The third edition of the Historical Dictionary of Croatia relates the history of this country through a detailed chronology, an introduction, a bibliography, and cross-referenced dictionary entries on significant persons, places, and events; institutions and organizations; and political, economic, social, cultural, and religious facets.

Provides a systematic approach to lexical indicators of cultural identity using the material of Slavic languages.

For those times when “you blackguard!” just won’t do, Sinister Wisdom supplies an amazing array of crude, vulgar, offensive, scurrilous, lewd, and otherwise unprintable denunciations. Organized thematically and translated into more than 69 languages, it contains an alphabetical listing of every conceivable (and inconceivable) slur and insult, from comments on mothers' peculiar anatomy and hobbies, to suggestions on where to go and how, to observations on how others spend their solitary moments. Appendices cover blasphemies, bodily functions, sexual deviations, and variations on “yo mama!”

The Historical Dictionary of Croatia, Second Edition, describes the history of Croatia and illuminates the reasons the Croats have for establishing an independent state. Substantially updated and expanded, this second edition now includes both the whole reign of President Tudman and the first years of the Racan government. The political situation and prominent figures as well as an overview of the economic evolution and the legal infrastructure have been brought up to date and cover current events.

This is the largest, most comprehensive, and by far the most up-to-date dictionary providing English equivalents of the SerboCroatian lexicon, including about 60,000 SerboCroatian headwords and 100,000 phrases, idioms, and collocations. The vocabulary represents the present-day speech of educated Yugoslavs and of the daily press, and includes the complex political and economic terminology used in contemporary Yugoslavia. The new edition includes a large number of current usages as well as essential computer terms. This dictionary accounts for the differences between the Eastern and Western varieties of SerboCroatian as well as between American and British English. The leading dictionary of its kind in Yugoslavia, this dictionary is a must for every reference library.

This book examines strategies of transformation (becomings, image-making, and the phantasmagoric) that figure in four stories and a novel by Gothic fiction writer Pilar Pedraza (Spain, 1951). While critics have long associated the Bildungsroman with Gothic fiction, this study takes a close look at the developmental process itself: the means by which a protagonist, young or old, might transcend a deprived status to achieve a complete sense of self. Pedraza's works imply that, regardless of the path followed, a character's ability to think differently is crucial to progress. The fixed image, representative of an inflexible, socially determined mindset, arises as an obstacle to maturation. In "Días de perros," for example, a triangular arrangement of coins in a cigar box elucidates the connection between individual lives and the social order or assemblage. Literary texts, such as this one, serve as collective assemblages of enunciation, capable of exposing fixed images as powerful instruments of control. "Tristes Ayes del Águila Mejicana" discovers fixed images among the icons of Colonial Spain's exequias reales, used in this case to territorialize the evolving identity of indigenous peoples. The territory thatPedraza's fictionbest illuminates is, in reality, the image. When images remain fixed or territorialized, they uncannily infect the assemblages over which they exert influence. Placing emphasis on images that impact women, Pedraza, in "Anfiteatro," for example, deconstructs "cat woman," which, albeit a potentially subversive image in its early manifestations, eventually ceases to empower the feminine, lashing it, rather, to a burdensome stereotype. Territorialized, the feminine must, then, break free from the image in order to discover representations more capable of illuminating present-day challenges. The phrase "dark assemblages," drawn from Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, gestures toward societal stagnation as a decisive factor in individual evolvement. Gothic fiction represents an uneven landscape, in that it tenders the possibility of a social critique yet, equally well, lends itself to the exclusion of specific identities and practices that society brands as anomalous. Pedraza's Gothic fiction is, indeed, subversive, in that it offers readers original perceptions of modern day people and the assemblages, dark or otherwise, to which they belong.