Beyond speculation, analysis and evaluation of different hypotheses, this collection of essays is an attempt to provide innovative and multidisciplinary perspectives from the current point of view of our newly born 21st century about Edgar Allan Poe s life and works, keeping also in mind the memory of his recent bicentennial celebration (1809-1849).
Among the contributions, different fields of arts such as cinema, literature and science turn this work into an interdisciplinary debate in which the authors disclose and introduce old and new topics, clarify concepts and positions, and above...

In recent labour market history, one of the most striking features has been the increase in part-time employment. In Switzerland, one person out of three works part-time. 57% of women work part-time compared to only 13% of men. This disparity between women and men is one of the highest worldwide. At the same time, differences in the level of education between genders are disappearing. Given the magnitude of this phenomenon, new questions and challenges need to be addressed.
By presenting several econometrical models and taking into account historical and social gender focused behaviors,...

The Mediterranean world has long had strong cultural links to Great Britain as well as to the United States. Through the analysis of artistic objects and critical writings that crystallise this encounter, the essays in this volume demonstrate the variety and complexity of the connections between two geographical zones and two or more cultures.
Mediterranean cultures are shown to haunt American and British culture and artistic productions. The relation between British and American literature and art on the one hand, and Mediterranean arts on the other goes beyond the mere inscription of...

Based on a dialogical premise, this book provides a comparative analysis of two interrelated literary fields: postcolonial and women s/feminist, viewed through the ideological and aesthetic prism of the grotesque. The author examines the work of novelists such as Githa Hariharan, Salman Rushdie, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Robert Coover and Ben Okri, selected to reveal the range and intensity of the grotesque in contemporary fiction through their de/constructions of gender and postcolonial politics.
Complementary fields with the grotesque are considered through theorisations of Mary Russo,...

Travelling in Women s History with Michele Roberts s Novels: Literature, Language and Culture is a journey to discover Roberts s work as a feminist writer, novelist and memoirist. An overall analysis and detailed overview of Michele Roberts s novels first provide the reader with a study of Roberts s rewriting of stories that have been inspired by historical, mythological and religious women who gain a voice in her fiction. Not only will the content of Roberts s novels be explored but also its connection to form, as this feminist writer has always linked body to language. Second, the...

The assumption of an environmental crisis, global warming and climate change, has put into question the viability of modern development patterns in industrialised societies. This pattern is characterised by excessive exploitation of energy and resources without concern for negative impact upon the natural ecosystem. One of the primary challenges to sustainable development is identified as the dilemma between long term economic development and environmental damage. Influenced by this pattern, modern design of buildings and cites contributes to environmental degradation.
To explore an...

This book brings together a selection of papers originally presented at the fifth conference on Discourse, Communication and the Enterprise (DICOEN V) held in Milan in September 2009, and mainly focuses on the relevance of discourse and communication to the world of business and organizations as seen from a variety of disciplines (linguistics, communication studies, management studies, sociology, marketing). What unites the contributions is the discursive framework they adopt for the analysis of corporate communication, looking at it as a situated activity in a broadly constructionist...

This book represents a fresh look at cohesion, the point of departure being Halliday and Hasan s seminal Cohesion in English, which is examined in depth as are other notable approaches to cohesion such as Hoey s Patterns of Lexis in Text. It also compares different studies of relevance to cohesion from other areas of linguistics, such as: generative grammar, Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP), and corpus linguistics. In this way, this work extends discussion of cohesion beyond the realms of systemic linguistics to include a broader spectrum of approaches including research...

This work provides an analysis of The Book of Margery Kempe and the figure of Margery Kempe herself, with a specific focus on contemporary critical re-readings as well as creative re-writings. The author re-reads the text making reference to recent theoretical conceptualizations and taking into consideration the figure of Margery Kempe as mystic, preacher and pilgrim. This book looks into the multiple layers of interpretation that this autobiography from the 15th century allows today, highlighting the importance of The Book of Margery Kempe as the first English autobiography,...

For more than a decade, the Balkans have been a centre of crisis armed conflicts have brought death, expulsion, destruction and untold suffering to the people. The postwar efforts of the West have failed to bring lasting stability and real progress so far.
The Symposium at Basel University was an interdisciplinary event where complex issues were elucidated by historians, geographers, sociologists and political scientists. The event enabled East and West European scholars and their American counterparts to exchange their somewhat divergent views. The speakers covered a broad range of...