An evocative and fascinating portrait of Venice, Italy-the ultimate city where there are stories on every street and in every doorway, nook and cranny. What is it about Venice? The city empowers creativity, and is a place of art, artisans, and artistry, with a rich cultural and intellectual history. It's also been facing major challenges-including a fragile ecosystem, significant depopulation and political volatility-leading to fears that the city will become an inauthentic museum for tourists. Neal Robbins examines this Italian city, reflecting on the changes he has seen since he first encountered it in the late 1970s-living with a Venetian family while he was a high school student-to quite recently, when, after nearly 50 years and a career as international journalist, he returned to see how the city has endured and changed. Drawing on his journalism background, Robbins brings deep research, curiosity, and keen insights to his personal experiences of the city, delivering a multi-dimensional profile of this enchanting place. Taking the reader down the city's streets, into its churches and cafes, and onboard boats traveling through its canals and out into its vital lagoon, Robbins shares the city's history, symbols, politics, and struggles, as well as its sounds, smells, animals, and many of its remarkable denizens. He draws upon exclusive interviews with Venetians from all walks of life-artisans, historians, a bank employee, authors, parents, a psychologist, an oceanographer, a funeral director, a nobleman and a former pop star-to share multiple personal interpretations of Venice as it was, as it is and what it can be. Readers will come away with a rich understanding and appreciation of Venice's history and culture, the challenges it faces, and what it shows us all about the future.

To a substantial degree cinema has served to define the perceived character of the peoples and nations of the Middle East. This book covers the production and exhibition of the cinema of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabi, Yemen, Kuwait, and Bahrain, as well as the non-Arab states of Turkey and Iran, and the Jewish state of Israel. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Middle Eastern Cinema contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 500 cross-referenced entries on individual films, filmmakers, actors, significant historical figures, events, and concepts, and the countries themselves. It also covers the range of cinematic modes from documentary to fiction, representational to animation, generic to experimental, mainstream to avant-garde, and entertainment to propaganda. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Middle Eastern cinema.

"e;Life of Dante"e; brings together the earliest accounts of Dante available, putting the celebratory essay of literary genius Giovanni Boccaccio together with the historical analysis of leading humanist Leonardo Bruni. Their writings, along with the other sources included in this volume, provide a wealth of insight and information into Dante's unique character and life, from his susceptibility to the torments of passionate love, his involvement in politics, scholastic enthusiasms and military experience, to the stories behind the greatest heights of his poetic achievements.Not only are these accounts invaluable for their subject matter, they are also seminal examples of early biographical writing. Also included in this volume is a biography of Boccaccio, perhaps as great an influence on world literature as Dante himself.

This book argues that contemporary Italian history has been marked by a tendency towards divided memory. Events have been interpreted in contrasting ways, and the facts themselves often contested. Moreover, with so little agreement over what happened, and why it happened, it has been extremely difficult to create any consensus around memory. These divisions have been seen at all levels, but take on particular importance when linked to the great traumatic and life-changing events of the Twentieth century - war, terrorism, disaster - but can also be applied to more cultural fields such as sport and everyday life. Social change also has an impact on memory. This book will take the form of a voyage through Italy (and into Italy's past), looking at stories of divided memory over various periods in the twentieth century. These stories will be interwoven with analysis and discussion.

Anthony Burgess draws on his love of music and history in this novel he called “elephantine fun” to write. A grand and affectionate tragicomic symphony to Napoleon Bonaparte that teases and reweaves Napoleon’s life into a pattern borrowed—in liberty, equality, and fraternity—from Beethoven’s Third “Eroica” Symphony, in this rich, exciting, bawdy, and funny novel Anthony Burgess has pulled out all the stops for a virtuoso performance that is literary, historical, and musical.

Over the past decade, a new transnational movement has emerged within American Studies. It centers on the efforts of US-based Americanists to conduct transnational and comparative research while recognizing that scholars working outside the geographical boundaries of the US have just as much to contribute to American Studies as those within its borders. Such an approach not only fills in the blanks of historical, literary and cultural studies to include diasporic participants, but also enriches our understanding of major American events, figures, and influences beyond the limited geographic framework of the United States. Despite increasing interest, transnational American Studies remains a subdiscipline, or one of a host of many «side interests» for most scholars. There exist few booklength studies which examine American Studies from the Turkish perspective, and little on the contributions of Turkey to American culture. This interdisciplinary volume seeks to begin a transnational dialogue between Turkey and the United States by highlighting the work that is being conducted by noted Turkish academics, American researchers, as well as foreign scholars working in Turkey, many of whom are living examples of transnationality.