Foreign Languages: Sample Titles

The Documentary Imagination in Twentieth-Century French Literature identifies a documentary impulse in French literature that emerges at the end of the nineteenth century and culminates in a proliferation of factual writings in the twenty-first. Focusing on the period bookended by these twomoments, it highlights the enduring concern with factual reference in texts that engage either with current events or the historical archive. Specifically, it considers a set of ideas and practices centered on the conceptualization and use of documents. In doing so, it contests the widespreadnarrative that twentieth-century French literature abandons the realist enterprise, and argues that writers instead renegotiate the realist legacy outside, or at the margins of, the fictional space of the novel.Analyzing works by authors including Gide, Breton, Aragon, Yourcenar, Duras, and Modiano, the book defines a specific documentary mode of literary representation that records, assembles, and investigates material traces of reality. The document is a textual, visual, or material piece of evidencerepurposed through its visual insertion, textual transcription, or description within a literary work. It is a fact, but it also becomes a figure, standing for literature's confrontation with the real. The documentary imagination involves a fantasy of direct access to a reality that speaks foritself. At the same time, it gives rise to concrete textual practices that open up new directions for literature, by interrogating the construction and interpretation of facts.

Experimentation and the Lyric in Contemporary French Poetry offers a new theoretical approach and historical perspective on the remarkable upsurge in creative poetic practices in France that have challenged traditional definitions of poetry and of the lyric. Focusing on the work of Pierre Alferi, Olivier Cadiot, Emmanuel Hocquard, Franck Leibovici, Anne Portugal and Denis Roche, this book provides an analysis of the most influential poets in French poetry of the last few decades. It contextualizes the theoretical models that inform their investigations, analyzing them alongside the history of the avant-garde and the heated theoretical debates that have taken place over whether to continue or bring an end to the lyric. Systematically addressing the various strategies employed by these poets and drawing on reception theory and cognitive studies, Jeff Barda argues that French radical poetics re-evaluates the lyric in cognitive terms beyond the personal. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in twenty-first-century forms of experimental writing and the connections between literature and the arts today.

Exploring medieval literary representations of the Islamic conquest of Spain in 711, Hazbun discusses chronicles, epic and clerical poetry, and early historical novels. While material on the conquest of Spain is substantial, it is understudied and this book works to fill that gap.

Alicia Giménez Bartlett's popular crime series, written in Spanish and organized around the exploits of Police Inspector Petra Delicado and Deputy Inspector Fermin Garzon, is arguably the most successful detective series published in Spain during the previous three decades. Nina L. Molinaro examines the tensions between the rhetoric of gender differences espoused by the woman detective and the orthodox ideology of the police procedural. She argues that even as the series incorporates gender differences into the crime series formula, it does so in order to correct women, naturalize men's authority, sanction social hierarchies, and assuage collective anxieties. As Molinaro shows, with the exception of the protagonist, the women characters require constant surveillance and modification, often as a result of men's supposedly intrinsic protectiveness or excessive sexuality. Men, by contrast, circulate more freely in the fictional world and are intrinsic to the political, psychological, and economic prosperity of their communities. Molinaro situates her discussion in Petra Delicado's contemporary Spain of dog owners, ¡Hola!, Russian cults, and gated communities.

What would love be if heterosexual couples were no longer assigned gender and sexual norms? Maxime Foerster examines the "heterosexual trouble" between men and women in nineteenth-century French Romantic and Decadent literature. Key works by authors ranging from George Sand to Charles Baudelaire persistently demonstrate that heterosexuality did not work: these authors, and many others, investigated the struggle that men and women alike waged against patriarchal norms. Whereas Romantic fiction dedicated itself to the reinvention of love, Decadence promoted sexual and gender deviance. In expertly evaluating the discord afflicting fictional heterosexual couples, male and female dandies, and doctors and their female patients, Foerster shows the crucial role that literature played in the fashioning of alternative identities. A concluding look at Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu traces the legacy of heterosexual trouble in the twentieth century. Hardcover is un-jacketed.

In this 1954 study of poetic realism and the Novelle form, Silz examines nine Novellen by Brentano, Arnim, Droste-Hulshoff, Stifter, Grillsparzer, Keller, Meyer, Storm and Hauptmann. Through his textual interpretation of each of these works Silz draws the threads of the transition from Romanticism to Naturalism as well as the development of the Novelle form.

In this first definitive study of Friedrich Schiller's relationship to music, R. M. Longyear discusses Schiller's personal, literary, and philosophical utilization of music as well as the influence of Schiller's works on composers from 1782 through the 1960s.

This treasury of enlightening information reveals the roles of youthful Southerners in academic, scholarly, and literary society in Weimar, Gottingen, Bonn, Berlin, Heidelberg, and Munich in the Golden Age of Germany. In this piece of German-American cultural history, Krumpelmann traces the paths and influence of young men from the American South who attended German universities in the age of Goethe. Discussed are Hugh Legare, Jesse Burton Harrison, George Henry Calvert, Thomas Caute Reynolds, Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, James Woodrow, and others.

At the heart of all crime fiction is an investigation into an act of intentional violence. The variance, evolution, splintering, and reimagining of the genre all lie in the method and outcome of the investigation and the dynamic between investigator, criminal, and victim. The understanding and portrayal of the relationship between criminal, victim, and investigator often reflect current social concerns, perceptions, and realities. While the narratives and the scholars who study them have generally centered on the criminal and the investigator, the victims and their bodies also reflect changing social and political landscapes. This book brings together nine scholars of Latin American and Peninsular Spanish crime fiction who explore the role of the victim in crime fiction from the Spanish-speaking world. The authors highlight how the definition of "victim," the identification of the body, the nature of the crime, and the treatment afforded the corpse by the authorities and/or by the narrative, reflect societies coping with changing demographics, drug wars, economic crisis, and political corruption and instability. While the challenges above are not unique to the Spanish speaking world, the spotlight on the victim is a relatively new line of inquiry in the field of crime fiction of interest to readers and scholars of Hispanic crime fiction and popular culture studies.