"'Love is harder to explain than hunger, for a piece of fruit does not feel the desire to be eaten': Denis Diderot's Éléments de physiologie presents a world in flux, turning on the relationship between man, matter and mind. In this late work, Diderot delves playfully into the r…
The subject of this book is the philosophy of Stanisław Lem. The first part contains an analysis and interpretation of one of his early works, The Dialogues. The author tries to show how Lem used the terminology of cybernetics to create a project of sociology and anthropology. T…
2019 marked both the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and Napoléon's 250th anniversary. Picking up on this contingency of world history with an ironic wink, the volume analyses in retrospect the epoch of European universalism. It focusses on its dialectics, polemi…
Acta Slavica Estonica is an international series of publications on current issues of Russian and other Slavic languages, literatures and cultures. This volume This volume is devoted to the interrelations of the prominent Estonian writer Jaan Kross (1920-2007) with Russian liter…
This volume offers the author's central articles on the medieval and early modern history of cartography for the first time in English translation. A first group of essays gives an overview of medieval cartography, illustrating the methods of cartographers. Another analyzes worl…
"Through case studies of the work of Alison Bechdel, Matt Kindt, Lynda Barry, Carla Speed McNeil, Chris Ware, and Randall Munroe, this monograph argues that paying attention to comics helps us understand the future of the book"--
This first book-length study of Pound criticism investigates not just what critics have had to say about Pound but also why they have asked the questions they have asked. Forty-five years after his death, and more than seventy years after his indictment for treason, Ezra Pound r…
"This is the first full-length study of Shelley's plays in performance. It offers a rich, meticulously researched history of Shelley's role as a playwright and dramatist and a reassessment of his 'closet dramas' as performable pieces of theatre. With chapters on each of Shelley'…
"This is the first full-length study of Shelley's plays in performance. It offers a rich, meticulously researched history of Shelley's role as a playwright and dramatist and a reassessment of his 'closet dramas' as performable pieces of theatre. With chapters on each of Shelley'…
The Environment on Stage: Scenery or Shapeshifter? investigates a pertinent voice of theatrical performance within the production and reception of ecotheatre. Theatre ecologies, unavoidably enmeshed in the environment, describe the system of sometimes perverse feedback loops run…
This volume is the first to examine the museum landscape of all post-socialist EU member states. How do museums present the Second World War, the Holocaust, and Soviet crimes? As part of their nations' attempts to join the EU, some "invoke" Europe, aiming to prove their European…
Both Giorgio Agamben and Franz Kafka are best known for their gloomy political worldview. A cautious study of Agamben?s references on Kafka, however, reveals another dimension right at the intersection of their works: a complex and unorthodox theory of freedom. The inspiration e…
"Terrorism and Temporality in the Works of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo starts from a simple premise: that the events of the 11th of September 2001 must have had a major effect on two New York residents, and two of the seminal authors of American letters, Pynchon and DeLillo. …
Reverberations of the Vietnam War can still be felt in American culture. The post-9/11 United States forays into the Middle East, the invasion and occupation of Iraq especially, have evoked comparisons to the nearly two decades of American presence in Viet Nam (1954-1973). That …
The Invention of China in Early Modern England describes how several different English communities became aware of China. It begins by describing how early modern intellectuals used the utopian ideal of China to license all kinds of progressive innovation before chronicling how …
Golden Age departures in historiography and theory of history in some ways prepared the ground for modern historical methods and ideas about historical factuality. At the same time, they fed into the period's own "aesthetic-historical culture" which amalgamated fact and fiction …
From Mind to Text: Continuities and Breaks Between Cognitive, Aesthetic and Textualist Approaches to Literature explores the historical context of theory formation and of its contemporary status, including an overview of debates about theory's role in literary studies provided b…
This volume presents an interdisciplinary dialogue between sociology, geography, political sciences, history, and literary, cultural and media studies. Together, they contribute to current debates on the (re-)imagining of forms of human responsibility that meet the challenges cr…