual regulation, by collective bargaining, or by legal regulation. Despite the importance of governance structures, we still have only a rudimentary understanding of the way in which they emerge and evolve.
This book analyses the determinants of governance structures for the employment relationship in Britain. It begins with an evolutionary framework for the analysis of governance structures, based on...

The Old French fabliaux may be notorious for their bawdy content, but few aspects of these medieval comic narratives are as astonishing as their depiction of the parish priest, whose fiscal and sexual transgressions are on occasion so enormous that lay protagonists are driven to inflict graphic punishments ranging from public exposure and communal beating to castration and murder. In this study, Burrows draws on social psychological research into the cognitive and socio-motivational components of stereotyping to explore the forces underlying the creation and development of the...

Awarded the 2007 National Research Prize SAES/AEFA.
This study is a reappraisal of John Bunyan in the light of the dissenting religious culture of the late-seventeenth century. Charges of schism and fanaticism were repeatedly levelled against Bunyan, both from within the dissenting community and without, but far from being chastened by these accusations, Bunyan responded with a religious discourse marked by a rhetoric of excess. The focus of this book is therefore upon Bunyan s overwhelming spiritual experiences, especially the representation of torment, in his literary and...

Ecological thinking has in recent years come a long way from its origins in biology, to become a new paradigm within many disciplines. Its approach is holistic, and focuses on dynamic, interactive systems and the interrelationships between the object of study and its context. The author demonstrates how adopting such an ecological perspective fundamentally changes our understanding of human language, and calls into question a number of assumptions: that language is rule-governed, for example, or that it represents a distinctive form of knowledge. From an ecological point of view, language is...

Contrary to widespread rhetoric of deregulation, the media are objects of increased global policy. Generators of cultural spheres, within which social consensus is formed, the media are shaped by national and supranational agencies of questionable legitimacy. Policy delineates the form and content of global communications impinging on cultures, discourses and consciousness; yet, citizen representation in processes of policy-making remains fragmentary.
In this insightful study, the author examines the role of the European Parliament, as the only international organisation directly...