The Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid abound with plants, yet much Vergilian criticism underestimates their significance beyond attractive background detail or the occasional symbolic set-piece. This ...work joins the growing field of nature-centred studies of literature, looking head-on at Vergil’s plants and trees to reveal how fundamental they are to an understanding of the poet’s outlook on religion, culture, and mankind’s place within the world. The first half of the book explores the religious and more diffusely numinous aspects of Vergil’s plants, from awe–inspiring sacred groves to divinely promoted fields of corn, showing how both cultivated and uncultivated plants fit within and help to shape the complex landscape of Vergilian (and, more broadly, Roman) religious thought. In the second half, the focus moves to human interactions with plants from the perspectives of both cultivation and relaxation, exploring the love–hate relationship with vegetation which sometimes supports and sometimes contests the human self-image as the world’s dominant species. Combining a series of close readings of a wide range of passages with the identification of broader patterns of association, this book reveals and celebrates the complexity and variety of Vergilian flora.
This volume is the outcome of a transatlantic conversation on the topic Transnational America, in which more than sixty scholars from universities in the United States and Germany gathered to assess ...the historical significance of and examine the academic prospects for the transnational turn in American studies.
This development has brought about the most significant re-imagining of the field since its inception. The transnational has subsumed competing spatial and temporal orientations to the subject and has dismantled the foundational tenets and premises informing the methodology, periodization, pedagogy, and geographical locations of U.S. American studies, but transnational American studies scholars have not yet provided a coherent portrait of their field. This volume constitutes an effort to produce this needed portrait. The editors have gathered work from a host of senior and up-and-coming Americanists to compile a field-defining project that will influence both scholars and students of American studies for many years to come.
Marriage and the relationship between husband and wife in medieval literature have often been analyzed from many different points of view. However, there is an aspect which remains unexplored and ...this is the analysis from a discursive perspective of the conversation between the knight and his lady before he departs in search of adventures, war or whatever other reason. This study aims to verify if there is any kind of coincidence or similarity in the arguments used by the lady in different texts, when she tries to stop her husband from leaving. Therefore, in the present study conversations concerning the departing of a knight from his lady shall be analyzed in Icelandic, German, French, Catalan and Spanish chivalric texts of the Middle Ages, taking into account the consequences of the knight’s departure for the lady, for the knight and for the marriage bond itself. A detailed analysis of the lady’s arguments intending to keep the knight by her side seems to lead to a hypothesis concerning the existence of similar arguments across literary texts in different languages.
Presentamos textos de la literatura oral de Laghouat (Argelia) recogidos por una hermana blanca en torno a 1970 en un cuadernillo hallado en el Archivo General de las Hermanas Blancas en Roma. Se ...trata de frases, cuentos, nanas, coplas para el mal de ojo, oraciones, textos etnográficos, léxico infantil y léxico relacionado con el trabajo de la lana. Todo este material pertenece tanto al género poético como narrativo y va acompañado de un estudio. Concluimos además con una presentación de los rasgos lingüísticos más relevantes.