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This anthology brings together texts of significance for the conceptualisation of human dignity as a constitutional principle in Europe from the earliest evidence until 1965. It divides into four parts, respectively presenting the ancient, the medieval, the early modern and the modern sources. As far as human dignity is a constitutional principle, its history follows closely that of the constitution of states. However, various traditions of human dignity, understanding it to rely on features unrelated to the state, combine in the background to reflect the substance of the idea. The introductions to texts, chapters and parts narrates this history in relation to the texts presented to reflect it. The aim is to provide for scholars and students of law, philosophy, political science and theology a collection of texts documenting the history of the concept of human dignity that is sufficiently comprehensive to contextualise the various understandings of it. A structured bibliography accompanies the work.

This book breaks new ground in drawing on evolutionary psychology in support of advocacy for music education, and the presentation of innovative musical pedagogy. The book adopts the perspective that musical experience is the birthright of all human beings through the decisive role it played in the evolution of our species, the traces of which we carry in our genes. The author draws on scientific developments in acoustics, neuroscience, linguistics, archaeology and anthropology to examine theories that have emerged powerfully during the last twenty years and which argue for the significance of the practice of music as foundational to human culture. This position is examined in parallel with research into how children learn musically, and the role that creative decision making plays in this. A series of strategies is presented that explores collective creativity which draws on vocalisation, the use of gesture, and instinctive responses to harmony to develop musical imagination.

In the first half of the twentieth century, artists, intellectuals, writers, thinkers and patrons in Europe and the United States created a large number of artistic communities, circles, groups and movements with the aim of providing alternatives to the increasingly conflictual political and intellectual climate; the works and artistic practices of many of these groups were marked by an ethos of collaboration, based on a collective understanding of artistic production, and on the nurturing and exercise of sociability and conviviality. Collaboration, sociability, friendship and collective artistic efforts represented the utopian aspects of the radical experiments carried out by avant-garde and modernist artists; they were also the counterparts of the period’s obsession with the notion of genius and the cult of the artist. This book offers studies of under-researched (and often consciously provincial) avant-garde and modernist groups and authors. Their progressive aims are here read as particular forms of utopia based on the ethics and aesthetics of community.

The essays in this volume analyse the significance (and failures) of literary coteries as spaces of aesthetic and political freedom. They explore the internationalist and interdisciplinary practices of the Porza Group, the abstrakten hannover and the anthroposophical group Aenigma; the utopian efforts of the artists’ communities at Dornach (Switzerland) and Farley Farm, in England; the political and aesthetic implications of collaborative practices of cultural mediation, criticism and translation within the Bloomsbury group, the «Young American Critics», and of single individuals in relation to networks and avant-garde coteries, such as Mina Loy, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Djuna Barnes. The volume offers an evaluation of the roots and ethos of sociability in the Enlightenment, as the basis of modernist utopias of community; it also reflects on the problematic notion of individual authorship within artistic groups, as in the case of the early-modernist Finnish author Algot Untola, who created around forty fictitious author-names.

Die vorliegende Abhandlung stellt eine Analyse von ausgewählten Werken Arno Surminskis dar, wobei den Gegenstand der Erwägungen die deutsche Geschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts bildet, genau gesagt solche Themen wie Ostpreußen und dessen vermeintliche Idealisierung, der Erste Weltkrieg, Paul von Hindenburg, der Nationalsozialismus, der Zweite Weltkrieg, Flucht, Verschleppung und Vertreibung, Integrationsprobleme der Flüchtlinge/der Vertriebenen in der neuen Heimat oder die deutsch-deutsche Teilung. Die Romane und die publizistischen Texte von Arno Surminski werden den Werken anderer Schriftsteller gegenübergestellt wie auch mit historischen Publikationen verglichen. Dieses Buch ist eine der wenigen Monographien, die der Schriftstellerei von Arno Surminski auf den Grund gehen.

L'éthique des affaires est mise en œuvre par un ensemble des règles, codes ou principes qui orientent les décisions des entreprises vers plus de morale et de transparence. La question de l’éthique des affaires dans le secteur bancaire est d'autant plus pertinente que la crise qui frappe les économies nationales et l'économie mondiale est largement attribuée à l'irresponsabilité de la sphère financière.

L'auteur, par une enquête minutieuse au sein des milieux financiers, cherche à repérer les types d’éthique (pour autant que l’éthique existe explicitement au sein des banques) qui s'appliquent dans les organisations, les formes qu'elle prend, les initiateurs des mesures qui s'y associent, ainsi que les manières dont l'éthique est pensée d’une part et gérée d’autre part.

L’objectif de l’ouvrage est d’éclairer, voire de comprendre, l’attitude et le comportement des banques vis-à-vis de l’éthique　: entre dynamisme et pragmatisme, en passant par l’opportunisme, entre formalisation institutionnelle et adaptation à la complexité des situations, entre responsabilité attribuée et responsabilité distribuée.

Les historiens furent parmi les premiers à le souligner : à la fin du XIX^e siècle et au début du XX^e siècle, l’influence du nationalisme – ou des nationalismes – ne repose pas seulement, voire pas prioritairement, sur la force de ses idées. Cette influence paraît s’appuyer sur « un sens de la formule, de la métaphore, de l’évocation » davantage que sur la « théorie » (Michel Winock à propos du nationalisme barrésien), ou, pour reprendre une dichotomie qui a durablement structuré le champ intellectuel depuis le milieu du XIX^e siècle, dans la diffusion des doctrines nationalistes, l’efficacité du style l’aurait souvent emporté sur celle des idées – en littérature a fortiori.

Ce sont ces enjeux idéologiques du style littéraire, mais aussi ceux des imaginaires linguistiques et stylistiques afférents, que les contributions ici rassemblées se proposent d’expliciter, à partir d’un corpus littéraire narratif, essayistique, voire poétique, composé tout à la fois des œuvres des chantres du nationalisme (Maurice Barrès, Charles Maurras), de romans qui reflètent des idées et des valeurs proches du nationalisme (tels ceux écrits par Henry Bordeaux, René Bazin ou Ernest Psichari), d’essais ou de pamphlets de Paul Déroulède et Édouard Drumont, ou encore d’articles critiques et de poèmes d’orientation nationaliste.

Ce volume, qui rassemble les communications prononcées lors du colloque organisé les 28 et 29 juin 2018 à l’Université du Luxembourg, propose ainsi de réfléchir aux liens entre langue, style et idéologies nationalistes en littérature au tournant des XIX^e-XX^e siècles.

This book explores the ways in which Australian Indigenous filmmakers, performers and writers work within their Indigenous communities to tell the stories of early Indigenous resistance leaders who fought against British invaders and settlers, thus keeping their legacies alive and connected to community in the present. It offers the first comprehensive and trans-disciplinary analysis of how the stories of Pemulwuy, Jandamarra and Yagan (Bidjigal, Bunuba and Noongar freedom fighters, respectively) have been retold in the past forty years across different media. Combining textual and historical analysis with original interviews with Indigenous cultural producers, it foregrounds the multimodal nature of Indigenous storytelling and the dynamic relationship of these stories to reclamations of sovereignty in the present. It adds a significant new chapter to the study of Indigenous history-making as political action, while modelling a new approach to stories of frontier resistance leaders and providing a greater understanding of how the decolonizing power of Indigenous screen, stage and text production connects past, present and future acts of resistance.

In the postcolonial reassessment of history, the themes of colonialism, decolonisation and individual and collective memory have always been intertwined, but it is only recently that the transcultural turn in memory studies has enabled proper dialogue between memory studies and postcolonial studies. This volume explores the synergies and tensions between memory studies and postcolonial studies across literatures and media from Europe, Africa and the Americas, and intersections with Asia. It makes a unique contribution to this growing international and interdisciplinary field by considering an unprecedented range of languages and sources that promotes dialogue across comparative literature, English and American studies, media studies, history and art history, and modern languages (French, German, Greek, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian-Croatian, Spanish).

Combining theoretical discussion with innovative case studies, the chapters consider various postcolonial politics of memory (with a focus on Africa); diasporic, traumatic and «multidirectional memory» (M. Rothberg) in postcolonial perspective; performative and linguistic aspects of postcolonial memory; and transcultural memoryscapes ranging from the Black Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, from overseas colonialism to the intra-European legacies of Habsburg, Ottoman and Russian/Soviet imperialism. This far-reaching enquiry promotes comparative postcolonial studies as a means of creating more integrated frames of reference for research and teaching on the interface between memory and postcolonialism.

Luigi Pirandello’s first novel L’esclusa, completed in its earliest form in 1893, straddles two literary worlds. On the one hand, it is clearly rooted in the late nineteenth-century realist mode, especially that of Italian verismo. On the other, Pirandello employs a style and an approach to narrative that anticipate both the theory of writing he would later lay out in his long essay L’umorismo [On Humour] (1908), and the kinds of experimental writing that one associates with the author’s later work and with early twentieth-century modernism in general. Examining the novel in light of its relationship to these two worlds not only gives readers insight into the trajectory of Pirandello’s work as he developed as a writer, but also marks it as an example of the broader shift towards modernism that was already beginning to be made manifest in the works of novelists across Europe.

This book provides a new critical evaluation of L’esclusa, linking it explicitly to the theoretical principles aligned with Pirandello’s later output and with early twentieth-century literary modernism in general. L’esclusa and Pirandello’s other early works of fiction have too long been overlooked, particularly by scholars working in English. The aim of this book is not only to connect L’esclusa to Pirandello’s later, better-known writing, and to literary modernism, but also to bring this forward-looking novel to the attention of readers in the English-speaking world.

Muhammad al-Tabari’s History, written about 300 years after the establishment of Islam, is one of the religion’s most important commentaries. It offers important insights into the early development of Islam, not so much for its history as for the ways it was interpreted and understood. Through application of modern historiographical analysis and scriptural exegesis, the book explores the space between factual history and interpretive history, or histoire. The focus is especially on the ways in which al-Tabari himself understood and interpreted Qur’anic evidence, employing it not so much for literal as for political purposes. In this sense, his work is best understood not as a reliable history in the modern sense but as a politically-inspired commentary. Granted that his work has often been relied on for Islam’s historical claims, this book offers important new insights into the ways in which power and politics were shaping interpretations in its first three hundred years.