An analytic and historical perspective of literary texts to understand the position of domestic workers in South AfricaMore than a million black South African women are domestic workers. Precariously situated between urban and rural areas, rich and poor, white and black, these women are at once intimately connected and at a distant remove from the families they serve. Ena Jansen shows that domestic worker relations in South Africa were shaped by the institution of ...

In recent years, Europe has had to constantly rethink and redefine its attitude toward new flows of immigrations. Issues of boundaries and identity have been integral to this reflection. Through a magnificent collection of essays, Migrant Cartographies examines both sites and conflicts and the way in which forms of belonging and identity have been reinvented. With careful analysis and exceptional insight, this volume explores the most recent literature on migration as seen from di...

This monograph presents an entirely new solution to the synoptic problem. It demonstrates that the Acts of the Apostles functioned as the structure-giving hypotext for the Gospel of Matthew. Accordingly, the Gospel of Matthew is a reworking of not only the Gospel of Luke, but also, in a strictly sequential way, of the Acts of the Apostles. This strictly sequential, hypertextual dependence on Acts explains the Matthean relocations of the Marcan and Lucan material, numerous Matthean modifica...

This book debunks the myth of Polish Modernist literature as rooted in rash, immediate expression. The author compares programmatic statements on language by turn-of-the-century writers such as Wacław Berent, Bolesław Leśmian, Stanisław Brzozowski or Karol Irzykowski with notions deduced from their literary works. He demonstrates that these writers’ linguistic self-consciousness informs their implicitly self-reflexive texts and sheds light on their values and characteristic qualities. The ...

Sienkiewicz’s Bodies focuses on the work of the most popular Polish writer from the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. It discusses the surprising success of Sienkiewicz’s writing in relation to the dissection of optimistic illusion that takes place during a reading of its cruel prose. Sienkiewicz is seen as something more than a juggler of genius in narrative prose. This conservative writer, like the modernists, knew that there was no longer any way...

The discourse on Physiognomy had an important influence and impact on European theatrical culture at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. The book discusses the debate about the scientific nature of Physiognomy. Starting from the concept that Physiognomy refers to particular signs on the face, it looks for evidence of a knowledge and awareness of this pseudo-scientific theory. The author researches among various acting manuals and theatrical works in Eng...

Kriminalliteratur bietet seit längerem ein Forum für die Behandlung schon ‚klassischer‘ postkolonialer Themen. So lassen sich die ProtagonistInnen vielfach als hybride Subjekte beschreiben, und die Suche nach ‚historischer Wahrheit‘ bedarf einer anderen Substruktion als der einfachen Antithetik von Gut und Böse. Darüber hinaus sind die im Verschwinden begriffenen ehemals klar getrennten kolonialen Räume in postkolonialer Kriminalliteratur zwar solche des Kulturkonflikts; die ‚liminalen‘ Rä...

The story of Narcissus, who falls in love with his own image in a spring, has fascinated writers and thinkers ever since Ovid first gave poetical form to the myth in his Metamorphoses. This study systematically investigates the elaborations of the theme at the turn of the century around 1900. It argues that a sense of crisis in the modern foundation of selfhood explains the heightened interest in Narcissus during this period.The book investigates three different aspects of...

Taking as its point of departure The Odyssey, Plato’s account of Atlantis and The Voyages of Sindbad the Sailor, this book examines the profound influence of these works on the development of island fiction as a genre specific to English literature. Close readings of island fictions from the past four centuries reveal the many ways in which they adapt, rewrite and refer back to these foundational texts, forming an important and intriguing literary tradition. Examples of t...

For the scholarly reader it is a truism that trade, in its widest sense (exchange, interchange, deal) is the basis of human society, it is part of the human interaction which is the very texture of society. The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss demonstrated in his seminal essay «The Elementary Structures of Kinship» that human society relies on the exchange of women by men. But women are not only the passive object of this trade among men. They also try and often succeed in trading...

The volume is uniquely located at the interdisciplinary crossroads of Performance Studies and transnational American Studies. As both a method and an object of study, performance deepens our understanding of transnational phenomena and America’s position in the world. The thirteen original contributions make use of the field’s vast potential and critically explore a wide array of cultural, political, social, and aesthetic performances on and off the stage. They scrutinize transnational tra...

This volume consists of twelve studies thematically grouped into three parts: (1) Linguistics and Philosophy of Language, (2) Hermeneutics and Text Linguistics, and (3) Lexicology and Phraseology. The phrase «tradition and innovation» characterizes almost all the texts included here, since tradition and innovation are present both at the level of the object (language) and at the level of its research (linguistics). The dominant theoretical perspective is the «Coserian» one, since the autho...