2024 collection (82 titles)

Linguistic, Literary, and Cultural Diversity in a Global Perspective is a captivating collection of research articles. This volume explores the intricate connections between language, culture, and identity across the globe.

An agenda-setting introduction by the editors and essays by Liliana Sikorska and Shin-ichi Morimoto establish the scope and stakes of the book as a whole. Chapters by Eri Ohashi, Ruth Karachi Benson Oji, Liliane Hodieb, Zheng Yang, Zhifang Li, and Wanwarang Softic investigate cultural diversity in film. Chapters by Mai Hussein, Wang Chutong, and Darja Zorc Maver offer insights into the linguistic and literary creativity of diasporic and immigrant communities, and a new global context for German literature is developed in chapters by Ekaterina Riabykh, Muharrem Kaplan, and Tomás Espino Barrera.

Appealing to scholars, researchers, and students, this interdisciplinary work sheds light on the complexities of our globalized world. Linguistic, Literary, and Cultural Diversity in a Global Perspective is a valuable addition to the field, offering fresh perspectives on language, culture, and identity.

The textual heritage of Medieval Latin is one of the greatest reservoirs of human culture. Repertories list more than 16,000 authors from about 20 modern countries. Until now, there has been no introduction to this world in its full geographical extension. Forty contributors fill this gap by adopting a new perspective, making available to specialists (but also to the interested public) new materials and insights. The project presents an overview of Medieval (and post-medieval) Latin Literatures as a global phenomenon including both Europe and extra-European regions. It serves as an introduction to medieval Latin's complex and multi-layered culture, whose attraction has been underestimated until now. Traditional overviews mostly flatten specificities, yet in many countries medieval Latin literature is still studied with reference to the local history. Thus the first section presents 20 regional surveys, including chapters on authors and works of Latin Literature in Eastern, Central and Northern Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the Americas. Subsequent chapters highlight shared patterns of circulation, adaptation, and exchange, and underline the appeal of medieval intermediality, as evidenced in manuscripts, maps, scientific treatises and iconotexts, and its performativity in narrations, theatre, sermons and music. The last section deals with literary “interfaces,” that is motifs or characters that exemplify the double-sided or the long-term transformations of medieval Latin mythologemes in vernacular culture, both early modern and modern, such as the legends about King Arthur, Faust, and Hamlet.

Language Change in the 20th Century: Exploring micro-diachronic evolutions in Romance languages examines the distinctive features that set the study of the 20th century apart from preceding periods. With a primary focus on Romance languages, including Spanish, Italian, French, and Portuguese, the book advocates for the adoption of innovative methodologies to enhance the nuanced retrieval of research data: the use of speaker’s attitudes questionnaires, apparent time constructions, and S-curves. Additionally, new materials are addressed as diachronic data sources: mass-media recordings from radio and TV, colloquial conversations, and sociolinguistic corpora. Results focus on the evolution of discourse markers, address terms, as well as on the influence of specific processes such as colloquialization or external mechanisms on the language changes developed during this period. In sum, the 20th century is presented in this book as a new strand in diachronic studies, rather than another time span.