Metamorphosis Structures Of Cultural Transformations

At times of crisis and revolution such as ours, diagnoses of crucial junctures and ruptures – ‘turning points’ – in the continuous flow of history are more prevalent than ever. Analysing literary, cinematic and other narratives, the volume seeks to understand the meanings conveyed by different concepts of turning points, the alternative concepts to which they are opposed when used to explain historical change, and those contexts in which they are unmasked as false and over-simplifying constructions. Literature and film in particular stress the importance of turning points as a sensemaking device (as part of a character’s or a community’s cultural memory), while at the same time unfolding the constructive and hence relative character of turning points. Offering complex reflections on the notion of turning points, literary and filmic narratives are thus of particular interest to the present volume.

Gesa Stedman's ambitious new study is a comprehensive account of cross-channel cultural exchanges between seventeenth-century France and England, and includes discussion of a wide range of sources and topics. Literary texts, garden design, fashion, music, dance, food, the book market, and the theatre as well as key historical figures feature in the book. Importantly, Stedman concentrates on the connection between actual, material transfer and its symbolic representation in both visual and textual sources, investigating material exchange processes in order to shed light on the connection between actual and symbolic exchange. Individual chapters discuss exchanges instigated by mediators such as Henrietta Maria and Charles II, and textual and visual representations of cultural exchange with France in poetry, restoration comedies, fashion discourse, and in literary devices and characters. Well-written and accessible, Cultural Exchange in Seventeenth-Century France and England provides needed insight into the field of cultural exchange, and will be of interest to both literary scholars and cultural historians.

"Counternarrative Possibilities" reads Cormac McCarthy s Westerns against the backdrop of the two formative national tropes of virgin land (from the 1950s) and homeland (after 9/11) in American mythology. While both of these figures have been used in exceptionalist discourse about the United States, they are also intimately connected with the emergence and transformation of the field of American Studies. Using an integrative approach to read McCarthy s Westerns in relation to both their ideological context and the institutionalized ideology critique that has shaped their reception, the book shows how McCarthy s Westerns simultaneously counter the national narratives underlying the tropes of virgin land and homeland and reinvest them with new, potentially transformative meaning. McCarthy s work of the 1980s and 1990s both draws on postmodern strategies of narrative disruption and departs from them by staging a return to narrative that prefigures recent postpostmodern developments. Departing from prevailing accounts of McCarthy that place him in relation to his literary antecedents, "Counternarrative Possibilities" takes a forward-looking approach that reads McCarthy s work as a key influence on millennial fiction. Weaving together disciplinary history with longstanding debates over the relationship between aesthetics and politics, "Counternarrative Possibilities" is at once an exploration of the limits of ideology critique in the 21st century and a timely reconsideration of McCarthy s work after postmodernism. "

In The Situatedness of Translation Studies, Luc van Doorslaer and Ton Naaijkens reassess some outdated views about Translation Studies. They present ten chapters about lesser-known conceptualizations of translation and translation theory in various cultural contexts, such as Chinese, Estonian, Greek, Russian and Ukrainian.