MCL Books

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

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

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.

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

Roger Celestin, 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
ISBN: 0-312-29524-3
0-312-23908-4

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

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

Sara 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

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

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

Laurietz Seda

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

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

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 Ugrešić, André Heller, Alissa Walser, Aras Ören, Claudio Magris, Yoko Tawada, Tankred Dorst, and Anna Maria Carpi.

Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2007
ISBN: 9783865250650