'This is a remarkable, challenging and bravely original work.' The Guardian Ripped from the world by her husband's paranoia, Desdemona turns in death towards the memory of Barbary, the North African maid who raised her: together, they explore the contours of death, race, war, love and motherhood, in a moving elegy. Audacious with ambition, Desdemona is Toni Morrison's intimate reimagining of the fourth act of Shakespeare's Othello, mixing monologue with Rokia Traore's lyrical songs to re-examine the Bard's presentation of race and female suffering. Part-play, part-concert, part-quest into the afterlife, Desdemona is published in Methuen Drama's Modern Classics series, featuring a new introduction by Joyce Green MacDonald.

Thomas Bernhard is widely considered to be one of the most important German playwrights in the post-war era. Highly acclaimed, he has written over twenty plays and novels and gained a reputation as one of Austria’s most controversial authors. Bernhard wrote Heldenplatz in 1988 as a response to the fiftieth anniversary of the Anschluss (annexation) of Austria by Hitler’s Germany. Highly controversial in Austria, the play concerns a Jewish professor who returns to Vienna after the Second World War and discovers that his fellow Austrians are as anti-semitic as ever. ‘Heldenplatz’ is the square in Vienna where the Austrian-born Hitler made his first speech after the Anschluss. In Heldenplatz, Bernhard's final play, he explores the shared isolation of people who have lost their bearings, along with most of their illusions.

Dante's letter to Lord Can Grande della Scala, concerning the Divine Comedy in general, the Paradiso in particular, and the method to be used for interpretation.

The Rhaeto-Romance languages have been known as such to the linguistic community since the pioneering studies of Ascoli and Gartner over a century ago. There has never been a community of RR speakers based on a common history or polity and the various dialects are mutually unintelligible, but a unity, based on a number of common features, has been advanced. This book is the first general description of the Rhaeto-Romance languages to be written in English. It provides a critical examination of the phonology, morphology, lexicon, and syntax of the modern Rhaeto-Romance dialects within the broader perspective of Romance comparative linguistics.

Leading international contributors present a lively and interdisciplinary panorama of the Italian Renaissance as it has developed in recent decades.

In the early 1900s the Catholic Church appealed, for the first time in its history, directly to women to reassert its religious, political and social relevance in Italian society. This book examines how the highly successful conservative Catholic women's movements that followed, and how they mobilized women against secular feminism.

A bold and revealing book which looks with fresh vision at feminist political writing. Maria Lauret developes a new definition of the genre and illuminates the profound influence and importance of African-American women's writing.

With translation assistance and a foreword by Karen Juers-Munby First produced in 1998 at the famous Vienna Burgtheater, the remarkable and provocative Sports Play by Austrian playwright Elfriede Jelinek is a postdramatic theatrical exploration of the making, marketing and sale of the human body and of emotions in sport. It explores contemporary society’s obsession with fitness and body culture bringing into sharp focus our need to belong to a group, a team or a nation. Sport is seen as a form of war in peacetime.

A classic examination of John Locke's philosophy of economics, language and history.