Peter Lang Oxford is delighted to announce the publication of its latest book, Death and Desire in Car Crash Culture: A Century of Romantic Futurisms by Ricarda Vidal.
Why are we so obsessed with cars?Shiny objects of desire,
cars never cease to fascinate us. As symbols of freedom they return again and again in art and film, even if real freedom is sometimes only achieved in the final explosive crash – the climax of the sheer exhilaration of speed.
‘Car crash culture’ is a symptom of the twentieth century, Ricarda Vidal argues in this book, revealing that our love of the car and technology is caused by the continuing influence of turn-of-the-century ideas: the Futurist technological utopia and the Romantic return to nature and desire. Artists, writers and filmmakers have explored this troubled love affair with the automobile throughout the past century. The work of F. T. Marinetti, Giacomo Balla, Jack Kerouac, Andy Warhol, Jean-Luc Godard (Week End), Richard Sarafian (Vanishing Point), J. G. Ballard and David Cronenberg (Crash), Quentin Tarantino (Death Proof) and Sarah Lucas, among others, are shown to pursue these ideals, even as developments in modern cities and telecommunications continue to change the nature of speed and technology.
While the first half of the twentieth century was concerned with the celebration of speed and acceleration, the car crash has now become an obsession of contemporary culture. Vidal concludes that our attraction to the car crash reflects the contemporary way of life in the West, which is defined by a Futurist technophilia, a Romantic longing for a higher meaning and an undeniable infatuation with the automobile.
Infosys Prize for outstanding contribution to the Humanities in Literary Studies
Rabindranath Tagore is widely regarded as a romantic poet, speaking of beauty and truth; as a transcendentalist; a believer in the absolute; a propagandist for universal man; and as a national icon. But, as Amit Chaudhuri shows in these remarkable and widely admired essays about the poet and his milieu, his secret concern was really with life, play, and contingency, with the momentary as much as it was with the eternal. It is this strain of unacknowledged modernism, as well as a revolutionary life-affirming vision, that gives his work, Chaudhuri argues, its immense power.
Acute, challenging, and path-breaking, Amit Chaudhuri's collection will become a classic reading of Rabindranath Tagore and the way he is perceived today.On Tagore was awarded the Rabindra Puraskar, the West Bengal government's highest literary honour, in 2012 in recognition of the 'significance, in the English language, of its critical analysis of Tagore's works'.
House of Lords Reform
House of Lords Reform is the great political divide de nos jours. In the first of two volumes, author Peter Raina shows that it has a long and distinguished history of much of the same.Find the book "House of Lords Reform: A History" in our Online-Shop
«Raina has produced a work of scholarship that is useful and fascinating for constitutional historians and lawyers. It is a very informative source book with some documents never previously published.» (George Devenish, The South African Law Journal 129, 2012/1)
The Liturgical Vision of Pope Benedict XVI
This book presents and evaluates the liturgical vision of Pope Benedict XVI and the theological background underlying that vision. It describes the main features of Joseph Ratzinger’s theology of the liturgy and analyses them within the context of his theology as a whole. Ratzinger’s evaluation of the contemporary Roman Catholic liturgy is explored in relation to his overall assessment of the post-Vatican II era in the Church, alongside an examination of his project of liturgical renewal (‘reform of the reform’) and its practical implementation during his pontificate. The author discusses the various critical voices which have been raised against the Pope’s liturgical agenda and against certain aspects of his general theology. Overall, the book offers an assessment of the importance of Ratzinger’s vision for the Church at the threshold of the third millennium.
Seminar series
Seminar series: Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing
A new seminar series associated with the Peter Lang book series Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing will be held in 2013 at the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing at the INSTITUTE OF GERMANIC & ROMANCE STUDIES University of London School of Advanced Study
New cross-cultural/comparative seminar series on Wednesday afternoons
at Senate House, University of London, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU
1 May 2013, 2-5pm:
War Stories: Reading the Postcolonial Text
22 May 2013, 2-5.30pm:
Women’s Writing in the 21st Century
26 June 2013, 2-5.30pm:
The Aesthetics of Disgust: Revolting Bodies and Other Gruesome Things in post-1990 Women’s Writing
11 December 2013, 2-5 pm:
Women Leaders in Contemporary European Women’s Writing
More infos here.