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Writing at first anonymously and later under the pen name Pierre Loti, French author Julien Viaud (1850-1923) produced a series of fictions that sympathetically portrayed male same-sex desire and its accompanying societal conflicts. Due to the constraints of the time, Viaud had to develop various strategies for discussing his subject covertly; his success in doing so is demonstrated by the great critical and commercial success he enjoyed during his lifetime, which included his election to the French Academy at age forty-one. Richard Berrong presents a gay reading of the novels and novellas of Julien Viaud, chronologically tracing his development of a distinct homosexual identity and the stra...
In Rabelais and Bakhtin, Richard M. Berrong demonstrates both the historical and textual weaknesses of the argument advanced by Mikhail Bakhtin and his influential study Rabelais and His World. The publication of Bakhtin's book in the West in the late 1960s brought both Rabelais and Bakhtin to the attention of students interested in the "New Criticism" in literature. Bakhtin agrued that the key to Rabelais's narratives was to be found in their language of popular culture, which was intended to free his readers from the ideological "prison house" of official, establishment discourse; to provide them with a nonofficial perspective from which to view?and combat?the establishment and its institu...
Few authors have led lives as interesting as that enjoyed by French novelist and travel writer Pierre Loti (1850–1923)—and still fewer have worked so hard to make their lives appear even more romantic than they already were. As a career officer in the French navy, Loti participated in expeditions that took him to locales which even today seem exotic, giving rise to four decades of novels, travelogues, and autobiographical narratives, some of which went through hundreds of editions in France and were translated into dozens of languages. And as Richard M. Berrong reveals in this colorful biography, the extravagances of Loti’s often very public private life were as interesting as his art....
Finally -- a complete Italian grammar course that addresses the specific needs of singers translating opera librettos, with their archaic forms and poetic syntax! In Grammar and Translation for the Italian Libretto, Professor Berrong guides you through examples from numerous librettos as you build your expertise. Each chapter includes a short vocabulary list and translation exercises to self-test. You will be empowered to speak and understand Italian more masterfully and to translate Italian opera without having to depend on others to do it for you!
Through a wide range of examples, from literature to social media, the book explores how meaning and communication interact.
"The tradition of Russian tragifarce can be characterized by its strong links to Russian political and cultural history and by its significant role in the development of Russian dramatic literature and theater practice. The book argues that the dualistic character of Russian tragifarce, which is close in spirit and philosophy to Bakhtin's understanding of the medieval carnival, embodies the ambivalent spirit of Russian culture and politics. The book further argues that the tragifarcical perception of the world can be seen as a national characteristic of the self-doubting and ironic Russian sensibility under the influence of a repressive political regime."--BOOK JACKET.
The cinephobic novelist who complains to Fitzgerald's tycoon that he will never get the hang of scriptwriting wouldn't give a nickel for the movies. Yet never before the appearance of film had human perception been engaged in such an all-encompassing way by a single art form. In this ambitious investigation of a little-studied narrative genre, Gavriel Moses defines and explores "the film novel," a literary text in which cinema provides the thematic, formal, psychological, and philosophical center. Through close readings of works by the major representatives of the genre—Pirandello, Nabokov, Isherwood, West, Fitzgerald, Moravia, Percy, Puig—Moses develops a suggestive theory of novels tha...
Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924) is the world's most frequently performed operatic composer, yet he is only beginning to receive serious scholarly attention. In Giacomo Puccini and His World, an international roster of music specialists, several writing on Puccini for the first time, offers a variety of new critical perspectives on the composer and his works. Containing discussions of all of Puccini’s operas from Manon Lescaut (1893) to Turandot (1926), this volume aims to move beyond clichés of the composer as a Romantic epigone and to resituate him at the heart of early twentieth-century musical modernity. This collection’s essays explore Puccini’s engagement with spoken theater and op...
This reader brings together original and influential recent work in the field of early modern European history. Provides a thought-provoking overview of current thinking on this period. Key themes include evolving early-modern identities; changes in religion and cultural life; the revolution of the mind; roles of women in early-modern societies; the rise of the modern state; and Europe and the new world system Incorporates new scholarship on Eastern and Central Europe. Includes an article translated into English for the first time.