The authors of the 16 essays collected in this volume use a variety of approaches to study a broad range of what are now called 'ego-documents' from the Renaissance to the beginning of the 19th century.

Embodiment, Expertise, and Ethics in Early Modern Europe highlights the agency and intentionality of individuals and groups in the making of sensory knowledge from approximately 1500 to 1700. Focused case studies show how artisans, poets, writers, and theologians responded creatively to their environments, filtering the cultural resources at their disposal through the lenses of their own more immediate experiences and concerns. The result was not a single, unified sensory culture, but rather an entangling of micro-cultural dynamics playing out across an archipelago of contexts that dotted the early modern European world—one that saw profound transitions in ways people used sensory knowledge to claim ethical, intellectual, and practical authority.

This book offers new, often unexpected, but always intriguing portraits of the writers of classic fairy tales. For years these authors, who wrote from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, have been either little known or known through skewed, frequently sentimentalized biographical information. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were cast as exemplars of national virtues; Hans Christian Andersen's life became—with his participation—a fairy tale in itself. Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, the prim governess who wrote moral tales for girls, had a more colorful past than her readers would have imagined, and few people knew that nineteen-year-old Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy conspired to kill her much-older husband. Important figures about whom little is known, such as Giovan Francesco Straparola and Giambattista Basile, are rendered more completely than ever before. Uncovering what was obscured for years and with newly discovered evidence, contributors to this fascinating and much-needed volume provide a historical context for Europe's fairy tales.

This volume historicizes the study of life-writing and egodocuments, focusing on early modern European reflections on the self, self-fashioning, and identity. Life-writing and the study of egodocuments currently tend to be viewed as separate fields, yet the individual as a purposive social actor provides significant common ground and offers a vehicle, both theoretical and practical, for a profitable synthesis of the two in a historical context. Echoing scholars from a wide-range of disciplines who recognize the uncertainty of the nature of the self, these essays question the notion of the autonomous self and the attendant idea of continuous identity unfolding in a unified personality. Instead, they suggest that the early modern self was variable and unstable, and can only be grasped by exploring selves situated in specific historical and social/cultural contexts and revealed through the wide range of historical documents considered here. The three sections of the volume consider: first, the theoretical contexts of understanding egodocuments in early modern Europe; then, the practical ways egodocuments from the period may be used for writing life-histories today; and finally, a wider range of historical documents that might be added to what are usually seen as egodocuments.

In this new book, Bauman examines how we have moved away from a 'heavy' and 'solid', hardware-focused modernity to a 'light' and 'liquid', software-based modernity. This passage, he argues, has brought profound change to all aspects of the human condition. The new remoteness and un-reachability of global systemic structure coupled with the unstructured and under-defined, fluid state of the immediate setting of life-politics and human togetherness, call for the rethinking of the concepts and cognitive frames used to narrate human individual experience and their joint history. This book is dedicated to this task. Bauman selects five of the basic concepts which have served to make sense of shared human life - emancipation, individuality, time/space, work and community - and traces their successive incarnations and changes of meaning. Liquid Modernity concludes the analysis undertaken in Bauman's two previous books Globalization: The Human Consequences and In Search of Politics. Together these volumes form a brilliant analysis of the changing conditions of social and political life by one of the most original thinkers writing today.

As an American author who chose to live in Europe, Henry James frequentlywrote about cultural differences between the Old and New World. Theplight of bewildered Americans adrift on a sea of European sophisticationbecame a regular theme in his fiction.This collection of twenty-four papers from some of the world's leadingJames scholars offers a comprehensive picture of the author's crossculturalaesthetics. It provides detailed analyses of James's perception ofEurope - of its people and places, its history and culture, its artists andthinkers, its aesthetics and its ethics - which ultimately lead to a profoundreevaluation of his writing.With in-depth analysis of his works of fiction, his autobiographical andpersonal writings, and his critical works, the collection is a major contribution to current thinking about James, transtextuality and cultural appropriation.

Ethics and Aesthetics of Translation engages with translation, in both theory and practice, as part of an interrogation of ethical as well as political thought in the work of three bilingual European authors: Bernardo Atxaga, Milan Kundera and Jorge Semprún. In approaching the work of these authors, the book draws upon the approaches to translation offered by Benjamin, Derrida, Ricœur and Deleuze to highlight a broad set of ethical questions, focused upon the limitations of the monolingual and the democratic possibilities of linguistic plurality; upon our innate desire to translate difference into similarity; and upon the ways in which translation responds to the challenges of individual and collective remembrance. Each chapter explores these interlingual but also intercultural, interrelational and interdisciplinary issues, mapping a journey of translation that begins in the impact of translation upon the work of each author, continues into moments of linguistic translation, untranslatability and mistranslation within their texts and ultimately becomes an exploration of social, political and affective (un)translatability. In these journeys, the creative and critical potential of translation emerges as a potent, often violent, but always illuminating, vision of the possibilities of differentiation and connection, generation and memory, in temporal, linguistic, cultural and political terms.