College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Literatures, Cultures & Languages

Katharina von Hammerstein, Corkhill (eds.)

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Anke Finger (author) Anke Finger liefert eine kritische Betrachtung von Gesamtkunstwerk-Projekten innerhalb der ästhetischen Moderne sowie eine Analyse, um die ästhetische Moderne selbst als Gesamtkunstwerk-Projekt zu verstehen. Die Struktur des Bandes folgt der Chronologie von den Ursprüngen in der Romantik bis hin zu heutigen Multimediaexperimenten. Anhand von Einzelbeispielen aus Literatur und Film wird argumentiert, dass das Gesamtkunstwerk-Projekt ebenso wie das der ästhetischen Moderne international war und ist, Netzwerkcharakter hat und häufig sozialpolitische Elemente enthält. Das Gesamtkunstwerk ist stets ein Projekt geblieben, so dass es so, wie es in zahlreichen Dokumenten gefordert oder beschrieben wurde, überhaupt nicht existiert.

Anke Finger (co-author)

Friedemann Weidauer

The Brecht Yearbook is the central scholarly forum for discussion about German playwright Bertolt Brecht and his career, exploring aspects of theater and literature that were of particular interest to Brecht, especially the politics of literature and of theater in a global context.

Jacqueline Loss

The specter of the Soviet Union lingers in Cuba, yet until now there has been no book-length work on the ways Cubans process their country’s relationship with the Soviet bloc. Dreaming in Russian at last brings into the light the reality that for nearly three decades, the Soviet Union subsidized the island economically, intervened in military matters, and exported distinct pedagogical and cultural models to Cuba. Drawing on interviews with Cuban artists and intellectuals, as well as treasures from cinematographic and bibliographic archives, Jacqueline Loss delivers the first book to show that Cuba remembers and retains many aspects of the Soviet era, far from shedding those cultural facets as relics of the Cold War.

Weaving together intriguing, seldom-seen images, Dreaming in Russian showcases the ways in which Cuba’s relationship to its Soviet benefactors lingered after the disintegration of the U.S.S.R. in 1991. Analyzing numerous literary texts and works of visual art, Loss also incorporates aspects of architecture, popular culture, the space race, and other strands to create a captivating new perspective on Cuban society. Among the luminaries featured are poet Reina María Rodríguez, writer Antonio José Ponte, visual artist Tonel, and novelist Wendy Guerra. A departure from traditional cultural history, Loss’s approach instead presents a kaleidoscopic series of facets, reflecting the hybrid nature of the self-images that emerged in the aftermath of the Soviet aegis. As speculations about Cuba’s future under Fidel Castro’s heir apparent continue, the portrait that emerges in Dreaming in Russian is both timely and mesmerizing.

Norma Bouchard

Roger Travis

playthepast.org, a collaboratively edited research blog about Cultural Heritage and games.

Anke Finger (co-editor) In The Aesthetics of the Total Artwork, artists, curators, and scholars from many countries and fields offer new ways of understanding the history and contemporary importance of the idea of the total artwork, or Gesamtkunstwerk. The term "Gesamtkunstwerk" was introduced in the romantic period. It describes the desire for and practice of combining various art forms into a whole, such as performances that combine text, visual arts, music, dance, and architecture. Richard Wagner was one of the early theorists of the concept, inspiring many modernist artists; yet, due to his ideological significance for the Third Reich, the concept has frequently been associated with totalitarianism since the Second World War. Nonetheless, artistic practice has continued to incorporate all-inclusive tendencies, even while avoiding the term "total artwork." The contributors to this volume challenge us to think again about the total artwork, daring to suggest that it is alive and well, that it informs current art in ways that are deep, meaningful, contentious, and provocative. The essays come from authors steeped in literary culture, the world of art, philosophy, and music theory. Such diverse perspectives can only stimulate debate in the academy and beyond about the history of the Gesamtkunstwerk and open up paths that may be followed in its future.

Laurietz Seda and Enrique Mijares, eds.

Esta antología contiene 11 textos teatrales de 5 autores puertorriqueños y 6 autores mexicanos que abarcan el tema de las fronteras desde el punto de vista político, social y cultural.  Se incluyen: Malasangre: La nueva emigración de Roberto Ramos-Perea, Indocumentados: El otro merengue de José Luis Ramos Escobar, Bony and Kin de Carlos Canales, El adiestramiento de Teresa Marichal, El olor de los machos, El olor de las hembras de Abniel Marat, Pool de Jorge Celaya, Border Santo de Virginia Hernández, Arde el viento con los vientos que vienen del sur de Hugo Salcedo, Canción del cuchillo parado de Manuel Talavera, Carta a los gringos de Gustavo Thomas y Con el apagón de Medrardo Treviño.

ISBN: 968-6404-68-6

Publisher: UJED/ Espacio Vacío (Durango, Mexico)  and Ateneo Puertorriqueño (San Juan, Puerto Rico)  (2004)

Friedemann Weidauer

The Brecht Yearbook is the central scholarly forum for discussion about German playwright Bertolt Brecht and his career, exploring aspects of theater and literature that were of particular interest to Brecht, especially the politics of literature and of theater in a global context.

Laurietz Seda and Jacqueline Bixler, editors

Trans/Acting: Latin American and Latino Performing Arts comprises fourteen new essays by leading scholars of Latin American and US Latino theater as well as the performance script Mexterminator vs. The Global Predator by Guillermo Gómez-Peña. The essays focus on contemporary Latin American and US Latino dramatic texts and performances. They range from a panoramic view of transculturation in twentieth-century Latin American theater to in-depth analyses of individual plays from Cuba, Mexico, Argentina, Uruguay, and the US. By deploying the concept of trans/acting, with its connotations of negotiation and/or exchange, in various theoretical ways the essays explore and challenge the parameters of culturation, nationalism, gender, genre, translation, and adaptation in the context of globalization, shifting borders, and new cultural paradigms. The study of contemporary theater and performance arts in this volume is complemented by trans/actor Gómez-Peña's Mexterminator vs. The Global Predator, a strikingly transgressive script that underscores the performative nature of territorial and symbolic border crossings. Exploring the transformation of Latin American theater from the local to the global and the national to the transnational, Trans/Acting will appeal to scholars of Latin American studies, performance art, and globalization.

$60.00; hardcover

TO ORDER: Associated University Presses • aup440@aol.com • (609) 655-4770

Roger Célestin, Eliane DalMolin

A cultural history of France from a period of dominance in the mid–19th century to one of "decline" or "crisis" in the first few years of the third millennium. The first part (1851 to 1944) explores developments ranging from the transformation of Paris and the appearance of the colonial empire, to the construction of modern French society. The second part follows the crisis of French universalism or of the "French exception" from the end of World War II to the contemporary period in which the "French model" has been increasingly difficult to sustain in the face of globalization, the Americanization of culture, decolonization and multiculturalism, among other developments.

Palgrave Macmillan, 2007

Ana Maria Diaz-Marcos

The essays written by 19th Century Spanish women writers have been historically undervalued by the academia because it was considered a “masculine” literary domain. Nevertheless, Concepcion Arenal (1820-1923), Rosario de Acuña (1850-1923) and Concepcion Gimeno de Flaquer (1950-1919) were prolific essayists whose work is crucial to understand the raising of a feminist consciousness in Spain. Those intellectuals carried out a powerful cultural work challenging the hegemonic ideal of the “angel in the house” and proposing alternative models of femininity. The woman of the future, the agricultural woman or the new Eve are icons of a plethora of representations that insist on the heterogeneity of female experience and the potential of women to promote change. The creation of a modern and emancipated female identity was the passionate purpose that inspired the activism and the works of those writers.

Oviedo: Krk, 2012.

ISBN 978-84-8367-379-9

Philip Balma

Susan Einbinder

When Crusader armies on their way to the Holy Land attacked Jewish communities in the Rhine Valley, many Jews chose suicide over death at the hands of Christian mobs. With their defiant deaths, the medieval Jewish martyr was born. With the literary commemoration of the victims, Jewish martyrology followed. Beautiful Death examines the evolution of a long-neglected corpus of Hebrew poetry, the laments reflecting the specific conditions of Jewish life in northern France. The poems offer insight into everyday life and into the ways medieval French Jews responded to persecution. They also suggest that poetry was used to encourage resistance to intensifying pressures to convert.

The educated Jewish elite in northern France was highly acculturated. Their poetry--particularly that emerging from the innovative Tosafist schools--reflects their engagement with the vernacular renaissance unfolding around them, as well as conscious and unconscious absorption of Christian popular beliefs and hagiographical conventions. At the same time, their extraordinary poems signal an increasingly harsh repudiation of Christianity's sacred symbols and beliefs. They reveal a complex relationship to Christian culture as Jews internalized elements of medieval culture even while expressing a powerful revulsion against the forms and beliefs of Christian life.

This gracefully written study crosses traditional boundaries of history and literature and of Jewish and general medieval scholarship. Focusing on specific incidents of persecution and the literary commemorations they produced, it offers unique insights into the historical conditions in which these poems were written and performed.

Publisher: Princeton University Press
Cloth: ISBN: 9780691090535
eBook: ISBN: 9781400825257

Ana María Díaz-Marcos

This book explores representations of fashion and luxury in Spanish literary texts from the 18th century to the 1920s. The first chapter reviews the concept of “fashion,” its meaning and implications, and provides an overview of the most important theories that have attempted to explain why fashion exists and how it is created. The second chapter focuses on the controversy regarding fashion and luxury during the Enlightenment, with an emphasis on national and patriotic implications of that discussion; it also looks at the gendered aspects of this controversy, in which both males and females were subjected to scrutiny and criticism for their fashionable, effeminate and unpatriotic behavior. The third chapter explores ideas and rhetoric about fashion in 19th century novels by Pérez Galdós and in selected writings by Emilia Pardo Bazán and takes into consideration the feminization of fashion in that period. The fourth chapter addresses representations of fashion and glamour in the works of some of the most important writers on women’s education and examines ideas about finery in two Spanish women writers: Concepción Arenal and Rosario Acuña. The chapter concludes with a close analysis of the work of Carmen de Burgos (1920), a writer, feminist and journalist who celebrated fashion both as art and feminine expression. One of the principal conclusions of this book is that the 19th century marked a change from a culture of luxury to a culture of fashion in a capitalist world where being fashionable no longer meant being able to purchase the most expensive fabrics and embroideries. La edad de seda also proves that philosophers, writers and intellectuals, who for centuries thought they were addressing only the “frivolous” topic of fashion, were in fact dealing with further issues such as the body, sexuality, politics, class, economics, adultery and the morality of their times.

Universidad de Cádiz, 2006
ISBN 8498280702

Laurietz Seda, editor

Los 11 ensayos presentados en este libro analizan y comentan la forma en que teatristas destacados de Argentina, Chile, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, México, Perú, Bolivia, Colombia, Uruguay y Paraguay enfrentan a su público a los momentos políticos y sociales más dolorosos del continente latinoamericano. Todos los contribuyentes llegan de manera explícita o implícita a la misma conclusión: las obras intentan estremecer a su audiencia y llevarla a la reflexión para que la historia no se repita y para que no se olviden las víctimas.

ISBN: 978-612-45919-5-2

Publisher: Fondo Editorial Universidad Científica del Sur, Lima, Perú

Daniel Caner

This book provides a new basis for understanding the origins and early problems of Christian monasticism by focusing on the role of ascetic or voluntary poverty in the making of monasticism in the late Roman empire (c.250-450 C.E.). It explains the emergence of "orthodox" monastic practices regarding self-sufficiency and physical withdrawal within the context of competition for apostolic privileges in late Roman cities, and as a response to an earlier ascetic model based on providing lay people with spiritual edification in return for material support.

University of California Press 2002
ISBN:0520233247

Rosa Helena Chinchilla

Autor:    Chinchilla M., Rosa Helena (Autor)
Título:    La Obra literaria de Manuel Mariano de Iturriaga, S.J. en los reinos de la Nueva España y Guatemala / Rosa Helena Chinchilla M. --
Clasificación:    868.99214 C539
Imp / Ed.:    Guatemala : Universidad Rafael Landívar, c2006.
Descripción:    145 : il. ; 21 cm.
Temas:    Iturriaga, Manuel Mariano de, 1728-1810
Literatura mexicana - Siglo XVIII - Colección de escritos
Poesía mexicana - Siglo XVIII - Colección de escritos

Norma Bouchard

Stuart S. Miller

Stuart S. Miller maintains that recent portrayals of the rabbis of Talmudic Palestine as a small, insular, and uninfluential group fails to explain how they nevertheless evolved into an effective movement. Miller reframes the discussion by focusing on the structure of rabbinic circles and dynamics that enabled the sages to propagate their way of life within the larger milieu of "complex" common Judaism.

Mohr Siebeck, 2006
ISBN: 316148567X
ISBN-13: 9783161485671

Jeffrey S. Shoulson

Taking as its starting point the long-standing characterization of Milton as a "Hebraic" writer, Milton and the Rabbis probes the limits of the relationship between the seventeenth-century English poet and polemicist and his Jewish antecedents. Shoulson's analysis moves back and forth between Milton's writings and Jewish writings of the first five centuries of the Common Era, collectively known as midrash. In exploring the historical and literary implications of these connections, Shoulson shows how Milton's text can inform a more nuanced reading of midrash just as midrash can offer new insights into Paradise Lost.

Sebastian Wogenstein

In der Reflexion der Moderne spielen häufig Denkfiguren eine wichtige Rolle, die zeitlich und strukturell vor der Moderne verankert sind. Horizonte der Moderne geht mit Tragödie und Judentum zwei Themenkomplexen nach, deren Ursprünge in der Antike liegen und die im Denken von Hermann Cohen und nachfolgend bei Franz Rosenzweig, Ernst Cassirer, Joseph B. Soloveitchik und Emmanuel Lévinas auf unterschiedliche Weise aufgefaßt und zueinander in Beziehung gesetzt werden. Im Spannungsfeld von Ästhetik und Ethik erscheint die Tragödie als Ort der Selbstverständigung des Subjekts, während im Zentrum des Blicks auf das Judentum die Verantwortung für den Anderen und der Bezug zur Gemeinschaft stehen. Damit werden die beiden Pole europäischer Kulturkonzeptionen, ästhetische Individualisierung einerseits und politische Ethik andererseits, im Horizont ihrer dyadischen Herkunft betrachtet. Der Band gibt Einblick in einen Diskurs, der angesichts der Krise der Moderne nach deren ideengeschichtlichen Quellen fragt.

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Anke Finger (co-author and editor) The first introduction to a key thinker in twentieth-century media philosophy and cultural theory A thorough introduction to Vilém Flusser’s thought, this book reveals his engagement with a wide array of disciplines, from posthuman philosophy, media studies, and history to migrant studies, art, and anthropology. This volume shows how Flusser’s media theory works are just one part of a greater mosaic of writings that bring to the fore cultural and cognitive changes in the twenty-first century. "Flusser is one of our lost gems—the other McLuhan, and dare I say the better. A global citizen writing alternately in German, Portuguese, English, or French, Flusser meditated on words and gestures, translation and doubt, cities and images. He was a master of the essay form. I believe he had the ear of both gods and men. In this important book on Flusser we are introduced for the first time in English to perhaps our greatest media philosopher." — Alexander R. Galloway, New York University

Nehama Aschkenasy

This careful study of biblical tales about women links them to the ancient Near Eastern image of the "woman at the window," often seen as suggesting women's sexual availability and curiosity, and offers a reinterpretation of this classic myth as a socio-theological statement of women's spatial constriction and their removal from the sphere of history.

Publisher: Wayne State University Press, 1998
ISBN: 0814326269

Florence Marsal

Norma Bouchard

Stuart S. Miller

Susan Einbinder

When King Philip VI expelled the Jews in 1306, some 100,000 men, women, and children were driven from royal France into the neighboring lands of Spain, Provence, Italy, and North Africa. The great expulsion of 1306 was arguably one of the most traumatic moments of medieval Jewish history and would prove to be the harbinger of a series of recalls and expulsions, local and general, culminating in King Charles VI's expulsion decree of 1394.

Despite the upheavals of the fourteenth century, the literary productivity of Jews was astonishing. Yet there are few direct references to the catastrophic events of 1306, even in Jewish liturgical and historiographic texts, where one would expect to find them. In No Place of Rest, Susan Einbinder coaxes out the literary traces of this traumatic expulsion. Why did the memory of this proud and vibrant Jewish community fade from historical memory? Where do its remnants reside among later communities and readers? From the lyrics of the supposed "Jewish troubadour" Isaac HaGorni to medical texts and astronomical charts, Einbinder studies a range of writings she reveals to be commemorative. Her careful readings uncover the ways in which medieval Jews asserted their identity in exile and, perhaps more important, helped to preserve or efface their history.

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 978-0-8122-4115-0

Friedemann Weidauer

The Brecht Yearbook is the central scholarly forum for discussion about German playwright Bertolt Brecht and his career, exploring aspects of theater and literature that were of particular interest to Brecht, especially the politics of literature and of theater in a global context.

Anke Finger (editor) First English translation of 20th century German philosopher Vilém Flusser’s 1994 book, Von der Freiheit des Migranten. Vilém Flusser was one of the most fascinating and original European thinkers of the latter half of the twentieth century. In this volume, a collection of his essays on emigration, nationalism, and information theory, he raises questions about the viability of ideas of national identity in a world whose borders are becoming increasingly arbitrary and permeable. Flusser argues that modern societies are in flux, with traditional linear and literary epistemologies being challenged by global circulatory networks and a growth in visual stimulation. He posits that these changes will radically alter the ways cultures define themselves and deal with each other. Not just theories of globalization, however, Flusser’s ideas about communication and identity have their roots in the Judeo-Christian concept of self-determination and self-realization through the recognition of the other. Vilém Flusser (1920-91) was a German-Jewish philosopher from Prague who fled to Brazil in 1940. In 1963 he was appointed professor of philosophy of communication at São Paulo University; while there he also wrote a daily newspaper column. In 1972, he moved to France, and wrote books in both German and Portuguese, including The Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design, Toward a Philosophy of Photography, and From Subject to Project: Becoming Human.

Rae Beth Gordon

Vividly bringing to light the tradition of physical comedy in the French cabaret, café-concert, and early French film comedy, this book answers the perplexing question, "Why do the French love Jerry Lewis?" The extraordinary emphasis on nervous pathology in the Parisian café-concert, where the genres of the Epileptic Singer and the Idiot Comic took center stage, and where popular comic monologues and songs included "Man with a Tic" and "I'm Neurasthenic," points to a fascinating intersection between medicine and popular culture. The movements and gestures of these performers were carried over into early cinema, not only in the slapstick comedies of Pathé that inspired the Keystone Kops in the U.S., but in the more sophisticated, vertiginous style of Georges Méliès and Emile Cohl, the French inventor of animated film.The French tradition of comic performance style between 1870 and 1910 nearly exactly duplicates the movements, gestures, tics, grimaces, and speech anomalies found in nineteenth-century hysteria; the characteristics of hysteria became a new aesthetics.

ISBN-10: 0804738939
ISBN-13: 9780804738934
ISBN-10: 0804738947
ISBN-13: 9780804738941

Norma Bouchard

Negotiating Italian Identities explores the dynamic negotiations and formalizations of local, national, and supranational identities in post-war Italian culture. It examines processes of identity-formation in relation to many locations and sites of cultural production (i.e., high and low print culture, media and visual culture, patterns of consumption of the everyday life, ritualized forms of behavior and lifestyles, sites of memory and forgetting, and so on) while investigating the often competing claims of national and supranational communities and organization in relation to diasporic, hybrid, regional, gendered, class, and generational identities.

Laurietz Seda, Editor

Esta antología es un muestrario de algunas obras de dramaturgos pertenecientes a la segunda etapa de la Nueva Dramaturgia Puertorriqueña. Aquí desfilan los distintos temas, estilos y técnicas que le dan una voz única a los dramaturgos de esta generación que se vio en la necesidad de definirse y autodenominarse como la Nueva Dramaturgia Puertorriqueña. Los dramaturgos seleccionados tienen en común varias características. Todos nacieron en la década del 50, obtienen su madurez dramatúrgica en los años 80 y 90, y en el presente siguen escribiendo y produciendo teatro. Han publicado y estrenado un número considerable de textos dentro y fuera de la Isla, y han sido reconocidos con premios nacionales (e internacionales, algunos de ellos). Son gente de teatro en todas sus funciones porque todos ellos además de ser dramaturgos también han sido directores y en muchos casos actores. Son intelectuales en los que existe una gran preocupación por el oficio de hacer teatro y un enorme deseo de explorar la condición humana. Los autores y textos que se incluyen son Besos de fuego de Roberto Ramos-Perea, Rejum-reja-mujer-rejum de Teresa Marichal, Tabla de náufragos de Jose Luis Ramos Escobar y Luz Celeste de Carlos Canales. Besos de fuego es una obra rica en connotaciones sociales, políticas y culturales que critica el canon teatral, la moralidad vana, la hipocresía social, la academia y los intelectuales que canonizan y se empeñan siempre en estudiar a los mismos autores una y otra vez. El manejo de lo erótico, del lenguaje afrocaribeño, de la temática, del espacio y del tiempo demuestran la madurez autoral de Ramos-Perea, uno de los dramaturgos más importantes que ha cultivado el suelo puertorriqueño en los últimos años. Rejum-reja-mujer-rejum es un monólogo vibrante y desgarrador que presenta el tema del incesto desde la voz interna de la mujer abusada. En Tabla de náufragos encontramos un grupo de hombres fracasados que le buscan sentido a la vida. Y Luz Celeste explora el mundo creativo de un dramaturgo a quien el acto de creación le lleva a adentrase a mundos desconocidos que le llevan a descubrir los placeres, las pasiones y las crueldades a que se enfrenta el ser humano.

Publisher: Editorial Lea, Ateneo Puertorriqueño
1 st edition 2003, 2nd edition 2007
ISBN: 1-881703-52-5

Laurietz Seda and Rubén Quiroz, editors

A partir de la década de 1920, los dramaturgos latinoamericanos se dan a la tarea de renovar la escena teatral.  La mayoría de los autores que buscan nuevas líneas de expresión en el teatro reciben influencias de las corrientes vanguardistas europeas y norteamericanas, pues tuvieron contacto directo con estas endencias al vivir o viajar por Europa y Estados Unidos.  Laurietz Seda y Rubén Quiroz sostienen que ello sucede tambien con los artistas peruanos, quienes rompen con las estructuras y temáticas que existían hasta el momento respecto a la escena teatral. Así, nos invitan a revalorizar y a reevaluar el teatro nacional desde sus vanguardias. 13 Club (1929) de Luis Berninsone, Ojo de perdiz (1940) de César Moro y Caperucita Encarnada (1956) de Joel Marrokin son las obras presentadas en este libro.  Las mismas trascienden las convenciones miméticas para explorar mediante propuestas autorreflexivas de las posibilidades artísticas que les brinda el teatro.

ISBN 978-9972-46-406-5

Publisher: Fondo Editorial Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Lima, Perú

Anne Berthelot

This is a survey of the Arthurian legend in the Middle Ages, starting with the Welsh and Latin texts and encompassing French, English and German romances of the 12th to 15 centuries. It features the most famous characters around King Arthur, as well as some less well-known figures, and it offers a panorama of an ever-changing body of tales that still inform the Western imaginary world.

Publisher: Editions du Chêne, October 2004
ISBN: 2842774957

Sara R. Johnson

This book investigates the creation of historical fictions in a wide range of Hellenistic Jewish texts. It argues that the authors of the so-called Jewish novels use historical fictions to construct a particular model of Hellenistic Jewish identity through the reinvention of the past. The second half of the book is devoted to a close study of Third Maccabees.

University of California Press, 2004
ISBN 0520233077

Katharina von Hammerstein

This first-time English edition introduces the reader to a little known facet of vibrant Vienna around 1900: A white Austrian man's friendship with a group of Ashanti from the Gold Coast of Africa (the former British colony known today as Ghana) who in 1896 were put on display as living objects in a popular ethnographic exhibit. In light of today's postcolonial approaches to colonial discourses and in the context of current challenges of cultural coexistence in the global society, this book merits new popularity as a representation of encounters between people of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds.

Ariadne Press, 2007
ISBN 978-1-57241-155-5 and 1-57241-155-4

Katharina von Hammerstein

»Der vorliegende Tagungsband erzeugt in der Breite seiner Zugriffe auf Sophie Mereau und ihr Werk ein spannendes Gesamtbild biographischer und literarischer Aspekte, welches für die kontextualisierende Betrachtung des breiten Themenfeldes der Literatur von Frauen von entscheidender Bedeutung sein dürfte.«
Dörte Richter, in: Zeitschrift für Germanistik XIX – 3/2009

Dieser interdisziplinär konzipierte Sammelband mit Beiträgen aus der Germanistik, Geschichte, Musikgeschichte, Kunstgeschichte und Geschlechterforschung (aus Deutschland, England, Australien und den USA) perspektiviert Sophie Mereau und ihr Werk neu als Handlungsträger im diskursiven Raum der Literatur um 1800, im Beziehungsgeflecht der in Jena und Weimar konzentrierten Intelligenz und in der Erweiterung weiblicher Handlungs(spiel)räume in Realität und Fiktion.

Der Band umfaßt 18 intertextuell ausgerichtete Einzeluntersuchungen zu den Bereichen Ästhetik und literarische Vernetzung, soziale und berufliche Verflechtung, Poetisierungen von Freiheit, Sexualität, Glück, Erinnerung und Phantasie in unerforschten Werken, Genrefragen in Tagebuch und Briefen sowie Verbindungslinien zu altdeutschen Vorlagen, Kunst und Liedkultur. Aufgrund des fächerübergreifenden Ansatzes setzt der Band vollkommen neue Impulse für die internationale Mereau-Forschung.

Daniel Caner

The Sinai peninsula emerged in late antiquity as a distinct region of the Christian holy land, identified from the fourth century onward as the Old Testament place where the Hebrews had wandered, Moses received the Law, and ‘God’s Majesty descended’. At the same time it was part of the late Roman province of Third Palestine and located deep in the heart of ‘Saracen Country’. The historical essay and accompanying texts in this book enable readers to explore the particular ideals and dangers associated with this remote political and religious frontier.

At its core are three Greek narratives previously unavailable in English: Pseudo-Nilus’ Narrations, Ammonius’ Report Concerning the Slaughter of the Monks of Sinai and Rhaithou, and Anastasius’ Tales of the Sinai Fathers. Long known to historians, these narratives, all written c. 400–650, have long been used to reconstruct pilgrimage, monasticism, and Roman–Saracen relations in this area. However, each poses challenging questions of date, origin, and interpretation. In particular, Pseudo-Nilus’ Narrations represents an innovative blend of Greco-Roman (Achilles Tatius), Jewish (Fourth Maccabees) and Christian (Gregory Nazianzene) models, standing out as the last great example of ancient romance. Detailed introductions and commentaries highlight unusual features and shared problems of each text.

Readers will also find a comprehensive collection of travel accounts and other documents written on or about the late antique Sinai. Intended for specialists and students alike, this book makes an original contribution to the understanding of these texts and their place in the late antique development of the Sinai.

Julia Genz, Mirjam Schneider, Sebastian Wogenstein

Times of increasing traditionalism, fundamentalism, and nationalism undoubtedly give rise to one fundamental concept: the border. Borders, both physically and metaphorically, are established to provide orientation, eliminate ambiguity, and control mobility. They conceal complexities, multiple and layered identities, generate polarizing distinctions, and in many cases engender hostility. However, it would be simplistic and narrow to think of borders only in terms of dangerous demarcations. Identifying limits, differentiating and understanding differences are elemental functions in any process of knowledge and construction of identity. "An Grenzen" is a collection of previously unpublished essays and literary texts by internationally renowned writers, exploring various forms of reaching or transgressing limits, crossing borders, focusing on social, political, historical, or semantic distinctions. All contributors participated in the Tübingen Poetics Lectures, coordinated by Jürgen Wertheimer: Amos Oz, Herta Müller, Christoph Ransmayr, Izzat Ghazzawi, Peter Turrini, Dubravka Ugreši?, André Heller, Alissa Walser, Aras Ören, Claudio Magris, Yoko Tawada, Tankred Dorst, and Anna Maria Carpi.

Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2007
ISBN: 9783865250650

Allison P. Coudert and Jeffrey S. Shoulson, eds.

In the early modern period, the religious fervor of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, social unrest, and millenarianism all seemed to foster greater anti-Judaism in Christian Europe, yet the increased intolerance was also accompanied by more intimate and complex forms of interaction between Christians and Jews. Printing, trade, and travel combined to bring those from both sides of the religious divide into closer contact than ever before, while growing interest in magic and the Kabbalah encouraged Christians to study Hebrew in addition to Latin and Greek. In Hebraica Veritas? Christian Hebraists and the Study of Judaism in Early Modern Europe, noted scholars trace how these early modern encounters played key roles in defining attitudes toward personal, national, and religious identity in Western culture.

Jacqueline Loss, Esther Whitfield

With the disintegration of the Soviet bloc, the ongoing uncertainty surrounding Cuba's political future, the onslaught of tourists, and the economic upheavals in their society, Cubans face an important, perhaps epochal, moment of cultural change. It is a moment amply and complexly reflected in the fiction collected here, twelve short stories written in Cuba during the past ten years and published in English for the first time with the collaboration of some of today's finest translators.

Nortwestern UP, 2007
ISBN-10: 0810124068
ISBN-13: 978-0810124066

Norma Bouchard