With more than 1800 critical entries on the writers and literatures of 33 languages, this work presents the entire range of modern European writing -- from the symbolist and modernist works rooted in the last decades of the nineteenth century; through the avant-garde and existentialist movement to Barthes, Blanchot, Breton, and continental thought pertinent today.

"European Authors" is a biographical dictionary, covering European authors from 1000 to 1900.

Walter Cohen argues that the history of European literature and each of its standard periods can be illuminated by comparative consideration of the different literary languages within Europe and by the ties of European literature to world literature. World literature is marked by recurrent, systematic features, outcomes of the way that language and literature are at once the products of major change and its agents. Cohen tracks these features from ancient times to the present, distinguishing five main overlapping stages. Within that framework, he shows that European literatures ongoing internal and external relationships are most visible at the level of form rather than of thematic statement or mimetic representation. European literature emerges from world literature before the birth of Europe — during antiquity, whose Classical languages are the heirs to the complex heritage of Afro-Eurasia. This legacy is later transmitted by Latin to the various vernaculars. The uniqueness of the process lies in the gradual displacement of the learned language by the vernacular, long dominated by Romance literatures. That development subsequently informs the second crucial differentiating dimension of European literature: the multicontinental expansion of its languages and characteristic genres, especially the novel, beginning in the Renaissance. This expansion ultimately results in the reintegration of European literature into world literature and thus in the creation of todays global literary system. The distinctiveness of European literature is to be found in these interrelated trajectories.

A Dictionary of European Anglicisms documents the spread of English in Europe. It provides the first exhaustive and up-to-date account of British and American English words that have been imported into the main languages of Europe. English, which imported thousands of words from French and Latin (mainly after 1066), is now by far the world's biggest lexical exporter, and the trade is growing as English continues to dominate various fields ranging from pop music to electronic communication. Several countries have monitored the inflow of anglicisms and some have tried to block it. But language, as lexicographers have always found and as this book demonstrates once more, respects neither boundary nor law. The dictionary not only shows which words have been exported where, but how the process of importation can change a word's form and function, sometimes subtly, at others remarkably as in the transformation of painkiller to Bulgarian 'jack of all trades'. The book provides a systematic description of the lexical input of English into Icelandic, Norwegian, Dutch, German, Russian, Polish, Croatian, Bulgarian, French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, Finnish, Hungarian, Albanian, and Greek. Each entry has a brief definition of the loan word, followed by information on its history and distribution; variations in its spelling, meaning, and pronunciation; its route of transmission if not direct from English; its degree of acceptance and usage restrictions; and its native equivalents and derivatives. Grids showing distribution patterns across Europe accompany many of the entries. The Dictionary of European Anglicisms is a scholarly tour de force [French: imported early nineteenth century] and the result of a prodigious research effort across Europe masterminded and directed by Manfred Gorlach. It is a unique resource for comparative analysis and the study of linguistic variation and change. It will fascinate linguists and word-watchers of all persuasions.