You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
In recent decades, scholars have shown an increasing interest in gossip’s social, psychological, and literary functions. The first book-length study of medieval gossip, Transforming Talk shifts the current debate and argues that gossip functions primarily as a transformative discourse, influencing not only social interactions but also literary and religious practices. Known as “jangling” in Middle English, gossip was believed to corrupt parishioners, disturb the peace, and cause civil and spiritual unrest. But gossip was also a productive cultural force; it reconfigured pastoral practice, catalyzed narrative experimentation, and restructured social and familial relationships. Transforming Talk will appeal to a diverse audience, including scholars interested in late medieval culture, religion, and society; Chaucer; and women in the Middle Ages.
AVATARS OF THE CINEMA: Slavoj i ek, Avatar: An Exercise in Politically-Correct Ideology; Sergio Benvenuto, Avatars of Otherness; Cristiana Cimino, The Gaze on the Real: Marco Bechis's Political Poetics. LACAN AGAIN: Uri Hadar, The Analysis of the Real; Antonello Sciacchitano, Lacan, Subject, Object. REVIEWS: Christopher Bollas, The Evocative Object World, by Antonello Correale; Ruth Leys, From Guilt to Shame: Auschwitz and After, by Janet Thormann; Didier Fassin, Richard Rechtman, L'Empire du traumatisme. Enquete sur la condition de victime, by Cristiana Cimino; Lorenzo Chiesa, Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan, by Tom Eyers."
In the English-speaking psychoanalytic world, few diagnostic categories are as controversial as hysteria. This concept, widely held to reflect outmoded cultural prejudices aganist women, has virtually disappeared from our theoretical literature, diagnostic manuals, and traning programs. However far from being gender-bound, hysteria from Jacques Lacan represents a psychic strategy that bears on one of the most fundamental preoccupations of existence: What does it mean to be a woman? What does it mean to be a man?
This volume visits death in children’s literature from around the world, making a substantial contribution to the dialogue between the expanding fields of Childhood Studies, Children’s Literature, and Death Studies. Considering both textual and pictorial representations of death, contributors focus on the topic of death in children’s literature as a physical reality, a philosophical concept, a psychologically challenging adjustment, and/or a social construct. Essays covering literature from the US, Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Canada, the UK, Sweden, Germany, Poland, Bulgaria, Brazil, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, India, and Iran display a diverse range of theoretical and cultur...
"New Perspectives on Freud's Moses and Monotheism" presents some of the most important current scholarship on 'Moses and Monotheism'. The essays in this volume offer new perspectives on Freud's perception of Judaism, of collective trauma and collective repression, national violence, gender issues, hermeneutic enigmas, religious configurations, questions of representation, and constructions of truth, while exploring the relevance of 'Moses and Monotheism' in diverse fields - from Jewish Studies, Psychoanalysis, History, and Egyptology to Literature, Musicology, and Art.
This book focuses on the use of the past in two senses. First, it looks at the way in which medieval texts from the eighth to the fifteenth centuries discussed the past: how they presented history, what kinds of historical narratives they employed, and what anxieties gathered around the practice of historiography. Second, this study examines twentieth-century interactions with this textual past, and the problems that have arisen for critics trying to negotiate this radically different textual culture. Lauryn Mayer examines chronicle histories that have been largely ignored by scholars, bringing these neglected texts into dialogue with contemporaneous canonical works such as Troilus and Criseyde, The House of Fame, the Morte Darthur, Beowulf, and The Battle of Maldon.
What makes one Anglo-Saxon poem better than another? Why does Beowulf still have the power to move us after so many centuries? What might have been aesthetically pleasing to Old English readers and writers of poetry? While there is an apparent consensus by scholars on a core of poems considered to be exceptional literary achievements - Beowulf, Judith, the Vercelli book - there has been little systematic investigation of the basis for these appraisals. With new essays on rhetoric, wordplay, meter, structure, irony, form, psychology, ethos, and reader response, the contributors to this collection aim to find objective aesthetic qualities in Anglo-Saxon poetry. Posing questions of quality and beauty as discoverable in artefacts, On the Aesthetics of Beowulf and Other Old English Poems significantly advances our understanding not only of aesthetics and Old English poetry, but also of Old English attitudes towards literature as an art form.
PERVERSION: Elizabeth Roudinesco, Some Facets of Perversion; Sergio Benvenuto, Perversions Today. THE BODY AND THE REAL: Adrian Vodovosoff, The Suffering Subject Faced with Advances in Science and Medical Technique. Ethics, Thought, Humanity; Oren Gozlan, The "Real" Time of Gender; Viktor Mazin, Techniques for Masturbating. The Impossible Sexual Relationship as Prescribed by Gaspar Noe's Film We Fuck Alone. PASOLINI & FIREFLIES: Jean Paul Curnier, The Disappearance of the Fireflies; Cristiana Cimino, Witnesses of Desire. REVIEWS: Claudia Frank, Melanie Klein in Berlin - Her First Psychoanalyses of Childer, by Ayelet Hirshfeld; Roger Frie and Donna Orange (editors), Beyond Postmodernism, New Directions in Clinical Theory and Practice, by Raul Moncayo."
Richard Lane explores the themes surrounding the postcolonial novel written in English.
In this original and innovative study, Scott T. Smith traces the intersections between land tenure and literature in Anglo-Saxon England. Smith aptly demonstrates that as land became property through the operations of writing, it came to assume a complex range of conceptual values that Anglo-Saxons could use to engage a number of vital cultural concerns beyond just the legal and practical – such as political dominion, salvation, sanctity, status, and social and spiritual obligations. Land and Book places a variety of texts – including charters, dispute records, heroic poetry, homilies, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle – in a dynamic conversation with the procedures and documents of land tenure, showing how its social practice led to innovation across written genres in both Latin and Old English. Through this, Smith provides an interdisciplinary synthesis of literary, legal, and historical interests.