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In 1945, Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti (1901-66) brought back to Paris six matchboxes filled with the work of his war years: minute figurines that crumbled upon a single touch. Around this time, Irish playwright Samuel Beckett (1906-89) began writing plays, first Eleutheria and then Waiting for Godot. When they came together in 1961 to collaborate on a re-staging of Godot, both had turned their attention to different types of figures: Giacometti to lanky, attenuated figures that seem to erode into their environment, and Beckett to increasingly disembodied characters, such as Henry and Ada in Embers.What can we make of this turn in depicting figures that seem to make and unmake themselves in our processes of perceiving them? Through a close examination of Beckett's dramatic works and Giacometti's art, Lin Li traces the development of this peculiar type of figuration and uncovers its implications on personhood, rhetoric and inter-medial reading.Lin Li is research associate at the University of Antwerp.

We live in 'reenactive times'. Recent decades have witnessed a marked proliferation of various forms of reenactment across numerous cultural contexts and domains to the point that it is today seemingly impossible to enter museums, heritage sites, art galleries or even to turn on the television without encountering at least some elements of this veritable boom. In such a way, reenactment has become a ubiquitous cultural means of representing, commemorating and investigating the past, called upon for a variety of reasons, by a variety of practitioners and with a variety of effects. By bringing the autobiographical work of four experimental filmmakers from France and Belgium - Chantal Akerman (1950-2015), Vincent Dieutre (1960-), Boris Lehman (1944-), Agnès Varda (1928-2019) - into dialogue, Autobiographical Reenactment in French and Belgian Film: Repetition, Memory, Self considers them in relation to this broad cultural shift and explores the various forms of 'autobiographical reenactment' that their films contain. In the work of these four filmmakers, auto­biographical reenactment offers a radical and varied tech­nique of self-investigation and self-representation that sustains often challenging engagements with identity, subjectivity, memory, knowledge, time, feeling, loss, truth, reality and history, whilst leading us to continually rethink our under­standing of what autobiography can be and can do.Tom Cuthbertson is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Research Fellow in the School of Modern Languages at Newcastle University.

The avant-garde in the early-twentieth century planted its flag on the ruins of the day's pieties, with religion a particularly urgent target. Movements such as Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism often represented religion in blasphemous, prurient, or sacrilegious ways: but the invocation of spirituality and scripture were also indispensable to their transcendent, revelatory experiences. Examining the contemporaneous, and cross-national, careers in poetry and artistic propaganda of Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), F. T. Marinetti (1876-1944), and Ezra Pound (1885-1972), James Leveque frames the early avant-garde as an attempt to rediscover the necessity of prophecy and apocalyptic thought. Biblical literature furnished a sense of legitimacy and distinction to these avant-garde writers by charging many of their works with themes of spiritual direction in a new rationalized and secularized century, allowing them to present themselves as preachers of the End Times or visionaries of a new heaven and a new earth.James Leveque has taught literature at the University of Edinburgh, University of Dundee, and Edinburgh Napier University, and currently teaches at the City Literary Institute in London.

Four centuries after his death in 1616, Cervantes's great novel (the first novel), Don Quixote (1605; 1615), continues to fascinate readers and generate debate about key questions. Were the efforts of the deluded hidalgo and his corpulent squire to revive the lost age of chivalry intended simply to amuse? Or to be the vehicle for a sustained reflection on the acts of writing and reading, the state of Spanish society, the nature of reality itself? And if so, from what political and ideological perspectives? Should Don Quixote, a multi-generic text par excellence, be understood not simply as a novel, but as a poem and a performance? Cervantes is acknowledged as a supremely innovative stylist, but what was the nature and extent of his debt to classical and Renaissance rhetoric?These major areas of critical enquiry are addressed by ten leading scholars based in British and Irish universities. Each essay focuses on a particular aspect of the novel, and examines in its light particular chapters, scenes, motifs or techniques, while at the same time offering a comprehensive reading of the text. Taken as a whole, the ideas and approaches presented in this volume contribute to an understanding of Cervantes's art in Don Quixote that balances detail with synthesis.

María de Zayas y Sotomayor (Madrid, 1590-1647?) was one of the few secular women writers of her age and enjoyed great popularity. A relatively little-studied but key aspect of her success was her deft deployment of the supernatural sensu lato. Her novellas abound with miracles, disembodied voices, premonitory dreams, deals with the Devil, sorcery and witchcraft. Magic is sometimes treated as real, whereas at other times, in line with inquisitorial practice, it is dismissed as fraudulent. Some tales are humorous, others harrowing. With regards to diabolical pacts, she is strategically silent with regards to their salvific outcome. Although some of her miraculous scenes are traditional, others are imbued with a sense of the fantastic, which is also evident in other episodes. At various points she appears to suggest that free will is subjected to the stars. Throughout her oeuvre she introduces a pervading sense of doubt and indeterminacy while at the same time creating a baroque narrative labyrinth where lo que lees no es lo que es.Sander Berg has a doctorate from Birkbeck (London) and is Head of Spanish at Westminster School.

Are our actions and values freely chosen, or imposed on us by a complex interplay of unconscious motivations, culture, history, institutions and the pressure of others? Is the human subject a self-defining, self-creating autonomous agent, or merely the product or plaything of forces beyond its control? Are other people allies in the project to realize freedom, or unmovable obstacles who stand in our way? If we knew how to embrace freedom, would it be a blessing or a curse, a joyous epiphany or a crushing burden? To what extent does our finite mortal existence condition and limit our freedom? The work of Christina Howells has been instrumental in demonstrating how Continental thought has explored these questions in ways which are intellectually rigorous and humanly compelling. In this volume, some of her colleagues and former students build upon her work by addressing the situation of 'theory' today - literary, political, psychoanalytic, aesthetic and philosophical - in its relation to freedom and subjectivity. The volume includes a number of new essays on each of Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) and Jean-Luc Nancy (b. 1940), as well as essays on a range of other theorists. Taken together, the volume's essays show how the modern theorising subject may be both the source and the product of its endeavour to understand its place in the human, mortal world.Oliver Davis is Reader in French Studies at Warwick University. Colin Davis is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. Christina Howells is Professor of French and Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford.

Early modern Spanish American poetry (c. 1500-1700) is a fascinating but little-studied aspect of Hispanic colonial culture. Spanish American poetry was transmitted in material ways, not simply as an intellectual and literary phenomenon. Poetry was considered as a written and oral object, disseminated, conditioned and controlled by a range of societal players both within and beyond the urban space. While the obvious networks of interchange connected the European metropolis to the burgeoning colonies, there were also cross-regional connections in Central and South America. As performance art, poetry connected with other art forms in the region -- music, painting and sculpture -- but as an act of devotion it also intersected the history of early American religious culture.This wide-ranging and highly interdisciplinary volume offers pioneering work bringing together scholars from both Europe and the Americas, North and South.Rodrigo Cacho is Reader in Spanish Golden Age and Colonial Studies at the University of Cambridge. Imogen Choi is Associate Professor of Spanish at Exeter College, University of Oxford.

As Albert Camus once remarked: 'Of capital punishment, people write only [...] in a low voice.' Journalists and state officials alike use a carefully policed language when making any reference to the death penalty: when human beings are to be executed by the state, some key actors talk about what will be done in terms of legalities and procedures. Does fiction provide a counterbalance for that discretion, or simply echo it? What other perspectives can it bring into the foreground, and can literary language express a response to a supposedly necessary horror, or a terrible injustice, which other voices or media cannot?Considering a range of major works from across Western Europe and the United States, from the 18th century until the present day, Death Sentences investigates the contribution of poetics to our understanding, past and present, of capital punishment. The sophisticated literary representations found in Hugo, Dostoevsky, Wilde, Kafka, Mailer, King and others offer a privileged vantage point from which to illuminate and critique a unique institution which itself relies heavily on spectacle and representation to be operative and legitimized.Birte Christ is Assistant Professor of American Literature and Culture at Justus-Liebig-University Giessen. Ève Morisi is Associate Professor of French and Fellow of St Hugh's College at the University of Oxford.