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.

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

Gutenberg, simply put, helped found the Modern Age.".

Demonstrates that the Oxford English Dictionary is an international product in both its content and its making.

Did you know that ‘Almost’ is the longest word in the English language with all of its letters in alphabetical order ? Or that ‘Stewardesses’ is the longest word you can type solely with your left hand? Or that fireflies aren’t actually flies, they’re beetles? From information about words and their uses, to useful lists of things you never knew had names, palindromes, famous lines from literature and film, bizarre test answers and more, The Weird World of Words is bursting with truly oddball facts about words and language—and will have you hooked from the very first page.

Encompassing several genres of literary composition, this up-beat, multi-cultural anthology provides an integrated curriculum of contemporary American women writers from diverse backgrounds whose works have recently emerged or made an impact on American literature in the last several decades. Juxtaposing the works of emerging writers with those of American classics, this book comes organized into eight thematic sections - language, family, and multicultural histories, transformation, music/spirituality, work, love, and happiness. It includes a variety of genres in each section - fiction, memoirs, essays, poetry, drama - moving from one to another with ease and a sense of discovery. Presenting an original interview at the end of each section with a distinguished author, it provides clearly and concisely written headnotes for each section. Spanning a broad historical range, from Margaret Walker (1915) to the present day, it includes brief biographies for each author, along with contextual notes for each reading. For professors of American literature and/or women's studies; librarians.

Who knew that the great country of Canada is named for a mistake? How about "bedswerver," the best Elizabethan insult to hurl at a cheating boyfriend? By exploring the delightful back stories of the 250 words in Wordcatcher, readers are lured by language and entangled in etymologies. Author Phil Cousineau takes us on a tour into the obscure territory of word origins with great erudition and endearing curiosity. The English poet W. H. Auden was once asked to teach a poetry class, and when 200 students applied to study with him, he only had room for 20 of them. When asked how he chose his students, he said he picked the ones who actually loved words. So too, with this book — it takes a special wordcatcher to create a treasure chest of remarkable words and their origins, and any word lover will relish the stories that Cousineau has discovered.