Ghosts move freely, but often unnoticed, through the epics and poems published in early modern France. In the works of Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585), the most influential French poet of the sixteenth century, ghosts stand at the intersection of national identity, poetics and the nature of the imagination. Before the 'spectres' studied by demonologists of the late sixteenth-century, Ronsard crafted the category of the idole to describe all sorts of apparitions inspired from the Homeric epic.

These striking idoles were debated and imitated by other writers of the period who thought that the creation of a French national identity rested on the shoulders of poets. Often used for comical effects rather than to incite fear, these self-reflexive ghosts thus take on a political meaning and ironize royal mythography. In this literary study, Alice Roullière defines the specificity of Ronsardian ghosts as they travel from genre to genre, author to author to better disrupt political and poetic narratives of the period.

Alice Roullière is an early career research and teaching fellow at St John's College, Oxford, where she teaches early modern French literature.

Italo Calvino (1923-85) travelled to Japan in the autumn of 1976. Thereafter, his work shows an increasing fascination with Japanese literature and Zen Buddhism, even as he adds Japanese works to the bookshelves of his library in Rome. This is the first study to restore to the author's writing the dynamics of East-West dialogues, addressing Japanese gardens and temples, but also literary and artistic expressions, as the spaces through which Calvino developed a landmark feature of his distinctive cultural ecology: a renewed awareness of the interdependency between human and other-than-human forms of life and communication.

Claudia Dellacasa is Lecturer in Italian at the University of Glasgow.

What is an image? Literary imagery is often understood as figurative speech. But images can also be visual in artworks. They can be abstract, too, if mankind is understood as an image of God. Similarly, Plato often speaks of ideas and forms in visual terms. The question of the image prompted debates in philosophy, theology, and art history for many centuries, which had a profound impact upon two of the twentieth century's most significant European poets: the German-Jewish poet Paul Celan (1920-1970) and French-Jewish poet André du Bouchet (1924-2001). Through a wide-ranging comparative analysis of these two poets' work, this study proposes a new understanding of the role of the image in poetry, as well as a new way of reading the two writers' oeuvres.

Julian Johannes Immanuel Koch is a Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Copenhagen.

Christian Petzold (b. 1960) is arguably the most prominent filmmaker working in Germany today, with a growing international reputation for his carefully fashioned narrative studies of identity and relationships. Running through the core of his films is the theme of work, in various forms - manual, intellectual, psychological, emotional, ethical, social, political, economic and aesthetic. Focusing on close reading of key scenes, Stephan Hilpert and Andrew J. Webber demonstrate the crucial role of this theme in his filmmaking. Each chapter engages with particular aspects or modes of work, as evidenced by specific films, across the span of the director's career. The analysis of Petzold's own ways of working - including the crucial forms of collaboration that he has undertaken - is supported by the inclusion of material drawn from two interviews conducted with the director around the themes of the volume.

Stephan Hilpert is a filmmaker and Professor of Film and Television at Macromedia University, Berlin. Andrew J. Webber FBA is Professor of Modern German and Com-parative Culture at the University of Cambridge.

Crossings is a gathering of essays whose preoccupations converge in the idea that the workings of poetry and trans-lation are closely related. This is especially true in the work of Hölderlin, in whose poems the kinship is coupled with a way of reading the world and an attentiveness to transitions of all kinds: what can come over to us from the past, and what will pass on from us to posterity? What are the consequences for poetry if the present moment is understood as a perpetual transition? Translation can be a means of testing this understanding, and poetry perhaps negotiates the crossing itself. Later writers like Philippe Jaccottet, who thought of the poet's work as a work of translation, continue this line: the poem becomes a form of attention and, as such, a thing permeable to an elsewhere. Touching on bird-flight and sonnets, aqueducts and metamorphosis, what these readings have in common is a fidelity to the movement of particular poems.

Charlie Louth is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the Queen's College, University of Oxford.

Often regarded as a small and homogeneous country, modern Portugal has frequently displayed clear regional tensions, on several 'axes': between its capital, Lisbon, and more neglected cities and towns; between its developed coastline and its (noticeably declining) inland villages; between the relatively conservative small-holding communities of the North and the politically radical tenant farmers of the South, amongst others. Examining twentieth-century novelists' treatment of such geographical precepts leads one to ponder: what relationships exist between ideology and (regional) spaces? Through analysis of narrative fiction, how can one better comprehend the complex geographical grievances and identity politics that are increasingly characterising ideo-logical discourses across Western nations? The novels of Aquilino Ribeiro (1885-1963), Agustina Bessa-Luís (1922-2019), Lídia Jorge (1946-) and José Saramago (1922-2010) all have their part to play, in this quest for greater understanding of Portuguese regionalisms and resistances.

Peter Haysom-Rodríguez is a Lecturer in Modern Languages at the University of Leeds. He holds a Ph.D. in Portuguese & Lusophone Studies from the University of Nottingham.

Chantal Akerman was one of the most significant directors of our times. A radical innovator of cinematic forms, she was at the forefront of feminist and women's filmmaking. In the 1990s, she developed an important installation practice and began to experiment with self-writing.

Focusing on Akerman's works of the last two decades, a period during which she diversified her creative practice, this collection traces her artistic trajectory across different media. From her documentaries 'bordering on fiction' to her final installation, NOW, the volume elucidates the thematic and aesthetic concerns of the later works, placing particular emphasis on self-portraiture, the exploration of intimacy, and the treatment of trauma, memory and exile. It also attends to the aural and visual textures that underpin her art. Drawing on a wide range of theoretical approaches as well as engaging more creatively with Akerman's work, the essays provide a new optic for understanding this deeply personal, prescient oeuvre.

Marion Schmid is Professor of French Literature and Film at the University of Edinburgh. Emma Wilson is Professor of French Literature and the Visual Arts at the University of Cambridge.

Translation can be seen as producing a text in one language that will count as equivalent to a text in another. It can also be seen as a release of multiple signifying possibilities, an opening of the source text to Language in all its plurality. The first view is underpinned by the regime of European standard languages which can be lined up in bilingual dictionaries, by the technology of the printed book, and by the need for regulated communication in political, academic and legal contexts. The second view is most at home in multilingual cultures, in circumstances where language is not standardised (e.g., minority and dialectal communities, and oral cultures), in the fluidity of electronic text, and in literature. The first view sees translation as a channel; the second as a prism.

This volume explores prismatic modes of translation in ancient Egypt, contemporary Taiwan, twentieth-century Hungary, early modern India, and elsewhere. It gives attention to experimental literary writing, to the politics of language, to the practices of scholarship, and to the multiplying possibilities created by digital media. It charts the recent growth of prismatic modes in anglophone literary translation and translational literature; and it offers a new theorisation of the phenomenon and its agonistic relation to the 'channel' view. Prismatic Translation is an essential intervention in a rapidly changing field.

Imbued with a pulsating energy that emanates from the sun, Claude Lorrain's landscape draws on the interplay of light and darkness to effect a 'living whole' and evoke the symbolic. In a life-long conversation with Lorrain - recorded in texts as diverse as 'Amor as Landscape Painter', Faust, and the Doctrine of Colours - Goethe conducts an inquiry into the dialectics of nature and art, imitation and invention, subject and object. Goethe seeks to comprehend Lorrain by reenacting him in words, in ekphrastic mode, as an experience and an idea. The inquiry remains open-ended for landscape is a paradox: the real, the spiritual, and the affective meet without merging. This aesthetic discovery and visualization of nature as landscape is consonant with the attempt to grasp the world and our place in it. The three sister arts of poetry, painting, and horticulture serve as mirrors for Goethe's self-understanding as an artist, including his ambivalence vis-à-vis the English Garden as articulated, for instance, in the novel Elective Affinities.

Franz R. Kempf is Professor of German Studies at Bard College.

Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, the three crowns of Italian literature, dealt with literature, doctrine, and reality in distinct, yet also overlapping, ways. In this major collection of nineteen essays, Barański explores how they endeavoured to create and establish their authority and identity as writers, while developing new ideas about literature and its status in the world, and, especially in Dante's case, forging and legitimating new forms of writing. Each treated other authors, such as Guido Cavalcanti, or intellectuals, such as Epicurus, polemically and selectively as foils to their own self-portraits. Petrarch and Boccaccio had also to contend with Dante, and his extraordinary success as a 'modern' vernacular authority, though they employed very different strategies for doing so. Barański's close attention to the medieval context uniting these greatest of medieval writers is complemented by an equally close attention to the scholarly tradition on the questions addressed. To be a historian of literature also means being a historian of one's subject.

Zygmunt G. Barański is Serena Professor of Italian Emeritus at the University of Cambridge and Notre Dame Professor of Dante & Italian Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He has published extensively on Dante, on medieval Italian literature, on Dante's fourteenth- and twentieth-century reception, and on twentieth-century Italian literature, film, and culture. For many years he was senior editor of The Italianist, and currently holds the same position with Le tre corone.

From rubbery martyrs to wraith-like ascetics, and from pestilential dragons to troublesome giants, the bodies that fascinated audiences of saints' lives during the Middle Ages increasingly inform theoretical debates in medieval studies concerning corporeality. Saints and Monsters draws on notions of the 'sublime' and the 'abject' to explore the role played by these holy and unholy bodies in community formation. Examining a series of biographies of Sts Margaret, George, Honorat and Enimia - some of them previously unknown to scholarship - Huw Grange argues that the extraordinary bodies of medieval French and Occitan hagiography mutate in relation to a range of shifting historical, cultural and geographical imperatives.

Huw Grange is Junior Research Fellow in French at Jesus College, Oxford.

In 1935, 230 writers from 38 countries converged on Paris to consider ways of countering the fascist threat to culture. Held against a background of a rapidly changing political climate, the five-day congress attended by some of Europe's foremost writers -- Andr Gide, Andr Malraux, Bertolt Brecht, Heinrich Mann, Ilya Ehrenburg, Aldous Huxley, among others -- ultimately collapsed in a bitter standoff between Soviet and Western conceptions of freedom of expression, literature, and political engagement. Of all such congresses held in the 1930s, none better exemplified the interplay between history, politics, and literature. Writers' Block looks beneath the surface to expose the complex wiring that motivated participants. Clashing ideologies and personalities drive the narrative forward.

Jacob Boas is the author of a number of books on the Holocaust and teaches history at Linfield College (McMinville, Oregon, USA).

In her ever-evolving career, the legendary filmmaker Agn s Varda has gone from being a photographer at the Avignon festival in the late 1940s, through being a director celebrated at the Cannes festival (Cl o de 5 7, 1962), to her more ironic self-proclaimed status as a 'jeune artiste plasticienne'. She has recently staged mixed-media projects and exhibitions all over the world from Paris (2006) to Los Angeles (2013-14) and the latest 'tour de France' with JR (2015-16). Agn s Varda Unlimited: Image, Music, Media reconsiders the legacy and potential of Varda's radical tour de force cin matique, as seen in the 22-DVD 'definitive' Tout(e) Varda, and her enduring artistic presence. These essays discuss not just when, but also how and why, Varda's renewed artistic forms have ignited with such creative force, and have been so inspiring an influence. The volume concludes with two remarkable interviews: one with Varda herself, and another rare contribution from the leading actress of Cl o de 5 7, Corinne Marchand.

Marie-Claire Barnet is Senior Lecturer in French at Durham University.

This volume is the first to examine in parallel the ways in which twentieth- and twenty-first century Anglo-American Dante scholarship and Italian dantistica have studied key issues at the centre of the poet's oeuvre. It offers a critically and contextually informed overview that concentrates on the main trends, features, and specificities of both traditions, as well as their points of contact. Leading scholars discuss the history and development of the principal questions that characterize the present-day study of Dante and his writings - questions related to Dante's biography, his religious and political beliefs, his literary and doctrinal readings and knowledge, and the position of his writings in modern critical developments.

Film exhibition encompasses all the ways in which film texts are placed in front of audiences, and it has taken myriad, varied forms in Italy. For example, in the early days of cinema travelling projectionists exhibited films in urban centres and throughout the countryside, while in the 1920s and 1930s a network of Fascist youth groups actively circulated and screened films across Italy. As the twentieth century progressed, commercial exhibition was increasingly controlled by cinema chains, yet independent cinemas and film events remained vibrant. At the turn of the millennium, Italy's single-screen cinemas gave way to urban multiplexes, and more recently both have been challenged by online streaming and covid-19. The history of exhibition practice in Italy frames movie-going in political, economic, legal, sociological and architectural terms, and it provides a fascinating insight into cinema's enduring inextricability from wider issues of social space and cultural life.

Damien Pollard is Lecturer in Film at Northumbria University. Edward Bowen is Assistant Professor of Italian at the University of Kansas.

State and corporate violence has always been waged on material space. However, with the escalation of late-capitalist and neocolonial modes of extraction, incarceration, and bordering, these processes of spatial exploitation are accelerating and morphing. In this eloquent and wide-ranging study, Patrick Brian Smith examines how the documentary image is responding-aesthetically, discursively, and politically-to these transformations in spatial violence. Forging connections between a geographically disparate set of documentary works, Smith argues that over the past two decades we have seen an increasing number of experimental documentary works that are structured around radical interrogations of the spatial. How is it that a concentrated, durational, and temporal focus on diverse political spaces and sites of contestation and conflict helps to reveal the layers of spatial violence, exploitation, and injustice embedded within them?

Patrick Brian Smith is a University Fellow in the School of Arts, Media and Creative Technology at the University of Salford.

German literature from roughly 1750 to 1850 has a tradition of tragic drama unmatched by any other literature in that period. To an extent seldom recognized, this drama engages with political themes. Robertson traces these themes back to the thought of Machiavelli, its reception, and its frequent distortion by subsequent theorists, especially in the early modern concept of 'reason of state' and the nineteenth-century notion of Realpolitik. Writers from the Baroque dramatist Lohenstein via Goethe, Schiller and Kleist, through Nietzsche and Wagner and on down to Brecht and Hochhuth in the twentieth century employ the tragic dilemmas of history or mythology to exemplify the hard political choices we may also have to make in the present. Were the troubling decisions of Cleopatra, Elizabeth I, Wallenstein, and Pope Pius XII genuinely necessary? Were their machiavels and courtiers offering wise counsel, or cynical amorality?

Ritchie Robertson retired in 2021 as Schwarz-Taylor Professor of German at the University of Oxford. He is a Fellow of the British Academy. His recent books include the acclaimed intellectual history The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness, 1680-1790 (Penguin, 2020).

'If you're satisfied with yourself, beware of Döblin.' It was with this temptation for brave souls that Günter Grass closed his tribute on the tenth anniversary of the great modernist's death. Alfred Döblin is best known for his city masterpiece of 1929, Berlin Alexanderplatz. But the journey to the 'Alex' takes us along pathways both less familiar and every bit as intriguing. In the decades before his flight into exile in 1933, this medical doctor-cum-writer broke new ground both as an Expressionist storyteller and an author of experimental historical and science fiction. Not only that, but he made radical contributions to poetics, aesthetics and nature philosophy. The focus of this innovative study, one of the first of its kind in English, is a thorny and intractable relationship that perennially fascinated Döblin: that of nature and the self. Robert Craig shows how his eclectic works before 1933 traced out an evolving dialectic between the human and the natural, and between the subject and its forms and modes of embodiment. The constellations that emerged remain as illuminating as they are unsettling and discomfiting.

Robert Craig teaches German and English literary and cultural studies at the Otto-Friedrich-Universität in Bamberg.