Italian cinemas after the war were filled by audiences who had come to watch domestically-produced films of passion and pathos. These highly emotional and consciously theatrical melodramas posed moral questions with stylish flair, redefining popular ways of feeling about romance, family, gender, class, Catholicism, Italy, and feeling itself. The Operatic and the Everyday in Postwar Italian Film Melodrama argues for the centrality of melodrama to Italian culture. It uncovers a wealth of films rarely discussed before including family melodramas, the crime stories of neorealismo popolare and opera films, and provides interpretive frameworks that position them in wider debates on aesthetics and society. The book also considers the well-established topics of realism and arthouse auteurism, and re-thinks film history by investigating the presence of melodrama in neorealism and post-war modernism. It places film within its broader cultural context to trace the connections of canonical melodramatists like Visconti and Matarazzo to traditions of opera, the musical theatre of the sceneggiata, visual arts, and magazines. In so doing it seeks to capture the artistry and emotional experiences found within a truly popular form.

Reading Words into Worlds asks how it is that reading a novel can feel in some ways like being-in-a-world. The book explores how novels give themselves to readers in ways that mimetically resemble our phenomenological reception of given beings in reality. McReynolds refers to this process as phenomenological mimesis of givenness, and he draws on the phenomenological philosophy of Husserl, Heidegger, and Jean-Luc Marion to explore how masterful novels can make reading ink marks on a page feel like seeing things, feeling things, and meeting (even loving) others. McReynolds blends rigorous phenomenological study with a personable style, first laying out his theory in detail and then applying that theory through close studies of his reading experiences of four British realist masterpieces: Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Eliot’s Middlemarch, and Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. Ultimately, this book offers a grounded phenomenology of novel-reading, illuminating what gives novels such power to not only thrill readers—but to change them.

'Weaving Words into Worlds' comes as the third spinoff of the international ecopoetics conference organized in Perpignan in 2016. Reflecting upon how the many stories we tell directly influence the world we live in, each of the contributions in this international volume directs our attention to the constant, ecopoetic weaving of word to the world at work via the many entanglements between mind, matter, and meaning, whether on a local or a global scale. It encapsulates how the words, stories, and concepts we humans articulate as we try to make sense of the world we inhabit give part of its shape to the web of ecological relations that we depend on for survival. It seeks to cast light on the disenchanting and reenchanting powers of stories and poiesis in general—as stories retain the power to make us either become oblivious to and destroy or to feel and honor the many, complex ties between the multitudinous nature cultures intertwined within the fabric of a multispecies world always in the making. This book offers a total of fourteen articles written by international scholars in ecocriticism and ecopoetics who, by their analyses of literature and/or films and the political subtext they thus render visible, aim at showing how the study of environmentally minded media may renew our attention to the entangled agencies of the human and the more-than-human realm. Thus, this work offers to counter a reproach ecocriticism has often been met with, namely the over-presence of US scholars and the lack of diversity in subjects in the field, since the articles presented provide a wide variety of approaches and topics with examples of UK and Native American literature, Polynesian myth, graphic novels, or haiku. In doing so, the book expands on the fields of ecocriticism and ecopoetics, adding to this branch of study and enriching it with high-quality academic studies.

Worlds into Words, Essays in the History of Words organizes worlds of words in 122 essays. Since words recreate the world, the essays recreate the world by treating creative words in eleven essays, the five elements in twenty-four essays, time in seven essays, the five senses and their organs in ten essays, and kin, kindness and character in ten essays, etc. Singly and all together, the essays bring together the conceptual frameworks of our world. Following words creating their worlds, the essays examine fundamental verbal images and their constellations of meaning so basic that we take them for granted. From simplicity to complexity, they point out the many-layered stories that arise from simple words.

By carefully analyzing the text-semantic features of Genesis 1-11, this book offers a quite new perspective on the primaeval history: not a story concerning the human being in relation to God, nor one about the human being who falls from bad to worse, but a rather different landscape seen from the Tower of Babel as lookout. In the second part of the book the methodological framework of this text-semantic study is presented.

The mythographer who has command of scholarly literature, the analytic ability and the lucid prose and the staying power.