The authors of the 16 essays collected in this volume use a variety of approaches to study a broad range of what are now called 'ego-documents' from the Renaissance to the beginning of the 19th century.

Embodiment, Expertise, and Ethics in Early Modern Europe highlights the agency and intentionality of individuals and groups in the making of sensory knowledge from approximately 1500 to 1700. Focused case studies show how artisans, poets, writers, and theologians responded creatively to their environments, filtering the cultural resources at their disposal through the lenses of their own more immediate experiences and concerns. The result was not a single, unified sensory culture, but rather an entangling of micro-cultural dynamics playing out across an archipelago of contexts that dotted the early modern European world—one that saw profound transitions in ways people used sensory knowledge to claim ethical, intellectual, and practical authority.

This book offers new, often unexpected, but always intriguing portraits of the writers of classic fairy tales. For years these authors, who wrote from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, have been either little known or known through skewed, frequently sentimentalized biographical information. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were cast as exemplars of national virtues; Hans Christian Andersen's life became—with his participation—a fairy tale in itself. Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, the prim governess who wrote moral tales for girls, had a more colorful past than her readers would have imagined, and few people knew that nineteen-year-old Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy conspired to kill her much-older husband. Important figures about whom little is known, such as Giovan Francesco Straparola and Giambattista Basile, are rendered more completely than ever before. Uncovering what was obscured for years and with newly discovered evidence, contributors to this fascinating and much-needed volume provide a historical context for Europe's fairy tales.

This volume examines the practice of memory in early modern Europe, showing that this was already a multimedia affair with many political uses, and affecting people at all levels of society; many pre-modern memory practices persist until today.

In this new book, Bauman examines how we have moved away from a 'heavy' and 'solid', hardware-focused modernity to a 'light' and 'liquid', software-based modernity. This passage, he argues, has brought profound change to all aspects of the human condition. The new remoteness and un-reachability of global systemic structure coupled with the unstructured and under-defined, fluid state of the immediate setting of life-politics and human togetherness, call for the rethinking of the concepts and cognitive frames used to narrate human individual experience and their joint history. This book is dedicated to this task. Bauman selects five of the basic concepts which have served to make sense of shared human life - emancipation, individuality, time/space, work and community - and traces their successive incarnations and changes of meaning. Liquid Modernity concludes the analysis undertaken in Bauman's two previous books Globalization: The Human Consequences and In Search of Politics. Together these volumes form a brilliant analysis of the changing conditions of social and political life by one of the most original thinkers writing today.

Tattooed Memory (La Mémoire tatouée) is the first novel of the great Moroccan critic and novelist Abdelkébir Khatibi (1938-2009). Only one other novels has been translated into English (Love In Two Languages, 1991). Khatibi belongs to the generation following the foundational generation of writers such as Driss Chraïbi. For Khatibi's generation, French colonialism is a vibrant memory - but a memory from childhood. Tattooed Memory is part bildungsroman, part anticolonial treatise, and part language experiment, and it takes us from earliest childhood memory to young adulthood.

Ethics and Aesthetics of Translation engages with translation, in both theory and practice, as part of an interrogation of ethical as well as political thought in the work of three bilingual European authors: Bernardo Atxaga, Milan Kundera and Jorge Semprún. In approaching the work of these authors, the book draws upon the approaches to translation offered by Benjamin, Derrida, Ricœur and Deleuze to highlight a broad set of ethical questions, focused upon the limitations of the monolingual and the democratic possibilities of linguistic plurality; upon our innate desire to translate difference into similarity; and upon the ways in which translation responds to the challenges of individual and collective remembrance. Each chapter explores these interlingual but also intercultural, interrelational and interdisciplinary issues, mapping a journey of translation that begins in the impact of translation upon the work of each author, continues into moments of linguistic translation, untranslatability and mistranslation within their texts and ultimately becomes an exploration of social, political and affective (un)translatability. In these journeys, the creative and critical potential of translation emerges as a potent, often violent, but always illuminating, vision of the possibilities of differentiation and connection, generation and memory, in temporal, linguistic, cultural and political terms.

As an American author who chose to live in Europe, Henry James frequentlywrote about cultural differences between the Old and New World. Theplight of bewildered Americans adrift on a sea of European sophisticationbecame a regular theme in his fiction.This collection of twenty-four papers from some of the world's leadingJames scholars offers a comprehensive picture of the author's crossculturalaesthetics. It provides detailed analyses of James's perception ofEurope - of its people and places, its history and culture, its artists andthinkers, its aesthetics and its ethics - which ultimately lead to a profoundreevaluation of his writing.With in-depth analysis of his works of fiction, his autobiographical andpersonal writings, and his critical works, the collection is a major contribution to current thinking about James, transtextuality and cultural appropriation.

This study proposes a revised interpretation of Foucault’s views on literature. It has been argued that the philosopher’s interest in literature was limited to the 1960s and of a mostly depoliticized nature. However, Foucault’s previously unpublished later works suggest a different reality, showing a sustained interest in literature and its politics. In the light of this new material, the book repositions Foucault's ideas within recent debates on the politics of literature.

This book expounds fruitful ways of analysing matters of ecology, environments, nature, and the non-human world in a broad spectrum of material in French. Scholars from Canada, France, Great Britain, Spain, and the United States examine the work of writers and thinkers including Michel de Montaigne, Victor Hugo, Émile Zola, Arthur Rimbaud, Marguerite Yourcenar, Gilbert Simondon, Michel Serres, Michel Houellebecq, and Éric Chevillard. The diverse approaches in the volume signal a common desire to bring together form and content, politics and aesthetics, theory and practice, under the aegis of the environmental humanities.