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A partir d’un cas puntual d’estudi: una ressenya del volum Caires vius de Víctor Català (pseudònim de Caterina Albert i Paradís) publicada a la revista catalana Feminal i firmada per Lluís Via (1907); es pretén repassar dos temes més amplis de l’àmbit de la crítica literària amb perspectiva de gènere: en primer lloc, el paper de l’anomenada premsa femenina com a espai ambivalent –alternatiu, però també ‘alteritzat’– en relació a un sistema literari i editorial caracteritzat pel domini masculí; en segon, les maneres en què l’admissió de l’escriptura femenina implica una tensió dins d’aquest camp de forces situat a cavall dels segles XIX i XX.

In her poetry collection falsche freunde the German-speaking artist Uljana Wolf develops a translinguale Lyrik, a poetic voice dwelling on a linguistic and geographical border zone. Building on Emily Apter’s concepts of untranslatability, this paper investigates how Wolf’s structural and thematic checkpoints instil a strong political commitment into her poetry. Furthermore, this engagement is here interpreted as the expression of the paradigm of the postmigrantische Gesellschaft. Finally, the paper argues that through the choice of the term ‘alien’ over the category ‘fremd’ Wolf suggests an innovative shift in the representation of migratory dynamics, from their cultural dimension to their biopolitical significance.

This paper aims at showing how stylistics and ecocriticism, both being strongly ‘centripetal’ and ‘interdisciplinary’ fields, can cooperate in the exploration of a literary text. This is the case of a short story written by the Chinese-American writer Ha Jin. Also thanks to the help of the digital analysis, the paper mainly focuses on the stylistic analysis of the personal pronouns and of the narrator’s point of view to show the stinging and subversive irony which pervades the narration of the vicissitudes of a Chinese TV film crew who is asked to shoot a scene where a muscular hero has to fight bare-handed against a real Siberian tiger. The analysis also aims to show how the story becomes the opportunity for the writer to depict the narrow frame of mind of the blind dictatorship of his homeland and its deplorable consequences on both humans and animals. Thus, the whole exploration, in the end, reveals the ecocritical lens through which Ha Jin narrates the story.

This paper analyses intertextuality between two novels, Juan José Saer’s La pesquisa and Ricardo Piglia’s Blanco nocturno, in the context of detective fiction, that both writers explore in their narrative. The paper is divided in four parts: “Cruces introductorios” is an introductory form to produce connections between the most important authors of the last quarter of 20th-century Argentine; in “Primeros rastros” communicating vases are set between both poetics in detective genre; in “Subgéneros policiales” some important aspects of La pesquisa and Blanco nocturno are analysed while some differences are identified: the first work belongs to enigma novel and the last work connects with hard boiled; finally, the paper analyses Detective Morvan and Detective Croce aiming at identifying opposite pairs: intelligence and dementia, reason and madness, civilisation and barbarism. Thus, these concepts are establishing new relationships between Saer and Piglia based on their approaches to detective genre and their criticism to capitalist system.

The central aim of this paper is to show the similarities of some stylistic features of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with musical code. A second purpose is to verify how these musical features are echoed in “Sirens”. In order to initially describe the common properties of language and music and to define how their acoustic and rhythmic similarities are relevant in written texts, the paper will draw on the theories of the Science of Rhythm – a non-academic discipline that has influenced many modernist writings, and also studied the common rhythmic features of music and language. After detailing a musical method for the analysis of the linguistic texture of written prose, I focus on the first chapter of A Portrait. Hence, I identify the musical characteristics of the novel’s style through a comparison between some Joycean scholars’ theories on music in A Portrait and the principles of the Science of Rhythm. Finally, a few examples of the musical language in “Sirens” will provide a benchmark for a comparison with A Portrait.

This article focuses on the work of the insufficiently known writer Elena Soriano and more specifically on her novel La playa de los locos. The main objective is to analyze the cultured references present in the work, both from Judeo-Christianity and from classical culture or other literary texts. Likewise, the allusions to the famous fairy tales present in the novel have been studied. Given the disavowal of the publication of the novel by censors, the first part of this paper explains the context surrounding its publication and its repercussions on the author's career.

This paper aims to analyse and present the Italian paratexts of the Brazilian novel Tereza Batista cansada de guerra (1972) by Jorge Amado. Paratexts are a valuable instrument, sometimes even better than the actual translation, in order to verify how the source cultural and literary systems are represented. In this case, by examining the paratextual elements, the representation of Brazilian women and of Brazil in general is presented, as well as the status of the translation and the translation agents involved in the process, the rewarded translatress Giuliana Segre Giorgi and the publishing houses.

In this paper, Old High German mood alternations in the different types of subordinate clauses (complement, adverbial and relative clauses) are discussed. The use of the subjunctive in subordinate clauses is notoriously more frequent than in Modern German and has not yet been thoroughly investigated. Based on a comprehensive corpus study, the paper will show that the licensing conditions for the subjunctive in Old High German are determined by notions such as veridicality and – in relative contexts – specificity. These conditions are thus similar (but not always identical) to those observed for Modern Greek and Romance languages. Furthermore, a syntactic analysis is provided in order to account for the licensing of the subjunctive in each type of subordinate clause.

In his novel Allah n’est pas obligé the Ivorian writer Ahmadou Kourouma tries to convey his Malinké identity in the French language through a process of malinkisation – he interlaces Malinké words, syntactic structures and rhythm with French, playing with the two codes that he masters and portraying a fresh linguistic atmosphere. Kourouma exploits the potentiality, the richness of French linguistic varieties and thus legitimises their value. In the first part, this paper tries to analyse Kourouma’s linguistic play by focusing mainly on the language of the narrator, the child soldier Birahima. The second part of the paper attempts at proving how Kourouma’s malinkisation is part of a broader and more general project of legitimisation as regards his language(s), culture, and work as a writer.

Leaving aside historical and mythological dramas, a considerable number of plays written for the Abbey Theatre between 1904 and the outbreak of the Second World War represent emigration. They enjoyed varying degrees of success. In 1904 G.B. Shaw portrayed an Irish émigré as one of the two protagonists in John Bull’s Other Island; in the following two years Padraic Colum’s The Land and William Boyle’s The Mineral Workers were enthusiastically received by Abbey Theatre audience, the former with its depiction of young Irish men and women emigrating to America, the latter, an engineer returning to Ireland from overseas; 1907 saw three plays presenting emigration as one of the great Irish issues, both politically and economically: J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, George Fitzmaurice’s The Country Dressmaker and Lady Augusta Gregory’s The Jackdaw. They were followed by T.C. Murray’s Birthright, Lennox Robinson’s Harvest and Colum’s Thomas Muskerry. Indeed, it is almost impossible to provide an exhaustive list of all the plays dealing with emigration. The present paper aims to discuss a selection of significant plays intended for or staged at the Abbey Theatre in the first decades of the twentieth century, analysing what emigration stood for, and how it was exploited dramatically. The historical boundaries of this research (1904-1939) provide a provisional limit to an otherwise too vast study for the present paper.

Theo Padnos published My Life Had Stood A Loaded Gun in 2004, when Prison Studies were burgeoning and gaining academic attention globally. Neglected by critics, the book relates the author's experience as literature instructor in an American prison. Engaging methods of pedagogical research and reader-response criticism, the paper investigates the role of literature in the cultural activities of young male inmates in a medium security jail in Vermont. An original amalgam of crime reports, pedagogy of literature, and autobiographical criticism, Padnos' study for the first time confronts young criminals with a literary canon dripping with violence. The experiment sheds light on the reading activities of prisoners, on their and the author's social background, and on the power of American literature to speak to marginal groups.

Linguists argued that the Cockney dialect, in London, is expected to be replaced by Multicultural London English in the years to come. However, this does not imply that Cockney is dead, as recent research revealed that it just moved to Essex. This paper aims at examining whether (l) vocalisation, a common feature of Cockney, is still present in the London district of Bermondsey. Ten working-class English speakers, stratified by age and sex, have been recorded by means of sociolinguistic interviews. The results, discussed both quantitively and qualitatively, show that: (a) (l) vocalisation is present in all age cohorts, with young speakers favouring the non-standard feature; (b) preceding long vowels trigger (l) vocalisation.

The so-called indirect passive, where the subject is not the argument of the underlying verb that bears the Theme/Patient role, is generally understood to be a bi-clausal phenomenon (cf. Kuno 1973; Shibatani 1978; Kuroda 1979). In other words, the passive morpheme rare is merged with a clause, and then the resulting item is combined with the subject. In this paper, however, we argue that the indirect passive is best understood as a mono-clausal phenomenon. We first point out that with some instances of the indirect passive, the passive morpheme rare is not understood as being combined with a verb or clause in syntax. Thus, we are led to assume that the lexicon contains numerous instances of the Vrare form. This implies that even when the passive morpheme rare is combined in syntax, it forms a constituent with the relevant verb; hence, the indirect passive is a mono-clausal phenomenon. We furthermore maintain that when the indirect passive involves the merging of rare with a verb in syntax, the verb must be a volitional verb, and demonstrate that this generalization, as well as the case particle alternation involved in the indirect passive, poses a challenge to the bi-clause analysis but not to the mono-clause analysis. Finally, we review one of the main arguments for analyzing the indirect passive to be a bi-clausal phenomenon, which concerns the antecedent of zibun. We show that it is inconclusive at best.

The goal of this paper is to reconcile the definite marking with the indefinite-like semantics of those superlatives that take a relative/comparative reading. Following Szabolcsi (1986) and Heim (1999), we will assume that the difference between absolute and relative readings of superlatives is represented at the syntactic level of semantic representation, LF (Logical Form). We will however depart from Heim’s hypothesis that what raises at LF is the superlative operator itself (EST). We will instead assume a quantificational-determiner analysis of EST, which involves two raising operations at LF: EST-raising to Spec,DP and raising of the whole superlative DP (Determiner Phrase) to a scope position in the sentence. We will examine the relative readings of quality superlatives. The generalizations and the proposed analysis are not assumed to extend to quantity superlatives.

This paper analyses Angela Carter’s desecrating tendency to taboo-breaking in thematic and formal terms. By referring to her short-fiction production and focusing on “John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore", I intend to show how gender/patriarchal and genre/authorial taboos are similarly broken and transmuted into daringly subversive outcomes. In line with her feminist agenda and postmodern transformism, Carter superbly challenges, sabotages, violates, de- and re-constructs traditionally codified sexual and gender taboos by mimicking such reversals through new narrative solutions. If diversity, multiplicity and change guarantee the continuity of life, incest can easily metaphorise a taboo relationship based on repetition of the identical, sameness, and immobility, to be finally transformed, if not avoided. Consistent with many of her female characters’ incestuous relationships with parents or siblings, Carter also establishes incest-like relationships with previous authors and narrative discourses, which she predatorily appropriates. Carter’s resulting narrative testifies to the fact that taboos must be first experienced to be eventually broken. It is in the dialectic between rule and infraction, taboo and its violation that Carter’s writing is rooted, constantly looking for borders to be crossed.

Designed as a paper reflecting on the editorial mediation of early modern French literary texts, this article maps the educational activities conducted on the Tragiques Inventions site since 2020. In particular, it delves into the procedures linked to documenting, generating and manipulating descriptive and analytical (meta)data. A new concept of ‘hand-reading’ is being developed – the possibility of using digital technology to prioritize human intervention in the construction of knowledge through textual editing. This concept will bring a fresh perspective on early modern literary texts.

There is a substantial body of scholarship arguing for the relevance of magic realism to Toni Morrison’s fictional production, with one exception being her last novel God Help the Child, which, in that respect, has been remarkably overlooked. The present paper intends to fill this scholarly gap by focusing on what Morrison called “enchantment”, a powerful blend of magic and realism that she employed to represent a host of racial and ancestral issues of Blackness, often of a traumatic kind.

Sylvia’s Lovers is a novel about war. It is a historical novel set in the years 1793-1800 during the Napoleonic wars, and written by Elizabeth Gaskell in the years 1859-1862 when the American Civil War broke out, in April 1861. Examining Gaskell’s correspondence with Charles Eliot Norton in the years 1861-63 and the articles Norton wrote in support of the War and the anti-slavery cause, this paper explores the way in which the news coming from America and the debates on the contemporary events left a significant mark on the second part of the novel. The implied reference to the context of the American Civil War would shed new light on Gaskell’s narrative choices concerning the plot and the main male character’s development, which has been substantially overlooked.

Linguists argued that the Cockney dialect, in London, is expected to be replaced by Multicultural London English in the years to come. However, this does not imply that Cockney is dead, as recent research revealed that it just moved to Essex. This paper aims at examining whether (l) vocalisation, a common feature of Cockney, is still present in the London district of Bermondsey. Ten working-class English speakers, stratified by age and sex, have been recorded by means of sociolinguistic interviews. The results, discussed both quantitively and qualitatively, show that: (a) (l) vocalisation is present in all age cohorts, with young speakers favouring the non-standard feature; (b) preceding long vowels trigger (l) vocalisation.

The so-called indirect passive, where the subject is not the argument of the underlying verb that bears the Theme/Patient role, is generally understood to be a bi-clausal phenomenon (cf. Kuno 1973; Shibatani 1978; Kuroda 1979). In other words, the passive morpheme rare is merged with a clause, and then the resulting item is combined with the subject. In this paper, however, we argue that the indirect passive is best understood as a mono-clausal phenomenon. We first point out that with some instances of the indirect passive, the passive morpheme rare is not understood as being combined with a verb or clause in syntax. Thus, we are led to assume that the lexicon contains numerous instances of the Vrare form. This implies that even when the passive morpheme rare is combined in syntax, it forms a constituent with the relevant verb; hence, the indirect passive is a mono-clausal phenomenon. We furthermore maintain that when the indirect passive involves the merging of rare with a verb in syntax, the verb must be a volitional verb, and demonstrate that this generalization, as well as the case particle alternation involved in the indirect passive, poses a challenge to the bi-clause analysis but not to the mono-clause analysis. Finally, we review one of the main arguments for analyzing the indirect passive to be a bi-clausal phenomenon, which concerns the antecedent of zibun. We show that it is inconclusive at best.

The goal of this paper is to reconcile the definite marking with the indefinite-like semantics of those superlatives that take a relative/comparative reading. Following Szabolcsi (1986) and Heim (1999), we will assume that the difference between absolute and relative readings of superlatives is represented at the syntactic level of semantic representation, LF (Logical Form). We will however depart from Heim’s hypothesis that what raises at LF is the superlative operator itself (EST). We will instead assume a quantificational-determiner analysis of EST, which involves two raising operations at LF: EST-raising to Spec,DP and raising of the whole superlative DP (Determiner Phrase) to a scope position in the sentence. We will examine the relative readings of quality superlatives. The generalizations and the proposed analysis are not assumed to extend to quantity superlatives.

This paper analyses Angela Carter’s desecrating tendency to taboo-breaking in thematic and formal terms. By referring to her short-fiction production and focusing on “John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore", I intend to show how gender/patriarchal and genre/authorial taboos are similarly broken and transmuted into daringly subversive outcomes. In line with her feminist agenda and postmodern transformism, Carter superbly challenges, sabotages, violates, de- and re-constructs traditionally codified sexual and gender taboos by mimicking such reversals through new narrative solutions. If diversity, multiplicity and change guarantee the continuity of life, incest can easily metaphorise a taboo relationship based on repetition of the identical, sameness, and immobility, to be finally transformed, if not avoided. Consistent with many of her female characters’ incestuous relationships with parents or siblings, Carter also establishes incest-like relationships with previous authors and narrative discourses, which she predatorily appropriates. Carter’s resulting narrative testifies to the fact that taboos must be first experienced to be eventually broken. It is in the dialectic between rule and infraction, taboo and its violation that Carter’s writing is rooted, constantly looking for borders to be crossed.

Designed as a paper reflecting on the editorial mediation of early modern French literary texts, this article maps the educational activities conducted on the Tragiques Inventions site since 2020. In particular, it delves into the procedures linked to documenting, generating and manipulating descriptive and analytical (meta)data. A new concept of ‘hand-reading’ is being developed – the possibility of using digital technology to prioritize human intervention in the construction of knowledge through textual editing. This concept will bring a fresh perspective on early modern literary texts.

There is a substantial body of scholarship arguing for the relevance of magic realism to Toni Morrison’s fictional production, with one exception being her last novel God Help the Child, which, in that respect, has been remarkably overlooked. The present paper intends to fill this scholarly gap by focusing on what Morrison called “enchantment”, a powerful blend of magic and realism that she employed to represent a host of racial and ancestral issues of Blackness, often of a traumatic kind.

Theo Padnos published My Life Had Stood A Loaded Gun in 2004, when Prison Studies were burgeoning and gaining academic attention globally. Neglected by critics, the book relates the author's experience as literature instructor in an American prison. Engaging methods of pedagogical research and reader-response criticism, the paper investigates the role of literature in the cultural activities of young male inmates in a medium security jail in Vermont. An original amalgam of crime reports, pedagogy of literature, and autobiographical criticism, Padnos' study for the first time confronts young criminals with a literary canon dripping with violence. The experiment sheds light on the reading activities of prisoners, on their and the author's social background, and on the power of American literature to speak to marginal groups.

Sylvia’s Lovers is a novel about war. It is a historical novel set in the years 1793-1800 during the Napoleonic wars, and written by Elizabeth Gaskell in the years 1859-1862 when the American Civil War broke out, in April 1861. Examining Gaskell’s correspondence with Charles Eliot Norton in the years 1861-63 and the articles Norton wrote in support of the War and the anti-slavery cause, this paper explores the way in which the news coming from America and the debates on the contemporary events left a significant mark on the second part of the novel. The implied reference to the context of the American Civil War would shed new light on Gaskell’s narrative choices concerning the plot and the main male character’s development, which has been substantially overlooked.

This paper deals with Latin discontinuous nominal expressions (hyperbatons) both by a diachronic perspective internal to Latin (I-VI cent. A.D.) and compared to Romance languages. A nominal expression can be considered discontinuous when its word order is interrupted by one or more elements. In these cases a violation of the principle of the ‘domain integrity’ takes place. Discontinuity is typical of Latin and sets it apart from Romance languages, in which hyperbatons are not allowed. It is well attested in all phases of Latin so that it is considered one of the most distinctive feature of Latin word order. In this paper, we explore the hypothesis that not all linearly discontinuous orders are real hyperbatons. In fact, cases in which the order Modif.-N or N-Modif. is interrupted by the complement of one of the two categories are frequent; in this perspective the domain of hyperbatons results consistently restricted. As regards real hyperbatons, we will propose the following three syntactic configurations: Type 1 due to the extraction of an element within the phrase; Type 2 due to the insertion of a weak element in second position; Type 3 due to the insertion of a verb. A final observation will concern the fact that we find in Latin kinds of hyperbatons that can be considered a clear sign of those that will develop later in Romance because they involve clitics which are absent in Latin.

This paper investigates the syntax of non-topicalized preverbal subjects in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). In BP, both locative PPs and locative DPs can occur in preverbal position: Na escola do Pedro aceita cartão de crédito; A escola do Pedro aceita cartão de crédito. In the latter case, the verb agrees with the locative. In BP, it is also possible to find non-argument constituents triggering verbal agreement, as in Essa estante cabe muitos livros. These sentences have been analysed as innovative constructions restricted to BP. This paper shows that some of the above structures are also present in other languages, e.g. Italian; not all of them are therefore innovative constructions of BP, and subcases need to be differentiated. The hypothesis is that sentences with preverbal non-argumental subjects have the same syntax as sentences with argumental subjects. What seems to occur in some cases is a modification in the verb thematic grid. We interpret BP’s “flexible diathesis” patterns as revealing that in this grammar, a variety of verbs have undergone a modification of their thematic grid which their counterparts in European Portuguese and other Romance languages did not.

This paper presents the figure of the Spanish writer Antonio Gala in his most unknown facet: as a poet. In doing so, we will focus on the research carried out within the “Phonodia” group of the Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia. This research consists of the description and analysis of the corpus of recorded poems by Antonio Gala, which add up to a total of eighty-four and are found in three audio publications: Testamento andaluz (1985), De viva voz (1997), and Miró a mi corazón (2014) – the last one in collaboration with the composer Rubén Jordán. With all this, not only the importance of Antonio Gala as a contemporary poet will be proven, but also the relevance of his poems in the framework of the relationship between the voice and poetry through sound files.

Indefinite nominals can typically be modified by pre- or postnominal adjectives in Romance languages. With the exception of a small group of adjectives concerning physical or moral characteristics whose meaning changes according to their pre- or postnominal use, the position of an attributive adjective does not alter its meaning. However, prenominal adjectives in a Spanish indefinite trigger its specific interpretation, thus preventing its variable reading; the same phenomenon obtains also in Catalan. The aim of this paper is to discuss specific cases in some Sicilian dialects – mainly in the dialect of Delia (province of Caltanissetta) – in order to provide further evidence of the fact that prenominal evaluative adjectives force the specific interpretation of indefinites in Romance. Since Sicilian dialects do not typically display prenominal adjectives, this paper will therefore draw on elatives to check whether Sicilian shows a parallel restriction in the postnominal position.

In this paper, I focus on the journal that Uruguayan writer Horacio Quiroga (1878-1937) wrote to record his visit to Paris, from March to July, in the year 1900. It remained as a manuscript until Emir Rodríguez Monegal transcribed it and published it in 1950 as Diario de un viaje a París (Journal of a Visit to Paris). This is the title under which we know this work today. There are several reasons why this text constitutes an outstanding autobiographical record. First of all, it stands out as a striking vision of Paris by a Latin American author. Paris was considered then the world capital of culture and civilization; nevertheless, the image of Paris provided by Quiroga is very different from the ideal city depicted by such authors as Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera and Rubén Darío. In the second place, the journal is also the record of a formative period in Quiroga’s intellectual development. Some critics contend that the trip to Paris determined Quiroga’s decision to become a writer, but in the present paper, upon the careful analysis of the entries in the journal, I argue that this journey only marks the beginning of an incipient literary call. Finally, the journal is also an extraordinary record of the everyday experiences of a Latin American traveler in Paris, at the turn of the twentieth century.

Between 1965 and 1973, the United States and Great Britain were going to conceive and execute a plan which involved the deportation of about two thousand islanders to set up a military base on the island of Diego Garcia located right in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Beyond the strategic, political and financial stakes, only one form of cultural practices managed to capture the joys, the pain and the hopes of that population: the ségas and the çantés. Indeed, the musical culture became the medium of choice of a then mostly illiterate population. Hence, all the songs of the Chagos shared a common heritage: the permanent evocation of the lost islands. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to show how the collective imagination of the exiled population is essentially portrayed in songs that initially referred to everyday life in their former place of abode. Once the spoliation process came into effect, the songs started to focus on a return to a fantasy island which with time has acquired mythical overtones.

Besides introducing groundbreaking critical concepts such as double consciousness, colour line and the veil, W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903) was among the first books to attribute universal dignity to black music. It did so by devoting a whole chapter to the ‘sorrow songs’, seen as “the articulate message of the slave to the world”, as well as by opening each chapter with epigraphs composed of bars of ‘black’ spirituals juxtaposed with lines of poetry by notable ‘white’ authors – Symons, Lowell, Byron, among others – in a musical/textual version of double consciousness. Reconsidering the composite formal structure of The Souls of Black Folk and the role of the spirituals as ceaseless reminders of freedom, the paper explores the ways in which Du Bois’s speculations on black music foreshadow contemporary sonic/textual strategies.

In many respects, classics may be considered as a language, that was aptly used to legitimate the imperialist exploitation of white people over the so called “Third World countries”. My paper is aimed at understanding whether and to which extent the Greco-Roman Antiquity as such can become a tool for telling a submerged history and for bringing forth its non hegemonic subjects. I will take into consideration a collective experience conducted by a theatre company in the south of Italy during the summer of 2018. Through a workshop involving immigrant people in the city of Palermo, Ali Farah, a Somali-Italian writer, staged an experimental rewriting of Sophocles’ Antigone, which starts from the telling of personal stories of migration through the Mediterranean sea. Grounding my analysis in the comparison between Antigone’s defiance of the power and the crossing of borders, I will underline the revolutionary message that the rewriting of this myth in contemporary Fortress Europe delivers.

In this paper aspects of the sibilant system in the variety spoken in the Germanic language island Sauris/Zahre in north-eastern Italy are presented. I investigate whether an intermediate, postalveolar “shibilant” (from Protogermanic */s/) in preconsonantal position is preserved from Middle High German as observed in other German minority languages in northern Italy. In Sauris/Zahre, in preconsonantal position a postalveolar realization is sometimes mentioned in literature, while in Modern Standard German and most related varieties in this position historical, postalveolar */s/ is retracted to palatoalveolar /ʃ/.

The paper considers Phillips’s rewriting of the canonical nineteenth-century romances in three of his novels – A State of Independence (1986), The Lost Child (2015), and A View of the Empire at Sunset (2018). The three texts resettle the romance genre through the postcolonial concept of ‘home’. In A State of Independence, Phillips rearranges the role of one of Jane Austen’s most orthodox characters, the landowner Sir Thomas Bertram of Mansfield Park (1814), by transposing the Austenian character’s features to his protagonist Bertram Francis, a Caribbean man who comes back to his ancestral homeland after twenty years in Britain. In The Lost Child, chronicling literary-historical events in the present tense by transferring the life of the Brontë family into the protagonists of Wuthering Heights (1847) is for the author one way of calling into question the real sense of literature. It is for this reason that Phillips constructs a cyclic narration around the figure of Branwell Brontë, fictionalised by his sister Emily in the romance protagonist Heathcliff, and mirrored in The Lost Child in the character of Tommy Wilson. In A View of the Empire at Sunset, Phillips definitely overturns the colonial and genre categories by reassessing the in-between life of the Dominican-born writer Jean Rhys through her personal return journey to Dominica: as a result, the author of Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) (an intense rewriting of Jane Eyre) becomes a fictional character, and the literary events of her life sum up the vicissitudes both of the two ‘Bertrams’ – of Mansfield Park and A State of Independence – and the protagonists of Wuthering Heights and The Lost Child.

The influence of loubok (Russian popular print) on Dostoevsky’s works is a topic deserving more attention than has been given up to now. It makes us understand how Dostoevsky got inspiration from popular iconography. The present article could be a further contribution to this research topic; its aim being to investigate the recurrence in Dostoevsky’s poetics of a particular typology of popular print, showing how a wife beats her husband after he came back home drunk. This loubok spread widely through Russia (the peasant family version) and Germany (the cobbler version). In particular the German version, which had a wide readership thanks to the German printer G. Renner and was named “Der Blaue Montag” was undoubtedly known to Dostoevsky, since it was widespread in the very period he travelled through Germany. In this paper I will try to show how the Russian novelist caught not only the general setting but also some details from this version to describe Marmeladov’s home in the scene (I, 2) when he comes back home and faces a violent welcome from his wife Katerina Ivanovna.

This paper aims to discuss how environment, language and rhetoric interplay in the postcolonial context, in particular by focusing on Making India Awesome (2015), a recent collection of essays in which journalist and novelist Chetan Bhagat offers suggestions to handle many of the challenges of India, ideally positioning the country ‘on the road to awesomeness’. Although ecology is not specifically treated, it obviously constitutes the backdrop of the themes of the book as it intertwines with broad social and cultural domains. I will look at the postcolonial environmental intertext, and its ideological implications, which the author builds up via specific frames, metaphors and devices from an interdisciplinary perspective informed by postcolonial critique, environmental humanities and ecolinguistics. The purpose of the analysis thus is to provide a critical reflection on how language shapes, creates and hides values at the interface between the postcolonial and the environmental.

Irish English, albeit a variant of the language of the colonizer, can be considered an important identitarian element in twentieth century Irish literature. By taking into account Irish English terms in a selection of Anglo-Irish plays (with particular focus on the titles), this paper examines the lexical choices that contribute to rendering cultural, geographical and political meanings – some of which are derogatory, patronizing and pejorative. The conclusion, with reference to Brian Friel’s Translations, reflects on the implications of the dominance of English in Ireland following its replacement of Irish Gaelic. The various loanwords and calques from Irish Gaelic found in these plays thus acquire a cultural and political significance that is specific to the Irish context.

Aquest treball analitza la traducció i recepció de la novel·la Pedra tartera, de Maria Barbal, als països de parla alemanya. L’article se centra en l’anàlisi de dos aspectes principals: d’una banda, dels factors externs que determinen la projecció internacional no només de l’obra de Maria Barbal sinó de la literatura catalana en general; i de l’altra, dels factors literaris que defineixen la recepció a l’estranger d’aquesta novel·la. En el primer conjunt de factors, es descriu el paper que han jugat en aquest procés l’Institut Ramon Llull, diverses editorials, els agents literaris i les fires internacionals del llibre. Per al segon conjunt de factors, l’anàlisi se centra en la reacció del món acadèmic, la crítica literària i els mitjans, i en la mateixa mesura, en l’opinió de la traductora de l’obra, Heike Nottebaum, així com del seu editor alemany, Rainer Nitsche.

At length stripped of any free and independent voice by male writers, Haitian and African novelists shattered the taboos surrounding sex and a liberated sexual expression during the second half of the 20th century. By exploring sexuality and sensuality in their work, these writers courageously managed to break free from the outskirts of society and reshape the inferior identity unjustly attributed to them by the literary canons. As there is a gap in in-depth research on this subject, our study aims to explore the different ways in which female sexuality is constructed on paper. The novels by Calixthe Beyala, Frieda Ekotto, Ken Bugul, Margaret Papillon, Yanick Lahens and Kettly Mars will allow us to focus on three themes often recurring in the female universe: violence, madness and prostitution. Particularly, the research will take into consideration the enunciative and discursive modalities, as well as the stylistic techniques that enabled these authors to enhance a strong female subjectivity through their bodies.

In Middle Passages, Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s poetic discourse propels the reader through the landscape of a postmodern American society where the cultural achievements, despite the historical suffering of modern African American people, are regathered and offered through the poetic lens of re-memory as an American artifact of excelling cultural value. In this paper, Brathwaite’s poetic discourse joins that of Claudia Rankine, whose Don’t Let Me Be Lonely offers a contemporary poetic confrontation between the American media’s distillation of history and the poetic re-memory of those events, through the eyes of the Black community. The collections maintain strong political overtones in their historicizing of the suffering that African peoples have endured wherever they are in the black diaspora. Read together, they challenge the mythological depictions of mainstream America as a nation that embraces cultural difference, while upholding the need for continuing a discourse that contests mainstream representations of the status quo of the black American community.

The call for a “New Mythology” represents one of most controversial traits of German Romanticism. In the early works of F. Schlegel and F.W.J. Schelling, as in the so called Älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus, mythology stands for the Utopia of a universal reorganization of knowledge, capable of founding, after the Legitimationskrise of the modern era, a new horizon of shared ideas and values. Starting from an investigation of the mythological form as legitimation instrument and utopian catalyzer, this paper aims to shed light on the historical genesis of the “new Mythology” and its outcomes.

This paper examines Heidegger’s Beiträge zur Philosophie with the aim of shedding light on its messianic-eschatological approach. Firstly, I take into account the formal structure of history through a reference to Aristotle’s grasp of κίνησις and its principles. I then try to connect this structure to the complex epochal movement of Universal History, as it emerges from Heidegger’s works in the ‘30s. Lastly, I deal with the concept of the last-God’s realm in order to stress the messianic dimension of Heidegger’s projects for the new humankind known as the Futurians.

In the interwar period, the Soviet Union experienced an unprecedented attention towards children’s literature. The October revolution was a driving force for all the arts and particularly for the editorial production aimed at forging the ‘new man’, embodied in the present moment by the younger generation. The CPSU increased its investment in all forms of publications – books, magazines, posters – and proposed them for mass production with the scope of educational engineering. Through an analysis of the literary and visual contents of the 1920’s issues of the magazine Murzilka, this paper aims at defining the characteristics of the new man as they appeared on the pages of one of the most popular magazines for children in Soviet Russia.

During the 1970s, the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) initiated a redefinition process of its political culture, deeply inspired by libertarian and anti-statist themes having its fulcrum in the idea of “self-management”. The paper aims not only to examine the ways in which the ideal of self-management is translated concretely into two fundamental areas of the political debate of the time, but also to understand the role played by the idea of self-management in the PSI’s evolution in a neoliberal sense.

In the contemporary literary universe, where the ‘commercial pole’ of literary field prevails over the ‘autonomous’ one, according to the dichotomy introduced by Pierre Bourdieu and furtherly developed by Pascale Casanova, the phenomena of so-called ‘world fiction’, has been becoming increasingly widespread. Considering that many readers read the works of fiction in order to experience the Other and the Alterity, the writers originating from or somehow related to peripheral cultures are expected to represent their cultures. The value of authenticity is attributed to their representations, even if the author’s autonomy is significantly limited by the rules of the chosen genre (‘world fiction’), and of the literary field they are trying to penetrate. Starting from these premises and focusing on the extraordinary success of two American writers of Balkan origin, Tea Obreht and Sara Nović, in this paper I will try to provide some answers to the following questions: what is the expected image of the Balkan in the USA literary field? Is the discourse of balcanism still present? And why do these images, although fictional, have an importance for the real world?

As a paratextual element, headlines occupy a prominent place in the layout of texts, thus performing a wide range of pragmatic functions. In journalistic articles, titles tend to serve as a bait to seduce readers who are offered multiple and varied proposals on account of the journalist macro-genre. This paper examines the type of headings that the writer J.F. Mira – anthropologist, Hellenist, novelist, and translator – has used in his journalistic essays over four decades of publications in multiple distinguished newspapers throughout the Catalan-speaking world. This broad period allows for an analysis that indicates a gradual transformation of the titles he chooses, characteristic that shows how titles mode brings together text and any specific sociocultural context. In addition, from this perspective, the Valencian writer invites readers – while selecting them – to discuss matters that shun both emergencies and frivolities of today’s social media.

What we know about the horizon of possibilities in the writers’ discourse is largely influenced by two relevant scholars studies who defined literature as a field in which many pressures converge. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the aims and pressures that have Harkaitz Cano has to cope with when writing about the Basque context. In the aforementioned discussion I thoroughly identify different cycles of literary recreation by taking into consideration three essential stages: first, reflections from a novel’s main figure, secondly, an essay on artist and character building and finally, conversions based on metaliterature. To conclude, the single most striking observation to emerge from the analysis might be the correlation between the artist’s necessity and impossibility to represent reality around him.

This article sheds some light on the language change – from Spanish to Catalan – that took place in Pere Gimferrer’s work, one of the most acclaimed living poets in Spain. Specifically, the paper tries to analyse the political consequences of writing in Catalan during the Spanish transition form Franco’s dictatorship to democracy.