SELCS

Staff: recent publications


Details of all publications by members of staff can be found on IRIS

  • Mark Hewitson (German) and Matthew D'Auria, eds., (Oxford: Berghahn, 2012), Europe in Crisis: Intellectuals and the European Idea, 1917-1957. The period between 1917 and 1957, starting with the birth of the Soviet Union and the American intervention in the First World War and ending with the Treaty of Rome, is of the utmost importance for contextualizing and for understanding the intellectual origins of the European Community. This study reassesses the relationship between ideas of Europe and the European project.
  • Dilwyn Knox (Italian) and Nuccio Ordine (Università della Calabria), eds, Renaissance literature and learning: In memoriam Giovanni Aquilecchia, Warburg Institute: London, 2012. A collection of essays on Renaissance philosophy and literature by Lina Bolzoni (Scuola Normale di Pisa), Carlo Ginzburg (Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa and UCLA), Miguel A. Granada (Barcelona) and others. The collection includes an article by Dilwyn Knox (pp. 111-148) entitled 'Copernicus and Pliny the Elder's Stoic Cosmology', explaining how Pliny provided Copernicus with a framework of cosmological ideas for his heliocentric hypothesis. The conclusions are based on the annotations that Copernicus wrote in the margins of two copies of Pliny's Natural History.
  • Susanne Kord (German), and Elisabeth Krimmer (University of California, Davis), Contemporary Hollywood Masculinities: Gender, Genre, and Politics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
    This study investigates changing concepts of masculinity in the most successful Hollywood blockbusters of the Clinton and Bush eras (1992-2008), analyzing masculine ‘types,’ such as cowboys, spies, fathers, rogues, superheroes, cops, and killers, in relation to contemporary political events, social developments, and popular American myths.
  • The editorial board of Forum for Modern Language Studies, has awarded the 2011 Forum Prize to Prof. Susanne Kord's article "The Rule of Law and the Role of Literature: German Public Debates on Husband-Killers and Human Rights (1788-1845)", to be published in 2012.
  • Florian Mussgnug (Italian), Eco (Oxford, Oneworld, Spring 2012).
    This book provides a clear and comprehensive introduction to the philosophy of Umberto Eco - one of Europe's most important living writers and thinkers.
  • Gareth Wood (Spanish & Latin American Studies), Javier Marias's debt to translation: Sterne, Browne, Nabokov (OUP, Spring 2012).
    A study of how the translation of three Anglophone authors - Laurence Sterne, Sir Thomas Browne, and Vladimir Nabokov - has shaped the writings of the contemporary Spanish novelist Javier Marias.
  • Tom Lundskær-Nielsen (Scandinavian), Prepositions in English Grammars until 1801 - with a Survey of the Western European Background (University Press of Southern Denmark & Modern Humanities Research Association, 2011). The first part of this study presents a broad outline of the establishment of the parts of speech, with special emphasis on prepositions, in ancient Greece, and of the further development in the Roman age, in the High Middle Ages and in the Renaissance. The central part focuses on a detailed analysis of prepositions in fifty English grammatical treatises from Bullokar (1586) to Dalton (1801), thereby also providing a historical perspective of the view of this word class during the first two centuries of English grammar writing.
  • John Dickie (Italian), Blood Brotherhoods (Hodder and Stoughton, June 2011). As John's previous book Cosa Nostra, Blood Brotherhoods returns to the dark world of the Sicilian mafia, but also examines the Neapolitan Camorra and the Calabrian 'Ndrangheta, two criminal fraternities plaguing the South of Italy but increasingly also spreading their activities to other European countries. For more information, see John's website: www.johndickie.net
  • Robert Lumley (Italian), Entering the Frame: Cinema and History in the Films of Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi (Oxford, Peter Lang, 2011). Pioneers of experimental archival films, Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi are best known for From the Pole to the Equator (1986) – testimony to colonialism and war in the early 20th century. This first complete study of their work examines its importance for debates about the documentary form, the corporeality of the viewing experience, and the metamorphoses of cinema.
  • John Foot (Italian), Pedalare! Pedalare! A History of Italian Cycling (Bloomsbury, May 2011). A history of Italian cycling and its links with politics, culture, war, scandal, geography, the mass media and myth-making. The first complete cultural history of this popular sport in Italy to be published in English. Italian edition to be published by Rizzoli, also in May 2011.
  • Chris Abram (Scandinavian), Myths of the Pagan North (Continuum, May 2011). The myths of Thor, Freyr and Odin were first recorded in written form in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, long after most of Scandinavia had been converted to Christianity. Abram draws on archaeological resources, foreign accounts from Tacitus and others, and Old Norse poetry to explore the lost world of the Vikings.
  • Jane Gilbert (French), Living Death in Medieval French and English Literature (Cambridge University Press, February 2011).
    Medieval literature contains many figures caught at the interface between life and death - the dead return to place demands on the living, while the living foresee, organize or desire their own deaths. This original study examines the ways in which certain medieval literary texts, both English and French, use these 'living dead' to think about existential, ethical and political issues.
  • Stephen Hart (Spanish & Latin American Studies) & David Wood (edited), Essays on Alfredo Bryce Echenique, Peruvian Literature & Culture (Centre of Cesar Vallejo Studies, UCL, December 2010).
    This book, the third volume in the Centre of Cesar Vallejo Monograph Series, brings together a number papers on the work of the Peruvian novelist, Alfredo Bryce Echenique, delivered at the Cervantes Institute in London in 2004, along with a set of essays on Peruvian literature and culture in a broader sense.
  • Florian Mussgnug (Italian), The Eloquence of Ghosts: Giorgio Manganelli and the Afterlife of the Avant-Garde (Oxford, Peter Lang, September 2010).
    Giorgio Manganelli (1922-1990), one of Italy's most radical and original writers, went further than most in exploring the creative possibilities of hybrid genres and open forms. Following Manganelli's lead, this study examines the author's exceptional awareness of literature and philosophy, and addresses issues such as the boundaries of meaningful language, fantasy and realism, and the relationship between literary and visual texts.
  • Stephen Hart (Spanish & Latin American Studies), Gabriel García Márquez (Critical Lives, August 2010).
    This book provides a new perspective on García Márquez’s use of ‘creative false memory’ and magical realism. There are five ingredients that are critical to García Márquez’s writing – magical realism, a shortened and broken portrayal of time, punchy one-liners, dark and absurd humour, and political allegory – and these elements help to explain the extraordinary allure of García Márquez’s work, as well as providing fascinating insight into his approach to writing. The divisions between García Márquez’s everyday life and his life as a writer are also explored, as is the connection in his work between family history and national history.
  • Mark Hewitson (German), Nationalism in Germany, 1848-1866: Revolutionary Nation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 464 pp.
    This study reassesses the relationship between politics and the nation in Germany in the critical decades between the revolutions of 1848-49 and unification after 1866. It questions the existence of a broad shift from liberal to conservative nationalism, challenges the notion that cultural and ethnic forms of nationalism were particularly pronounced in Germany as a result of late unification, and qualifies the idea of a ‘revolution from above’. It asks how, when and why German unification occurred, revising existing accounts of Bismarck's role.
  • Susanne Kord (German), Murderesses in German Writing, 1720-1860: Heroines of Horror (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
    The way deviant women – murderesses, witches, vampires – are perceived and represented reveals much about what a society considers the norm for acceptable female behaviour. Drawing on extensive archival records and published texts, this study investigates the stories of eight famous murderesses in Germany as they were told in legal, psychological, philosophical and literary writings. The book shows how perceptions of normal and criminal women permeated not only legal thought but also seemingly unrelated cultural spheres, from poetry, philosophy and physiognomy to early psychological profiling.
  • Isabelle Moreau (French) ed., Les Lumières en mouvement. La circulation des idées au XVIIIe siècle (Lyon: ENS Éditions, 2009).
    The essays in this volume investigate the life and death of ideas: how ideas inherited from Montaigne, Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche or Bayle are used and misused by eighteenth-century authors; how scientific novelties are received and vulgarized through various means; how concepts and their representations are kept alive, transformed and even forgotten. Each essay helps to illustrate and explain the ever changing reception of ideas during the French Enlightenment.