Scipio Slataper is one of the most prominent writers from the Italian town of Trieste. Before the onslaught of World War One, Trieste was a unique urban environment and the largest port in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was a financially powerful city and a cosmopolitan centre where Slavic, Germanic, and Italian cultures intersected. Much of Slataper’s oeuvre is highly influenced by Trieste’s cultural complexity and its multi-ethnic environment. Slataper’s major literary achievement, My Karst and My City – a fictionalized, lyrical autobiography, translated here in its entirety – offers a unique example of an Italian modernist narrative, one that is influenced both by Slataper’s collaboration with the Florentine journal La Voce, and by the Germanic and Scandinavian literature that he absorbed while living in Trieste. My Karst and My City, together with the excerpts from his reflections on Ibsen and other critical essays included here, adds a new voice and a different dimension to our understanding of European modernism.

Border Heritage opens new insights in migration studies through analysis of the same emblematic eastern-central European borderland in Trieste, crossed by four refugee migrations over 70 years of history (1945–2022). Born from a dual personal and professional perspective, the book’s original structure starts from the Ukrainian displacement, going back to the asylum seekers arriving via the Balkans, then to refugees from the former Yugoslavia, and the exodus from Istria after the Second World War; the second part focuses on places, objects, and displaced memories. Each chapter begins with a particularly significant account by a refugee, which anchors the argument in everyday life and gives a human dimension to the following conceptual developments. All but scattered, the narrative plot offers a cohesive thread through the various chapters, analyzing how the various migrations have stratified, overlapped, and contaminated each other. Critically rethinking the heritage of a borderland means rethinking cognitive categories and being able to perceive the different nuances of those on the margins, without necessarily wanting to merge them into a generic “social inclusion” and instead giving them the right to a different voice. This book reverses the monochrome historical perspective to instead adopt the migrants’ perspective and make them the subject of study in a set of historical migrations.

This book develops our understanding of the global literary field in the long nineteenth century by discussing nine different places outside the established metropoles. It shows how different economic, geographical and political factors combined to give each place its own distinctive literary culture and symbolic capital. Taking a geocritical approach, the book shows how its different case studies can be seen as ‘literary capitals’ in terms of their role within the wider nation, region or empire. The volume is divided into three parts. Part One discusses Kolkata, Hong Kong and Buenos Aires. Part Two considers ‘semi-peripheral’ European cities: Pest-Buda (Budapest), Helsinki and Dublin. Part Three focuses on cities within Italy: Trieste, Florence and Rome. Drawing on a wide range of literary texts and different genres, the book reads the nineteenth-century literary field as a constellation where different connections can be plotted across various points on the map at different times.

In his "Essay on Tiredness," Handke transforms an everyday experience - often precipitated by boredom - into a fascinating exploration of the world of slow motion, differentiating degrees of fatigue, the types of weariness, its rejuvenating effects, as well as its erotic, cultural, and political implications.

In this Michael L. Printz Honor Book, the Newbery Honor-winning creator of the Joey Pigza books shares the true story of how he became a writer the hard way by learning a valuable lesson while he was in college.

Published in 1764, On Crimes and Punishments by Cesare Beccaria (1738–1794) courted both success and controversy in Europe and North America. Enlightenment luminaries and enlightened monarchs alike lauded the text and looked to it for ideas that might help guide the various reform projects of the day. The equality of every citizen before the law, the right to a fair trial, the abolition of the death penalty, the elimination of the use of torture in criminal interrogations—these are but a few of the vital arguments articulated by Beccaria. This volume offers a new English translation of On Crimes and Punishment alongside writings by a number of Beccaria’s contemporaries. Of particular interest is Voltaire’s commentary on the text, which is included in its entirety. The supplementary materials testify not only to the power and significance of Beccaria’s ideas, but to the controversial reception of his book. At the same time that philosophes proclaimed that it contained principles of enduring importance to any society grappling with matters of political and criminal justice, allies of the ancien régime roundly denounced it, fearing that the book’s attack on feudal privileges and its call to separate law from religion (and thus crime from sin) would undermine their longstanding privileges and powers. Long appreciated as a foundational text in criminology, Beccaria’s arguments have become central in debates over capital punishment. This new edition presents Beccaria’s On Crimes and Punishments as an important and influential work of Enlightenment political theory.