Bøger i Oxford Modern Languages and Literature Monographs serien

On a Knife-Edge represents the first book-length study in English solely devoted to the work of Joao Cabral de Melo Neto (1920-1999), one of Brazil's foremost poets of the twentieth century and a unique voice within Brazilian Modernism.

With reference to the treatment of mind-body problems in the novels and non-fictional writings of Johann Karl Wezel, Karl Philipp Moritz, and Jean Paul, this impressive study follows the development of, and demonstrates the continuity in, the history of ideas in Germany between the Late Enlightenment and Romanticism.

This work deals with the process of aesthetic education, as defined by Winckelmann on the basis of his own experience of art and as applied to his teaching of two pupils. A number of crucial difficulties are revealed, not least because Winckelmann's teaching programme does little justice to his insights, which were later appreciated and, in some cases, reproduced by Goethe.

This major study of the popular verse tradition of medieval Wales examines Dafydd ap Gwilym's use both of the Welsh and northern French verse traditions in his successful bid to forge a new kind of poetry.

This is the first comprehensive work on Pascal to be devoted to his use of key terms depicting the central subject of the Pensees, the human condition. Giving and in-depth account of many important critical controversies of the day, as well as offering a novel and provocative insight into the persuasive purpose of the Pensees, Hammond explores such fundamental notions as language and order.

This is the first book-length study in English on Vittorio Sereni (1913-83), a major figure in Italian twentieth-century poetry. It argues that a key innovation of Sereni's poetry is the way in which it reworks the boundaries of poetic space to construct a lyric 'I' radically repositioned in the textual universe with respect to its predecessors.

Studies the development of Artaud's thinking throughout his career on such issues as the body, theology, language, and identity. This book discusses his late poetry and focuses on verbal details of his writing and to the way he builds up his ideas.

This book describes the ideological, intellectual, and literary role of ghost stories in late Renaissance France. It takes in prominent literary figures - Rabelais, Ronsard, Montaigne - as well as lesser known tracts and pamphlets to shed new light on the beliefs, fears, and desires of a period on the threshold of modernity.

The Drowned Muse charts the trajectory of representations of "L'Inconnue de la Seine" in literature and the visual arts since the late 1890s and shows how the mask's metamorphoses track across the years provides points of negotiation through which to better understand modernity.

This book investigates medieval concepts of authorship with reference to German narratives written between 1220 and 1290. It combines analyses of literary passages (accompanied by translations) and manuscripts (including illustrations) to shed new light on the ambivalent status of the figure of the author in the Middle Ages.

This volume takes a fresh look at theatre, including opera, in early modern Germany. Central to the study is the relationship of the stage with ideas of order or social control and how rhetoric was used against the potentially threatening "others" of the feminine and the Islamic.

A study of Yiddish in the former Soviet Union. A chronicle of orthographic and other reforms is created from contemporary publications and archive material from pre-Revolutionary Russia to the 1980s. Comparisons are drawn between Soviet Yiddish and Ukrainian, Belorussian, and German reforms.

This study examines the work of three fifteenth- and sixteenth-century French poets. It focuses on developments in the presentation of their poetry. As printed books came to replace manuscripts, features such as layout and illustration evolved. These changes reflect shifts in literary style and technique, under the influence of printing.

A study of novels by Uwe Johnson, Max Frisch, Christa Wolf, Jurek Becker, and Gunter Grass, this text investigates the fictions and fantasies invented by five narrators. It examines the purpose which the fictions serve and the means by which each author deliberately draws attention to them.

Stephen Bungay has succeeded admirably in a most ambitious undertaking.'___ British Journal of Aesthetics .

The first book to look at the life and works of Hermynia Zur Muhlen examines her prose fiction against the backdrop of her life and the turbulent times - the Weimar Republic and exile from the Third Reich. Zur Muhlen saw literature primarily as a political tool and used popular forms of literature to convey her ideas to a wide audience.

In this closely analytical study, Cruickshank reads the work of four influential writers of prose fiction - Angot, Echenoz, Houellebecq, and Redonnet - in the context of the turn of the millennium in France, which coincided with a number of tangible crises and apocalyptic discourses, and with the growth of the mass media and global market.

Straddling the disciplines of literature and social history, and based on extensive archival research, this book makes a crucial contribution to the feminist project of writing women back into literary history. It brings to light the hitherto unrecognised literary tradition in the prehistory of psychoanalysis: the psychiatric memoir.

The first study of Marquard von Lindau, arguably the most widely-read author in German before the Reformation. Active in the second half of the 14th century, in the generation after the Black Death, Marquard made a distinctive and critical contribution to contemporary understanding of Christ's Passion, the Eucharist, and the Virgin Mary.

Adam Watt's critical study of Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, focuses on the role of the acts of reading depicted in the seminal novel. Reading is shown to be a formative and often troubling force in the life of the novel's narrator.

A challenging new reading of Grass's literary work and political writings that examines how the author has reacted to sustained public interest in his person from the mid-1960s onwards. Braun draws together an eclectic body of literary writing and suggests that questions of authorship lie at the heart of Grass's work.

Late eighteenth-century German literature was dominated by men. Women were discouraged from reading and scorned as writers, but the attempt to exclude did not always succeed. This study combines archival research, literary analysis, and statistical evidence to give a sociological-historical overview of the conditions of women's literary production.

'Bluebeard', in which women are slaughtered and hidden in a horrible chamber by a monstrous husband, is hair-raising; yet its happy ending gives it a utopian force. Davies's book focuses on literature in German from the eighteenth century to the 1990s, and is the first full-length study of the history of Bluebeard published in any language.

Compares three contemporary women writing in German: Herta Muller (from Romania), Libuse Monikova (from Czechoslovakia), and Kerstin Hensel (from the GDR). Drawing on psychoanlytical, feminist, and performativity theory, this book looks at images of the body and their relationship to the structures of their writing.

This book combines a Nietzschean reading of Proust's novel A la recherche du temps perdu with a Proustian reading of Nietzsche's philosophy. It focuses on the problem of knowledge, the status of the self, the experience of transcendence, and the complex time structures in the works of the two writers.

This is the first ever comparative study of Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy and Schiller's Aesthetic Letters, two crucial texts in aesthetic and cultural theory. This scrupulous examination and comparison reveals a convincing picture of the common ground shared by the two writers, who are usually regarded as being poles apart.

This is a major new account of the work of one of France's most significant authors. Subjecting Duras's entire written oeuvre to an unprecedented level of close reading, it demonstrates the vital presence of ethical questions in her work, and develops an important new model of the relation between writing and our ethical life.

This study explores in detail the interaction between the increasing move towards dialogue in Sarraute's prose works, and the dialogue those works initiate with their readers. It is designed to disentangle the problems of speech, both written and verbal.

This study focuses on The Mother, Bertolt Brecht's most overtly political play and the only play which he staged in the Weimar Republic. Through detailed analysis of archival material, Bradley explores how Brecht's theatre practice developed and how it has subsequently been received and challenged by other directors, in and beyond Germany.

Looks at Simone Weil's Christological interpretations of the Sophoclean "Antigone" and "Electra", the "Iliad" and Aeschylus' "Prometheus Bound". This book traces her apologetic intentions and explains the manner in which she recasts familiar Christian concepts (thereby letting them come alive - something every good apologist should be able to do).