Domestic Space in France and Belgium offers a new addition to the growing body of work in Interior Studies. Focused on late 19th and early 20th-century France and Belgium, it addresses an overlooked area of modernity: the domestic sphere and its conception and representation in art, literature and material culture. Scholars from the US, UK, France, Italy, Canada and Belgium offer fresh and exciting interpretations of artworks, texts and modern homes. Comparative and interdisciplinary, it shows through a series of case-studies in literature, art and architecture, how modernity was expressed through domestic life at the turn of the century in France and Belgium.

This anthology presents seven of the most characteristic of the thirty noir novels published by Frédéric Dard, France’s most popular author from the 1960’ s until his death in 2000. Written between 1951 and 1966, at the height of the vogue of the Crime Fiction paperback originals, these novels exemplify intersections between the legacies of L.F. Céline and French existentialism and that of American authors such as Jim Thompson, William Irish, David Goodis and Charles Williams. It also shows the literary influence of international film noir style and grammar. Between ekphrasis and novelisation, the selected novels illustrate the profound hybridity, intertextuality and transmedia nature of mid-20^th Century French Noir.

San-Antonio international studies representations of otherness in the notoriously ultra and untranslatably French work of San-Antonio, and how conversely his work has travelled abroad. It explores for the first time the lost, and largely forgotten continent of the translations of San-Antonio adventures, which sold over 100 million copies in France. While translated in 29 languages an amounting to a corpus of 750 titles, the San-Antonio novels proved widely unsuccessful in most other countries. This interdisciplinary volume argues for a new global methodological approach in order to contextualise this paradigmatic example of a failed attempt at globalisation.

From accounts of migration and stories of personal alienation, through the fragmented memories of former incarnations, to fable-like tales of half-breeds and species metamorphosis, Ying Chen’s fiction evolves as it revolves around questions of difference, otherness and identity, which is never fixed or singular. While presenting the narrators’ inner preoccupations and, in some cases, unreliable nature, the increasingly complex texts of this francophone-Chinese writer (1961-) also reveal larger concerns about dominant discourses, the limitations of social realities, survival, and the relationship between beings, all framed within an aesthetics of non-belonging. Intriguingly, the author achieves this by consciously distancing her works, from 1998 onwards, from any categorisation by ethnicity. This engaging study considers Chen’s writing from the contemporary perspective of the breakdown of traditional spatiotemporal experiences, the homogenization of places, the erasure of cultural differences, and the resulting tendency towards universalism.

While the ‘venereal peril’ of nineteenth-century France was responsible for thousands of deaths, critical attention to date has focused on the range of social anxieties with which it was associated, including degeneracy, depopulation, state surveillance and public morality. This interdisciplinary study redirects attention onto the body as locus of syphilis. Combining a critical medical humanities approach with close readings of medical, public health and literary texts, the book explores the ways in which canonical and non-canonical writers found a language to represent the syphilitic body. Drawing on scholarship from gender studies, theology, pain studies and word/image relations, the book investigates the role played by literature in articulating the pathological function and lived experience of disease.

The 2019 edition is the product of a 5-year project examining editions that had either not been used or were only partially used in previous work on the dictionary. The revision includes new entries as well as revisions to existing entries, including revised or new definitions, new grammatical information and new evidence taken from texts and manuscripts.

This book tells a history of Ireland by looking at the development of 100 medieval Irish words drawn from the Royal Irish Academy’s Dictionary of the Irish Language. Words tell stories and encapsulate histories and this book captures aspects of Ireland’s changing history by examining the changing meaning of 100 key words. The book is divided into themes, including writing and literature; food and feasting; technology and science; mind and body. Readers can explore words relating to particular concepts, dipping in and out where they please.

“Engaging, informative and illuminating” (The Irish Times)

This books applies innovative Machine Learning techniques to the problem of the dating of literary texts. Many ancient and medieval literatures lack reliable chronologies which could aid scholars in locating texts in their historical context. The new machine-learning method presented here uses chronological information gleaned from annalistic records to date a wide range of texts. The method is also applied to multi-layered texts to aid the identification of different chronological strata within single copies. 

This volume brings together leading scholars in Europe, South and North America to explore a series of sociolinguistic questions in relation to the Romance languages, embracing national languages as well as minoritized and endangered varieties, regional languages, dialects and creoles across the world. Twenty-nine chapters discuss methodologies, variation, language change, language contact, issues relating to medium, text-type, register and genre, as well as questions around status, norms, policy and revitalization. Sociolinguistics globally has been dominated by research on the English language but this volume is the first to foreground the distinctiveness of the Romance field which, the editors argue, is tightly linked to its multiplicity of linguistic varieties.

 “For linguists based in Modern Languages departments in particular, this is the handbook we have needed for some time” (French Studies, 74.1, 2020)

The nineteenth-century Hispanic world was shattered to its core by war, civil war, and revolution. At the same time, it confronted a new period of European and North-American expansion and development. In these essays, authors explore major, dynamic ways that people in Spain envisaged how they would adapt and change, or simply continue as they were. Each chapter title begins with the words "How to...", and examines the ways in which Spaniards conceived or undertook major activities that shaped their lives. These range from telling the time to being a man. Adaptability, paradox, and inconsistency come to the fore in many of the essays. We find before us a human quest for opportunity and survival in a complex and changing world. This wide-ranging book contains chapters by leading scholars from the United States, United Kingdom, and Spain.

“The achievement of this volume of essays is to open up a broad spectrum of possibilities for further consideration, other 'how to' questions which might be addressed to add to the extensive picture presented in this collection.” (Bulletin of Spanish Studies)

Cape Verde, Mozambique and Angola are three young nation states characterized by a long colonial past, a successful liberation war, and a post-independence socialist history. This study focuses on how the literary creations by female authors Dina Salústio (Cape Verde, 1941-), Paulina Chiziane (Mozambique, 1955-), and Rosária da Silva (Angola, 1959-) share a common modus operandi and thematic framework. By narrating the workings of patriarchy in the socialist and democratic eras, and recuperating female memories within them, they provide a contextualized reflection on the condition of Cape Verdean, Mozambican and Angolan women. At the same time, the female authors explore the strategies put forward by these women, in their specific settings, to deconstruct hegemonic patriarchal conceptions of the world.

“An excellent scholarly contribution that is both clear and accessible. It must be critically addressed by professors, students, and researchers both in and beyond the Lusophone academic sphere.” (Sandra I. Sousa, University of Central Florida)

The Ulster Cycle is a gem of the medieval Irish literary tradition. Comprised of approximately 80 distinct tales, it describes the heroic world set in Ireland’s distant past and centred on the court of Conchobar (Conor), king of Ulster, and his pre-eminent warrior, Cú Chulainn. This collection of essays presents the most recent thinking on the Cycle including its textual tradition and the interpretation of individual tales, the coherence of the cycle itself and its earliest attestations, its relationship to the law tracts, its political and intellectual context, and its topography and place-names. The representation of gender, with a particular emphasis on the male, is considered in a number of papers.

Paul Walsh Memorial Lecture, volume 2 (NUI Maynooth, 2017)

The place-names of Ireland bear testimony to all the languages which have been spoken on the island from ancient times down until the first ordnance survey of the island between 1829 and 1842. Irish is the language which has left the deepest mark on the country’s nomenclature; nonetheless, the majority of Irish-language place-names have not been preserved in Irish but were recorded for the first time in anglicised form in the aftermath of English conquest. This has been famously dramatised in Brian Friel’s Translations (1980); in an interview about the play in the Guardian, Friel described the whole country as having been ‘rechristened’. However, the way in which Ireland’s place-names were subjected to anglicisation long before the Ordnance Survey is examined here as is the assumption that anglicised spellings are inherently chaotic. There are regular patterns in the transmission of Irish names in English orthography which include changes governed by the phonology of English.

Staging the Artist questions how nineteenth-century French and Belgian artists self-consciously orchestrated their identities through their art and writings. It focuses on the role of theatrical self-performance as both subject and trope in the aesthetics of self-representation and allows for a new understanding of the processes of posturing and self-promotion. It offers new interpretations of works by three major nineteenth-century figures, Gustave Courbet, Paul Gauguin and James Ensor and highlights the neglected topic of the function of theatre in modern art.

This book explores the central role of translation as a key epistemological concept as well as a hermeneutic, ethical, linguistic and interpersonal practice. The argument is three-fold: (1) that translation provides a basis for genuine, innovative and meaningful exchange between various subject areas through both a concept (the what) and a method (the how); (2) that it challenges many of the traditional boundaries and offers a transdisciplinary epistemological paradigm, leading to a new understanding of quality, meaning, truth, and knowledge; and (3) that translational phenomena are studied by a broad range of disciplines in the humanities using various, often seemingly unrelated concepts which are nevertheless qualitatively close. The common thread running through all these convictions is the insistence that translational phenomena are ubiquitous.

“This book is a rich, provocative and thoughtful challenge to anybody searching for an original story of translation in its form-meaning tangle. It is an intellectual and spiritual feast for those who follow the avenues so inspirationally delineated by the author” (Marek Kuźniak, University of Wrocław)

This collection explores the central importance of values and evaluative concepts in cross-cultural translational encounters. Written by a group of international scholars from a diverse range of linguistic and cultural backgrounds, the chapters in this book consider what it means to translate cultures by examining core values and their relationship to key evaluative concepts (such as authenticity, clarity, home, honour, or justice) and how they influence the complex multidimensional process of translation.

“This wide-ranging collection of essays tackles a range of difficult issues that are fundamental to understanding our multi-faceted global world.” (Susan Bassnett, University of Warwick)

The long eighteenth century was a period of major transformation for Europe and India as imperialism heralded a new global order. Eschewing the reductive perspectives of nation-state histories and postcolonial ‘east vs west’ oppositions, contributors to India and Europe in the global eighteenth century put forward a more nuanced and interdisciplinary analysis, examining the complexities of the historical, political, material and cultural interactions between Europe and India during this period.

“Adopting multi-disciplinary approaches, contributors stress the complexity, subtlety and intricacy of the remarkable global connections between India and Europe in the eighteenth century. It will undoubtedly provoke not only lively debate, but also much further research.”

(French Studies)

“The present study opens a whole new world to its readers, by revealing not only the changes and transformations that occurred in a major part of the Asian continent in the long  eighteenth century, but also by bringing to light lesser-known areas of European life and literature of that era. […] This engaging book will appeal to eighteenth-century students and scholars regardless of their discipline and specialization.” (New Perspectives on the Eighteenth Century)

The fourteen essays of this volume engage in distinct ways with the matter of motion in early modern Spanish poetics, without limiting the dialectic of stasis and movement to any single sphere or manifestation. Interrogation of the interdependence of tradition and innovation, poetry, power and politics, shifting signifiers, the intersection of topography and deviant temporalities, the movement between the secular and the sacred, tensions between centres and peripheries, issues of manuscript circulation and reception, poetic calls and echoes across continents and centuries, and between creative writing and reading subjects, all demonstrate that Helgerson's central notion of conspicuous movement is relevant beyond early sixteenth-century secular poetics, By opening it up the book approximates a better understanding of poetry's flexible spatio-temporal co-ordinates in a period of extraordinary historical circumstances and conterminous radical cultural transformation.

 “An intelligent and suggestive review of the interrelationship between time and poetry, of language’s power to go beyond time and space, while at the same time to move its reader beyond rationality. This excellent collection of articles […] is an important contribution to early modern studies that will help promote further ‘conversations’ among scholars and students of Spanish Renaissance poetry” (Lía Schwartz)