Author: cgawade

Peebles, Kelly Digby, and Gabriella Scarlatta. Representing the Life and Legacy of Renée de France . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2021.

This book considers the life and legacy of Renée de France (1510–75), the youngest daughter of King Louis XII and Anne de Bretagne, exploring her cultural, spiritual, and political influence and her evolving roles and actions as  fille de France , Duchess of Ferrara, and Dowager Duchess at Montargis. Drawing on a variety of often overlooked sources – poetry, theater, fine arts, landscape architecture, letters, and ambassadorial reports – contributions highlight Renée’s wide-ranging influence in sixteenth-century Europe, from the Italian Wars to the French Wars of Religion. These essays consider her cultural patronage and politico-religious advocacy, demonstrating that she expanded upon intellectual and moral values shared with her sister, Claude de France; her cousins, Marguerite de Navarre and Jeanne d’Albret; and her godmother and mother, Anne de France and Anne de Bretagne, thereby solidifying her place in a long line of powerful French royal women.

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The Cambridge Companion to Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen. Eds. Mark Berry & Nicholas Vazsonyi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

The Companion is an essential, interdisciplinary tool for those both familiar and unfamiliar with Wagner’s Ring. It opens with a concise introduction to both the composer and the Ring, introducing Wagner as a cultural figure, and giving a comprehensive overview of the work. Subsequent chapters, written by leading Wagner experts, focus on musical topics such as ‘leitmotif’, and structure, and provide a comprehensive set of character portraits, including leading players like Wotan, Brünnhilde, and Siegfried. Further chapters look to the mythological background of the work and the idea of the Bayreuth Festival, as well as critical reception of the Ring, its relationship to Nazism, and its impact on literature and popular culture, in turn offering new approaches to interpretation including gender, race and environmentalism. The volume ends with a history of notable stage productions from the world premiere in 1876 to the most recent stagings in Bayreuth and elsewhere.

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Fictions of Legibility: The Human Face and Body in Modern German Novels from Sophie von La Roche to Alfred Döblin. Transcript (2020)

Reviewed in  German Studies Review
Reviewed in The German Quarterly

Gabriela Stoicea examines how the incidence and role of physical descriptions in German novels changed between 1771 and 1929 in response to developments in the study of the human face and body. As well as engaging the tools and methods of literary analysis, the study uses a cultural studies approach to offer a constellation of ideas and polemics surrounding the readability of the human body. By including discussions from the medical sciences, epistemology, semiotics, and aesthetics, the book draws out the multifaceted permutations of corporeal legibility, as well as its relevance for the development of the novel and for facilitating interdisciplinary dialogue.

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Eva Piirimäe, Liina Lukas, and Johannes Schmidt (eds.). Herder on Empathy and Sympathy. Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, Volume: 311 (2020).

The English-German collection  Herder on Empathy and Sympathy:  Einfühlung und Sympathie im Denken Herders considers the meaning and role of the concepts of empathy and sympathy in Herder’s thought. Herder invokes sympathy in a number of disciplinary domains ranging from metaphysics, biology, anthropology, epistemology, psychology, morality, politics, history, aesthetics to homiletics. While Herder is shown as belonging to a long line of thinkers who view sympathy as a metaphysical principle contributing to the interconnectedness of all parts of nature, he also offers new insights about intra-/inter-species sympathetic communication and distinctively human varieties of sympathy for which he reserves the term “sich einfühlen”. Acknowledging the limits of the natural capacity for “sich einfühlen”, Herder nonetheless calls for its reflective cultivation in various domains.

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The Cambridge Wagner Encyclopedia. Ed. Nicholas Vazsonyi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Paperback 2019.

Richard Wagner is one of the most controversial figures in Western cultural history. He revolutionized not only opera but the very concept of art, and his works and ideas have had an immeasurable impact on both the cultural and political landscapes of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From ‘absolute music’ to ‘Zurich’ and from ‘Theodor Adorno’ to ‘Hermann Zumpe’, the vividly-written entries of The Cambridge Wagner Encyclopedia have been contributed by recognized authorities and cover a comprehensive range of topics. More than eighty scholars from around the world, representing disciplines from history and philosophy to film studies and medicine, provide fascinating insights into Wagner’s life, career and influence. Multiple appendices include listings of Wagner’s works, historic productions, recordings and addresses where he lived, to round out a volume that will be an essential and reliable resource for enthusiasts and academics alike.

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Simone de Beauvoir: le combat au féminin.   Collection Que Sais-Je ? Paris: Presses Universitaires de France/Humensis, 2019.

Situating his arguments vis-à-vis major critics like Michel Onfray and Julia Kristeva, Touya de Marenne explores the repercussions of Beauvoir’s philosophical and political complex thought, but also the oppositions that she inspired during the twentieth century, and to the present day in France, the United States, and the world. In a groundbreaking study, Touya demonstrates how Beauvoir deepens and sheds new light like none of her contemporaries on the great questions of our time: the freedom and responsibility of the human being, the condition of women in an androcentric world, the dialogue between peoples, and the fight for justice, through an ethical thought that is contemporary to us.

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Iozzia, Alberto and Roberto Risso (eds.) Italian Quarterly, Year LV, Nos. 215-218, Fall 2018.

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«La penna è chiacchierona» Edmondo De Amicis e l’arte del narrare. Franco Cesati Editore, 2018

This monograph examines and analyzes the whole literary production of an author, Edmondo De Amicis (1846-1908) who is well known only for a very limited number of works, especially his best and long seller Cuore (The Heart of a Boy). But his journalist, traveller, narrator, patriot, novelist and educator produced a body of many thousand pages of works so different and so various that no scholar had tried to analyze them in full. This book, resulting from a decade of archival research, readings and travels and above all from a years-long historical researches on the journals and magazines of the times of the authors, gives an in depth study of the major and minor themes of this author, encouraging to face the least known of his works, giving a first hand analysis of his relevance in the past and in the present of Italian and European literature.

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Rainer, Godel and Johannes Schmidt (eds.): Herder Yearbook 14 (2018).

The Herder Yearbook offers—now for the fourteenth time—a selection of current research on Johann Gottfried Herder. This year’s volume collects eight contributions, among them articles on the Philosophieschrift , the  Plastik , and the  Humanitätsbriefe , as well as on Herder’s mentorship of female writers, Herder’s reception in Italy, the question of Herder’s particular universalism, and on his relationship to Martin Luther. Included are two source editions of Herder’s manuscripts. This volume presents again an extensive Herder bibliography including the continuation of Japanese literature on Herder. Two reviews conclude this volume. The Herder Yearbook is published on behalf of the International Herder Society and presents interdisciplinary scholarship on all aspects of Herder’s works as well as their publication history and reception.

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Music Theater as Global Culture: Wagner’s Legacy Today. Eds. Anno Mungen, Nicholas Vazsonyi, Julie Hubbert, Ivana Rentsch, Arne Stollberg. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2017.

his volume presents the most significant essays written by established and younger scholars as part of the two-year project titled WagnerWorldWide 2013. Conceived by Anno Mungen, Director of the Forschungsinstitut für Musiktheater at the University of Bayreuth, the project comprised a Lecture Series in Fall/Winter 2011-12 and two international conferences, at the University of South Carolina (USA) in January 2013, and at Schloss Thurnau in December 2013. Beyond recognizing the bicentennial of Wagner’s birth, WagnerWorldWide 2013 examines the current significance of the Wagner phenomenon through five overarching themes that link social, political, ideological and aesthetic aspects of the 19th and 21st centuries, as follows: Environment & Nature, Gender & Sexuality, Media & Film, History & Nationalism, Globalization & Markets. Beyond individual treatments, the project seeks to create networks between the themes. Since the concluding conference took place at the end of 2013, the volume also reflects on the anniversary year by examining not only its aesthetic and intellectual results but also the ways in which Wagner was remembered, memorialized, and celebrated.

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