William Carlos Williams is widely acknowledged to be among the most important American poets of the twentieth century. This collection includes sixteen new essays from many of the world s leading authorities on Williams, and is published to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of his death in 1963.
The volume contains fresh assessments of the nature and extent of Williams s profound and enduring impact on contemporary American poetic traditions, while providing a platform for appraising the neglected achievement of Williams as a writer of fiction and short stories. In doing so these and...

The essays in this volume consider a range of negotiations around francophone identity in Canada (Quebec, Acadia, Ontario, Saskatchewan), in the Caribbean, in Belgium and in Switzerland, and also with regard to Jewishness within European and Canadian francophonie. Their arrangement, starting with the Americas and concluding with Europe, provides a structural foregrounding of the shifting emphasis of the margins/centre debate, which also serves to resituate the more occulted, but no less significant, uncertainties of minority francophone cultures in Europe.
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This book studies the various definitions of animal nature proposed by nineteenth-century currents of thought in France. It is based on an examination of a number of key thinkers and writers, some well known (for example, Michelet and Lamartine), others largely forgotten (for example, Gleizes and Reynaud). At the centre of the book lies the idea that knowledge of animals is often knowledge of something else, that the primary referentiality is overlaid with additional levels of meaning. In nineteenth-century France thinking about animals (their future and their past) became a way of thinking...

Public demand for comedy has always been high in the German-speaking countries, but the number of comic dramas that have survived is relatively small. Those which are still read or regularly performed all have a serious purpose, and this collection of fourteen essays on the most distinguished of them shows how laughter can be exploited to treat personal, moral, and social problems in a way that would not be possible in tragedy. The texts range from the seventeenth to the late twentieth century, and no fewer than half of them are by Austrian writers. The contributors show how these plays are...

In 1915 Vera Brittain began to wonder whether it was possible to make a book out of the very essence of one s self . In this study, the author moves away from Brittain s already well-documented political passions socialism, feminism and pacifism to discuss her enduring fascination with philosophy and the problems surrounding the literary representation of subjectivity. Using the psychoanalytical, philosophical and literary theories known to Brittain as well as some more recent and pertinent theoretical developments, the author examines not only Brittain s explicitly autobiographical writings,...

Since the nineteenth century, children s literature has been adapted for both the stage and the screen. As the twentieth century progressed, children s books provided the material for an increasing range of new media, from radio to computer games, from television to cinema blockbuster. Although such adaptations are now recognised as a significant part of the culture of childhood and popular culture in general, little has been written about the range of products and experiences that they generate. This book brings together writers whose work offers contrasting perspectives on the process of...

The book is the first major study to bring together the two early twentieth-century theologians Dietrich Bonhoeffer, German Lutheran pastor, and Simone Weil, French philosopher and convert to Christianity. Both were victims of Nazi oppression, and neither survived the war. The book explores the two theologians reflections on Christian responsiveness to God and neighbour, being the interdependence of the two great commandments of the Jewish Law reiterated by Jesus. It sets out the common ground and the differing emphases in their interpretations. For Bonhoeffer, responsiveness was the...

The papers collected in this volume include a selection of those presented at a conference which took place at the University of Minho, Portugal, in July 2001 held under the auspices of the project European Intertexts: a Study of Women s Writing in English as Part of a European Fabric. The contributions focus on a variety of texts issuing from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds and debate the topics of Identity and Cultural Translation as instances of physical and allegorical border crossings in today s world while investigating their relation to Anglophone culture.
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The nature of religion on the domestic front in Britain during the Second World War has, hitherto, been relatively unexplored. This study focuses on Birmingham and describes wartime popular religion, primarily as recounted in oral testimony. The difference the War made to people s faith, and the consolation wrought by prayer and a religious outlook are explored, as are the religious language and concepts utilised by the wartime popular media of cinema and wireless. Clerical rhetoric about the War and concerns to spiritualise the war effort are dealt with by an analysis of locally published...