Search results for ""verlag peter lang""

This is a social history of refugees escaping Hungary after the Bolshevik-type revolution of 1919, the ensuing counterrevolution, and the rise of anti-Semitism. Largely Jewish and German before World War I, the Hungarian middle class was torn by the disastrous war, the partitioning of Hungary in the Treaty of Trianon, and the numerus clausus act XXV in 1920 that seriously curtailed the number of Jews admitted to higher education. Hungary’s outstanding future professionals, whether Jewish, Liberal or Socialist, felt compelled to leave the country and head to German-speaking universities in Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Germany. When Hitler came to power, these exiles were to flee again, many on the fringes of the huge German emigration. Emotionally prepared by their earlier threatening experiences in Hungary, they were quick to recognize the need to uproot themselves again. Many fled to the United States where their double exile catalyzed the USA into an active enemy of Nazi Germany and stimulated the transplantation of European modernism into American art and music. To their surprise, the refugees also encountered anti-Semitism in the USA. The book is based on extensive archival work in the USA and Germany.

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Development efforts will remain frustrated so long as corrupt leaders continue to steal their countries’ wealth and dispose of these ill-gotten gains in foreign jurisdictions. The prevention of such looting, and the recovery of the stolen assets are thus critical development issues and a cornerstone of the United Nations Convention against Corruption (2003) (UNCAC). However, to date experience with asset recovery is limited, and a number of legal and other obstacles continue to impede progress. This is the first comprehensive work on asset recovery, written by renowned practitioners and academics representing different legal systems and countries, all of whom have extensive experience in the asset recovery field. The authors notably discuss the ‘success stories’ of the past (the recovery of the assets of Sani Abacha, Ferdinand Marcos and Vladimiro Montesinos) and the concrete challenges for the future with regard to search, seizure, confiscation and repatriation of stolen assets. The book also provides perspectives on the role of technical assistance and donors in asset recovery and the likely impact of the UNCAC.

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This volume is made up of 17 chapters which have developed out of papers and workshop sessions presented at the event entitled «Corpora: Seminar and Workshops», held at the University of Padua, March 29-31, 2007. It maintains the straightforward, practical approach which characterized that event, meant as an introduction to the use of corpora even for novices. At the same time it goes into a wide range of different applications for corpora in language teaching and language research in higher education. One of these involves the creation and use of learner corpora. Another application involves corpus-assisted research into political discourse in the media. Language for special purposes is also focussed on as a research topic, an academic discipline, and language to be translated. Multimodal corpora are also considered. Proposals are made for corpus-based research into the language of films, and into translation (and mediation) universals. A corpus-based study of text complexity in reading tests is also presented. Large-scale corpora commercially available are also discussed. An online module for translator training is presented, as is an Internet-accessible corpus of Old English poetry.

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Following on from Patricia Anne Odber de Baubeta’s The Anthology in Portugal: A New Approach to the History of Portuguese Literature (2007), these new essays explore further the issues of reception, translation and canonicity. The three authors have produced complementary studies that focus on the role of anthologies in promoting international literary exchange, evaluate the relationship between the literary canon and literature at the margins, and flag up the importance of cover art in conditioning reader expectations. The first part of the book examines both collections of translated short stories considered suitable for children, even if originally written for an adult readership, and, in contrast, high-quality anthologies for older readers, produced in the context of a transnational publishing franchise. The second section offers a thorough analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s reception in Portugal, including where, how and by whom he was disseminated. The history of Poe in Portuguese also sheds valuable light on the broader history of translation and translation anthologies in Portugal. The final part of the volume charts mystery and detective stories selected and translated for Portuguese anthologies and magazines by the leading cultural mediators of the 1940s and 1950s, with an assessment of their contribution to literature in Portugal.

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The author sets out to examine migration movements to Australia and the role of successive immigration legislation: from the notorious White Australia Policy through to the contemporary multicultural agenda. Her detailed case study sheds new light on the experiences of Polish migrants of the 1980s and their children in Melbourne. The story of successive waves of migration – particularly following the Second World War – and the influence of these on multicultural Australia provide the context of this study. Of particular interest is the relationship between the policy of multiculturalism and language maintenance among first generation Polish migrants and their children (the second generation). In her empirical study of language maintenance, the author analyses ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors for migration from Poland to Australia. She examines the costs of migration; Polish migrants’ experiences of Australia’s multicultural policy; an evaluation of parents’ migration by their children; re-migration to Poland; interaction between Polish migrants and Australian-born people; and the influence of domains such as the home, institutions of learning, the Polish Catholic Church, the media and other organisations and spheres of Polish cultural activity.

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Michel Houellebecq is a French author whose profile in the English-speaking world is unusually high. He is an author who has put the humour back into the Absurd, without losing any of the awareness of the bleakness of the human condition. Undoubtedly one of the most trenchant satirists of our time, he deflates the projected utopias that we imagine protect us from the ills that beset us. More than many other novelists, his work is a reflection of the social and economic reality of life in a post-industrial society. Houellebecq shows a world of violence and tension, a world where people find it hard to be at ease, so that life becomes a process of disease. This book foregrounds Houellebecq’s scrutiny of our various attempts to confront and transcend the fundamental reality of the human condition, in particular the horror of death.

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