Bøker utgitt av Peter Lang AG, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften

What would a good world for women look like? How would we get there from where we are and how would we have to change ourselves in the process? This book examines a critical moment in recent American and western European history when the utopian dimension of political movements was particularly generative and feminism was at their core. The imaginative literature that emerged out of American, French, and German feminisms of the 1970s engaged the dialectic between the actual and the possible in radically new and creative ways. Ranging from conventional utopian and science fictions to avant-garde and experimental texts, they countered the idea of utopia as a pre-set goal with the idea of the utopian as a process of dreaming forwards. This book explores the transformative potential of feminist visions of change, even as it sees their ideological blind spots. It does more than simply look back to the 1970s. Instead, it looks ahead, anticipating some of the shifts and changes of feminist thought in the following decades: its transnational scope, its critique of identity politics and the gendered politics of sexuality, and its embrace of affect as an analytical category. The author argues that the radical utopianism of second wave feminisms has not lost its urgency. The transformations they envisioned are still our challenge, as the vital work of social change remains undone.

Norwood, an Anglo-Jewish childcare institution founded in the late nineteenth century, was one of several hundred such institutions in the UK, but the only Jewish one. Throughout its history, Norwood had the unusual task of adapting its childcare approach to both British and Jewish concerns. This book offers a unique study of one residential child institution within the broader British context, tracing the development of the institution and changing concepts of childcare over nearly one hundred years. The story of Norwood is told chronologically, beginning with its origins in the early nineteenth century and its growth before the First World War. The inter-war years saw a period of stagnation that paved the way for the post-war revolution in institutional childcare, the demise of the orphanage idea and, with it, the demolition of Norwood. The book provides a narrative of the rise and fall of the childcare institution as much as the story of Norwood.

Taking J.W. von Goethe's morphological and poetic thought as matrix, this volume presents eighteen articles by contributors coming from philosophy, art history, history, mathematics, demography and architecture focusing on Goethe's approach to science and art, to question and strengthen nowadays epistemological paradigm and contemporary aesthetics.

Modern Ekphrasis explores the analogical relations between modern poetry and painting in ekphrasis from Horace's mimetic ut pictura poesis tradition to Lessing's temporal/spatial antithesis, and the analogy's post-modern deconstruction with Derrida. The genesis of ekphrasis is demonstrated by close analytical readings of modern poems by Howard Nemerov, W.C. Williams, Sylvia Plath, and John Ashbery, mostly written on modern paintings by Paul Klee, Charles Demuth, Giorgio de Chirico, and Frank Stella. In an innovative approach, the author applies Anton Ehrenzweig's concept of unconscious scanning to a syncretic visualisation of Klee's Mountain Flora. Viewed with an undifferentiated depth vision that can fix the figure and background in a single glance, Mountain Flora acquires deeper verisimilitude. The self-reflexivity of the poems which comments on their creative processes and the interrelations of ekphrasis with cognition are analysed after the critical writings of Freud, Panowsky, Gombrich, Hagstrum, Arnheim, Steiner, Ehrenzweig, Derrida, and in the light of the latest neuroscientific discoveries. Homer's shield, Swift's tree, W.C. Williams' pot of flowers, and Ashbery's canvas create a suture within the ekphrastic poem in our imagination. This book demonstrates the evolution of literature and the humanities in our society from classicism to post-modernism which counteracted the self-alienation caused by our modern communication technology by inventing new socio-artistic circuits and new social identities.

This collection of essays on Francis Bacon pays tribute to his legacy and influence. The contributors consider the interdisciplinary scope of his art in relation to architecture, continental philosophy, critical theory, gender studies and the sociology of the body, and compare Bacon with artists, philosophers and writers who share similar concerns.

These essays were selected from papers given at the 2013 Edinburgh Seventh Century Colloquium. Exploring issues as diverse as the origins of the early Islamic state, the beginnings of English Christianity, the transmission of high culture and the forming of new identities, they highlight the latest scholarship from a rising generation of academics.

This book explores the linguistic nature of American movie conversation, pointing out its resemblances to face-to-face conversation. The reason for such an investigation lies in the fact that movie language is traditionally considered to be non-representative of spontaneous language. The book presents a corpus-driven study of the similarities between face-to-face and movie conversation, using detailed consideration of individual lexical phrases and linguistic features as well as Biber's Multi-Dimensional Analysis (1998). The data from an existing spoken American English corpus - the Longman Spoken American Corpus - is compared to the American Movie Corpus, a corpus of American movie conversation purposely built for the research. On the basis of evidence from these corpora, the book shows that contemporary movie conversation does not differ significantly from face-to-face conversation, and can therefore be legitimately used to study and teach natural spoken language.

This book is a theological reflection on the broken state of faith and of the Catholic Church in Ireland, following more than two decades of revelations of institutional and child sexual abuse and the Church's now acknowledged failure to respond to the abuse in an appropriate way. This has resulted in broken lives, broken faith and a broken church.

Irish women flourished in the publishing world at the turn of the twentieth century, and a number of the most popular and prolific of these authors chose to live and work in Britain. As expatriates, these women occupied a complex cultural space between Ireland and Britain from which they were able to observe the rapidly altering political landscape in their homeland and, in particular, the debates that concerned them as women. This book examines the lives and literature of six Irish novelists - Emily Lawless, L. T. Meade, George Egerton, Katherine Cecil Thurston, M. E. Francis and Katharine Tynan - who lived and worked in Britain between the years 1890 and 1916, between them producing nearly 500 published works. Drawing on a range of their novels, this study explores their participation in the prevailing debates of the era: the Irish Question and the Woman Question. This book was the winner of the 2013 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Irish Studies.

This book offers a comprehensive study of the role of dance in a wide range of contemporary Irish plays and argues that dance can be perceived as exemplifying the re-embracement of bodily expression by the local culture. The author approaches this issue from a cultural materialist perspective, demonstrating that dance in twentieth-century Ireland was particularly prone to ideological appropriation and that, consequently, its use in contemporary drama often serves to communicate critical and revisionist approaches to the social, economic and political concerns addressed in these plays. The book makes a valuable contribution to current debates about the nature of Irish theatre, investigating recent changes to its traditional, text-based character. These are examined within two important contexts: firstly, transformations in the perception of the human body in Irish culture and, secondly, changes in the attitude of the Irish towards their past and their cultural heritage.

Often hailed as a 'national genre', the short story has a long tradition in Ireland and continues to fascinate readers and writers alike. This volume explores the Irish short story as a hybrid, multivalent and highly flexible literary form, which is forever being reshaped to meet new insights, new influences and new realities.

This volume examines the use of French in European language communities outside France from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. Each chapter offers unique insight into the existence of francophonie in a given language community and the volume as a whole explores broad sociolinguistic and sociohistorical questions about the function of French.

This book explores the dreams, plans and hopes as well as the nightmares and fears that are an integral part of alternative thinking in the Western hemisphere. While ideological struggles of the twentieth century focused on the macro level, the real impetus for change came from blue-sky thinking that imagined alternatives to the status quo.

Explores the foundations of coaching and training practices and chronicles how traditional approaches to performance preparation evolved during the nineteenth century. This book was shortlisted for the Lord Aberdare Prize 2013.

Wittgenstein is not generally thought of as a philosopher of education, yet his views on how we think, learn and teach have the potential to contribute significantly to our contemporary understanding of pedagogy. Wittgenstein himself was a lifelong learner whose method consisted of thinking intensely about a wide range of topics, including not only the philosophy of language, logic and mathematics but also architecture, music, ethics, religion, culture and psychoanalysis. He then shared his observations and conclusions with his students as a way of teaching them how to think and learn for themselves, and his personification of the learner-teacher deeply impressed those who witnessed his pedagogical performances during his 'lectures'. This study presents a detailed exploration of Wittgenstein's legacy as an educationalist, now accessible to us through the extensive published collections of his thoughts on the subject.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, a dominant figure in European literature and intellectual life, was the creator of a new and influential visual culture. This volume investigates a new science of perception through an exploration of his autobiographical works, novels and writings on optics. The psychoanalytic approach taken in this study focuses on central acts of perception and the role of vision in Goethe as key to the formation of identity. By addressing the impact of visuality on the act of writing, new interpretations of his most important works emerge through analysis of subject formation in the autobiographies, The Italian Journey and Poetry and Truth. Further, the relationship between the self and the gaze plays a central role in the semi-autobiographical works, The Elective Affinities, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, as well as Color Theory. In exploring the question of identity and identification within a Lacanian framework, The Eye and the Gaze offers an innovative approach to biography, autobiography, and narrative.

Ut pictura poesis Horace said, but through the two millennia in which the sister arts have been compared, little has been said about the nature of sight itself. What we see in our mind's eye as we read has not been explored, though by following the visual prompts in texts, one can anatomize the process of visualization. The Poetics of Sight analyses the role of sight in memory, dream and popular culture and demonstrates the structure of a complex sight within the metaphors of Shakespeare, Pope and Dickens; and within the visual metaphors of Picasso, Magritte and Bacon. This book explores the difference between the great and the failed works of the supreme poet-painter, William Blake, and tracks the migrations of the Satiric muse between verbal mockery and scabrous images in Persius, Pope, Gillray and Gogol. It records the rise, and partial decline, of the vividly seen novel in Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Proust and Hardy. The key concept throughout this book is visual metaphor, which in the twentieth century acquired overarching importance: in art from Picasso to Kapoor, in poetry from Eliot to Hughes, in aesthetics from Pound to Derrida. The book closes with a far-reaching definition of visual metaphor and with the great visual metaphor of the human body.

This book analyses religious identity transformations through inter-religious relations. It aims to highlight the link between religious discourse and social cohesion, or the lack of such a link, and ultimately seeks to contribute to the dominant discourse on Muslim-Christian relations. The book is based on fieldwork in Indonesia and Tanzania, and is timely because of the growing tensions between Muslims and Christians in both countries. Its relevance lies in its fresh look at theories of religion and science. From its establishment as an academic discipline, the phenomenology of religion has dominated religious studies. Its theory of religion is 'realist' (religion is a reality 'in itself') and its view of science is objectivist (scientific knowledge is true if its representation of reality corresponds with reality itself). Based on Discourse Theory, the author argues that religion does not exist 'in itself'. Human practices and artifacts become religious because they are placed in a narrative context by the believers. By using discourse analysis as a research method, the author shows how religious identities in Tanzania and Indonesia are constructed, negotiated and manipulated in order to gain material or symbolic profit.

This book seeks to investigate gender differences in final year undergraduates' employment expectations at a university in central China, including salary expectations, occupational expectations and working region expectations, and to identify factors that have actually contributed to the gender differences in the these expectations.

Due to its strategic Mediterranean position, Italy is a crossroad of complex transnational movements, a unique context for the study of contemporary migration. This book brings together scholars from migration studies, linguistics, media, literature and film studies, as well practitioners and activists, to explore Italy as a destination country.

Corpus Linguistics in Language Teaching

This book was shortlisted for the R.H. Gapper prize 2011. On 8 February 1937 the 23-year-old Albert Camus gave an inaugural lecture for a new Maison de la culture, or community arts centre, in Algiers. Entitled 'La nouvelle culture mediterraneenne' ('The New Mediterranean Culture'), Camus's lecture has been interpreted in radically different ways: while some critics have dismissed it as an incoherent piece of juvenilia, others see it as key to understanding his future development as a thinker, whether as the first expression of his so-called 'Mediterranean humanism' or as an early indication of what is seen as his essentially colonial mentality. These various interpretations are based on reading the text of 'The New Mediterranean Culture' in a single context, whether that of Camus's life and work as a whole, of French discourses on the Mediterranean or of colonial Algeria (and French discourses on that country). By contrast, this study argues that Camus's lecture - and in principle any historical text - needs to be seen in a multiplicity of contexts, discursive and otherwise, if readers are to understand properly what its author was doing in writing it. Using Camus's lecture as a case study, the book provides a detailed theoretical and practical justification of this 'multi-contextualist' approach.

In this work, the author discusses the various beliefs and ideologies of the RastafarI movement related to Ethiopia. The author also challenges the misogynistic attitude of the RastafarI movement by rehabilitating the position of women through the figure of the Queen of Sheba.

Jorge Semprun is a leading writer from the first generation of Spanish Civil War exiles, yet studies of his work have often focused solely on his literary testimony to the concentration camps and his political activities. Although Semprun's work derives from his incarceration in Buchenwald and his expulsion from the Spanish Communist Party in 1964, limiting the discussion of his works to the autobiographical details or to the realm of Holocaust studies is reductive. The responses by many influential writers to his recent death highlight that the significance of Semprun's work goes beyond the testimony of historical events. His self-identification as a Spanish exile has often been neglected and there is no comprehensive study of his works available in English. This book provides a global view of his A uvre and extends literary analysis to texts that have received little critical attention. The author investigates the role played by memory in some of Semprun's works, drawing on current debates in the field of memory studies. A detailed analysis of these works allows related concepts, such as exile and nostalgia, the Holocaust, the interplay between memory and writing, politics and collective memory, and postmemory and identity, to be examined and discussed.

The essays collected here are responses to books of poetry and prose published during the transition period from the apartheid regime of the mid-1980s to the first democratic election in South Africa in 1994. The volume comprises a variety of texts written during the crucial mid-1980s - the time of the Emergency and the height of oppression - up to and including the installation of the first freely elected South African government in 1994. In the years of anti-apartheid struggle, the immediate political conflict was pre-eminent in the minds of many poets but extended to broader concerns about race, writing and colonialism, such as the debate about the imbongi (African praise singer) as the true antecedent of the contemporary African poet. After the end of apartheid new challenges came to the South African book publishing industry and, thus, to South African writers, as they tried to make sense of the past and draw tentative lines into the future. The works of J. M. Coetzee, Njabulo Ndebele, Kelwyn Sole, Sandile Dikeni, Vincent Swart, Heather Robertson, Patrick Cullinan, Seitlhamo Motsapi, W. P. B. Botha and more are read against this changing social and political landscape.

This book challenges the notion of the separation between economics and theology. It explores relationships between the disciplines through the concept of salvation, focusing on the work of Adam Smith and G.W.F. Hegel. They wrote as the disciplinary boundaries between economics and theology were taking shape, and remain important figures in contemporary discussions. Illuminating the theological foundations of the economic ideas of these two main thinkers, this book enriches our understanding of issues related to salvation such as: sympathy and recognition; poverty and the state; the invisible hand and the cunning of reason; evil and scarcity and eschatology. Moreover, the book contributes to a broader understanding of salvation and provides a model for future dialogue between economists and theologians by extending the frontiers of this unexplored field of research.

The Irish writer and critic Helen Waddell burst onto the publishing scene in the 1920s as a phenomenon, a scholar whose books became instant bestsellers. These essays reassess her achievement from the perspectives of medieval, English, cultural and Irish studies, exploring how her writings challenge academic and literary orthodoxies.

The status of Hong Kong English has been an increasing concern among the local population. Despite prolific research into attitudes towards language variation within the field of sociolinguistics in general, very few studies have focused on the Hong Kong context. Previous research has demonstrated that native English speakers tend to evaluate Standard English varieties highly as far as status is concerned, while non-standard varieties are evaluated highly in terms of solidarity. There is still, however, a noticeable lack of information about the attitudes of Hong Kong Chinese people to different English varieties and, particularly, about their attitudes to the local non-standard variety. This richly detailed case study sets out to investigate the attitudes of Hong Kong university students to eight varieties of English speech. It employs a range of direct and indirect techniques of attitude measurement in order to obtain in-depth information about the students' perceptions. The book also discusses the important pedagogical implications of the choice of linguistic model in English language teaching, both within the Hong Kong population and among other Chinese communities.

It is no longer a matter of debate to state that the practice of 'democracy' in different African nations is almost always experienced through violence or something near to it. The principal question addressed by this work is, 'Why are many African countries finding it difficult to practise democracy without tears Though this unique work recognises a number of factors as contributing to the pitiable democratic experience of many African states, the liberal party model of democracy is identified as a major political obstacle which not only impedes democratisation, but also fails to address significant national questions in plural societies. Instead of acting as an attenuating force, the liberal party system tends to intensify the negative roles of other dependent socio-political variables in instituting and consolidating democracy in multi-ethnic societies. In light of this, this work recommends a cooperative, instead of a competitive method of government formation - a 'Cooperative Collegial Democracy' - for African societies and any multi-ethnic society. This is a party-less, peaceful and overtly fair political system which is imbued with the qualities needed to resolve national questions and which constrains the incompetent and corrupt from emerging as political leaders, thus ensuring competent leadership and establishing functional and non-destabilising democracies in African or other multi-ethnic states.

A collection of essays that explores the relationship between art, literature and the stage in France and Belgium in the period 1830-1910. It provides insights into research within this interdisciplinary field.