Two well-dressed Frenchmen square off in a duel. A count kidnaps his wife to keep her from suing for marital separation. A twelve-year-old boy is hired as an office worker by the powerful Bureau of the Book Trade of the Ministry of the Interior. These actions were not sanctioned…
Linguistics has long shied away from claiming any link between a language and the culture of its speakers: too much simplistic (even bigoted) chatter about the romance of Italian and the goose-stepping orderliness of German has made serious thinkers wary of the entire subject. B…
"Italy has a bewildering cultural patrimony. Where do you start? With Giotto? With Caravaggio? In murky Etruscan tombs or the mighty Roman Pantheon? Speak the Culture: Italy sifts through a sprawling 3,000 year saga and makes sense of it; dissecting architecture, music, food, ar…
World War I was a devastating total war. But what was the reality like on the ground in Germany, for both the soldiers on the front-lines and the women on the homefront? This book examines this question in detail and challenges some strongly held assumptions about the Great War.
"Why is Old English poetry so preoccupied with mental actions and perspectives, giving readers access to minds of antagonists as freely as to those of protagonists? Why are characters sometimes called into being for no apparent reason other than to embody a psychological state? …
Mize synthesizes two previously disconnected bodies of theory to advance our understanding of how traditional phraseology makes meaning, as well as illuminate the political and social dimensions of surviving texts, through attention to Old English poets' impulse to explore subje…
