Our Books

Ever since the Second World War, the movement of refugees as well as of those seeking better opportunities for work, for education, or a functional democracy, has dominated headlines, influenced political debates, and shaped elections and referenda. Growing nationalist sentiments and policies are increasingly defined against, and clash with, the free movement of people.

In light of these worldwide tensions, this volume explores aggressive and brutal dimensions of migration through literature, documentary films, feature films, and theater productions. Uncovering deep societal forces behind migratory violence, the contributions reveal that instances of structural and cultural violence are rooted in hidden, yet highly influential and destructive, ideologies. The authors also provide revelatory glimpses into how artistic productions and scholarly works might be themselves subverting or deconstructing structural and cultural violence against migrants.

Offering a critical yet compassionate examination of our culture heavily influenced by borders, exclusion, terrorism, and resilience, the book primarily serves literary and cultural studies scholars with new perspectives on the intersections of art with structuralist and deconstructivist approaches to migration-related violence but also offers a fresh look at borders and migration-related phenomena for those active in the social and political sciences.

ibidem Verlag, 2025 - ISBN 9783838217314

This volume is a long overdue contribution to the dynamic, but unevenly distributed study of fantasy and J.R.R. Tolkien’s legacy in Central Europe.　The essays move between and across theories of cultural and social history, reception, adaptation and audience studies,　and offer methodological reflections on the various cultural perceptions of Tolkien’s oeuvre and its impact on twenty-first century manifestations. They analyse how discourses about fantasy are produced and mediated, and how processes of re-mediation shape our understanding of the historical coordinates and local peculiarities of fantasy in general, and Tolkien in particular, all that in Central Europe in an age of global fandom. The collection examines the entanglement of fantasy and Central European political and cultural shifts across the past 50 years and traces the ways in which its haunting legacy permeates and subverts different modes and aesthetics across different domains from communist times through today’s media-saturated culture.

Routledge, 2023 - ISBN 9781032525563

"Should there be any doubts as to the relevance of Arthur Koestler’s fiction for the 21st century, the essays in this eminently accessible volume dispel them with a vengeance. Covering all the novels to have appeared in English, with an editor who commands an unrivalled knowledge of the secondary literature in different languages, and with contributors from an impressive variety of backgrounds, it displays a degree of coherence rare in a compilation. Indispensable reading for all with an interest in an indispensable writer."
(Howard Gaskill, University of Edinburgh)

Featuring a selection of brand new essays by a group of accomplished scholars, Arthur Koestler's Fiction and the Genre of the Novel covers all of Koestler's novels published in his lifetime, the first book to attempt this in English since Mark Levene's Arthur Koestler, published thirty-seven years ago. The team of contributors, with research backgrounds in history, political science, religious studies, law, linguistics and journalism besides literature, offers a truly multidisciplinary take on how Koestler's novels utilize, and at times transcend, the genre of the novel, and argues for their enduring relevance and appeal in the twenty-first century, inviting the reader to revisit and reassess them. With the topics of Koestler's novels including terrorism, massive migration, espionage, rape trauma, war trauma, the crisis of faith, propaganda, fake news and the role and responsibility of intellectuals in major international crises, as the volume aims to show, these texts are just as topical today, as they were at the time of their publication.

Lexington Books, 2021 - ISBN 978-1-7936-2225-9
Information at the Publisher's Website

The contributions collected in this volume compare the views of philosophers, literary and cultural theorists, and political philosophers, concerning what in recent years has become a much discussed issue: the Anthropocene. Although there are no longer any doubts about the reality of this new era, understood as the epoch of significant human impacts on the planet, a wide and controversial debate has developed around the use of this term and on the definition to be given to it. The Anthropocene cannot only be understood as the perpetuation of an anthropogenic and anthropocentric perspective, it can also give rise to a critical paradigm of inquiry into a series of problems such as climate and geological changes produced by humans. As Delio Salottolo states in his paper, “the complexity of the notion of Anthropocene, which can also be defined as a semi-empty signifier”, is like that “‘blind spot’ in the human eye that is ‘filled’ with the information that the brain acquires from what is around it” (infra, p. 84). The semi-empty dimension of this box is the most interesting and stimulating aspect of the Anthropocene, one that invites and stimulates us, sometimes even provocatively, to imagine different scenarios and horizons as alternatives to the present. The contributions collected here speak to this richness and breadth, and also to the “irritating” nature of this term, Anthropocene.

Mimesis Edizioni, 2020 - ISBN 9788857577609

This book is a collection of articles written by international scholars and dealing with passing from a textual and cultural perspective. All these explorations of a complex identity phenomenon that defies reductive dualities result in scholarly interrogations of societal arrangements. The texts under perusal belong to different historical periods and various communities. The novelty of this collection is that passing is viewed not only as a racial or gendered transformation, but also as a religious one. The book deals with passing either as a strategy that results in assimilation, melting, and merging, or as resistance and challenge against the whiteness-only-based identity politics.

Peter Lang, 2020 - ISBN 978-3-631-81264-8
Information at the Publisher's Website

"It is a valuable resource for students, scholars and readers interested in crime fiction [...] that achieves its goal of demonstrating that crime fiction should have a first-class status"
(Daisey Cowley, Clues: A Journal of Detection)

"an ambitious attempt to show that crime fiction has not abated during the past few decades but has occupied a central position in literature and other forms of media [...] anyone setting out to read Crime and Detection in Contemporary Culture will [...] recognize its merits, its engagement with the latest theoretical ideas, and enjoy its witty and informative way of sharing it all with the reader"
(Renáta Zsámba, Eger Journal of American Studies)

Crime and Detection in Contemporary Culture brings together contributions by a wide range of international authors, and attempts to reposition crime writing by directing attention to the ways in which it has always been a peculiar and key mode of channelling cultural imaginaries about violence, transgression and various instances of social pathology. While highlighting crime fiction's ability to constantly reinvent itself, its ubiquity and reliance on participation that make it, as a genre as well as a mode, so powerful and capable of mobilizing audiences more than any other form of genre fiction, the collection offers innovative approaches to recent manifestations both in literary fiction and across converging media that demonstrate how crime fiction as a critical paradigm becomes more and more conducive to (generic) subversion, transgression and hybridization.

The volume draws on the scholarly legacy of studying crime through the converging areas of history, literature, culture, gender and politics, and aims to constitute crime fiction as a mode which successfully channels social anxieties and ethical dilemmas both historically and in our present historic time when our sense of security has become eroded in relation to our identities. It is a venture in showing the centrality of the figuration of crime in modern culture, as well as a heavily structured analysis focusing on issues of genre, social and political aspects of the culture of crime, and media-specific problems of its representation.

Americana eBooks, 2018 - ISBN 978-6155423512
Information at the Publisher's Website

For the scholarly reader it is a truism that trade, in its widest sense (exchange, interchange, deal) is the basis of human society, it is part of the human interaction which is the very texture of society. The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss demonstrated in his seminal essay "The Elementary Structures of Kinship" that human society relies on the exchange of women by men.

But women are not only the passive object of this trade among men. They also try and often succeed in trading goods, ideas, and changing their subject position by getting the upper hand in this crucial exchange. Little attention has been given to genderizing the connection between trade and the British Enlightenment and to its subsequent influence on women’s history and/or literary or visual representations of women by women or men. The contributors in this collection focus on women as physical or symbolic traded objects, as subversive women trading in spite of cultural and social stereotypes, and as women empowered in the cultural, political, and social trade.

Peter Lang, 2017 - ISBN 978-3-631-71411-9
Information at the Publisher's Website

This volume showcases selected papers presented during the 9th International Conference of the Association of Czech Teachers of English.

The contributions are grouped into three sections: a) Focus on Selected Language Topics, b) Increasing Learner Autonomy and c) Innovative Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) ideas. Papers were carefully chosen in order to appeal to a broad audience. Consequently, there are articles which have a mainly theoretical bent and others which have a more practical leaning. Therefore, teachers, advanced students of English, language researchers, and, indeed, anyone engaged in the EFL profession will find this collection both educational and thought-provoking.

Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016 - ISBN 978-1-4438-9527-9
Information at the Publisher's Website

"This book offers a stimulating discussion of the spatial structures of the urban poems by E. E. Cummings, and Hawksmoor, the novel by Peter Ackroyd. [...] Whatever scholars do in the future regarding these texts, Cities of Saviors will provide a very useful, enriching starting point."
-- Eva M. Gómez-Jiménez, Spring: The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society

"Vernyik's analysis of city poems and the embodiment of the city in poems are well-written for the careful treatment and strong conclusions that Vernyik reaches. [...] perspectives from international critics like Vernyik are an important step forward for Cummings criticism."
-- Taimi Olsen, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Cities of Saviors is a short study of the urban spaces of E. E. Cummings' poetry and Peter Ackroyd's seminal novel, Hawksmoor. Although at first sight a comparison of these two authors might seem surprising, the analysis offered by this new book shows that such a reading can be revelatory for the understanding of both authors. Relying on close readings informed by the spatial theories of Mircea Eliade, Michel Foucault and Gaston Bachelard, it sheds light on a common understanding of space: one that is immersed in a dark sacrality. By doing so, it also radically reinterprets the oeuvre of both authors, in that it positions Cummings away from the accepted image of the neo-Romantic poet of transcendence and situates Ackroyd in the continuing tradition of (late) Modernism.

Americana eBooks, 2015 - ISBN 978-615-5423-11-6 (print), ISBN 978-615-5423-09-3 (Kindle), ISBN 978-615-5423-10-9 (epub)
Information at the Publisher's Website

This book is a contribution to research into the analysis of academic English. It focuses on concrete evidence of change in the syntactic structure of sentences and sentence complexity over a period of about a century. It analyses academic texts from the fields of psychology and economics. Unlike most current research into academic English which focuses on selective syntactic issues, this book offers analyses of stretches of continuous running texts and categorises every single explicitly expressed finite and non-finite predication which occurs in them. The detailed examination of these texts and especially the diachronic perspective which this study adopts reveal and pinpoint some discernible trends in the modes of expression of current academic English, which may remain unnoticed if the research focuses merely on selective issues. This book is intended mainly for professionals and students of linguistics, but it should also be of interest to anyone concerned with academic English, language change and corpus linguistics.

LAP Lambert Academic Publishing, 2011 - ISBN 978-3844333657
Information at the Publisher's Website

"[T]his collection of recent essays on E. E. Cummings' work is characterized by a stimulating variety of ideas [...] Each essay in the collection has its undeniable merits."
-- Zoltán Galamb
(Read the whole review here.)

Words Into Pictures: E. E. Cummings Art Across Borders is a collection of ten new essays on the American poet and artist E. E. Cummings (1894-1962). Bringing together the verbal and the visual, two forms of art traditionally considered to be distinct and separate, the volume invites the reader to examine fields in Cummings studies that have been neglected or under-researched. An artist who vigorously pursued painting and writing throughout his life, Cummings may be called the William Blake of American Modernism, a PoetAndPainter whose habitual genre-crossing renders his oeuvre a unique choice for multidisciplinary critical studies. The essays of this volume address the limits of the visual, linguistic, spatial, and political vison of the artist. Contributors to this volume include established as well as junior Cummings scholars from the U.S. and Europe, giving Words Into Pictures an international and authoritative flavour.

Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007 - ISBN 978-1847183354
Information at the Publisher's Website

An English-German couple spends their holiday in Oxford and meet International guests. The book provides an intensive training of listening comprehension, pronunciation and intonation, while home study lays a solid foundation for further language work. For complete beginners.

Langenscheidt, 2001 - ISBN 978-3526504252
Information at the Publisher's Website