What does the modern era look like to those labeled “not modern” or “traditional”? Refuting claims that their art was “old world” and “primitive,” African, Native, and Jewish American writers in the early twentieth century instead developed experimental strategies of self-representation that reshaped the very form of the novel itself. Uncovering the connections and confrontations among three ethnic groups not often read in relation to one another, Kent maps out the historical contexts that have shaped ethnic American writing in the Modernist era, a period of radical dislocation from homelands and increased migration for these three ethnic groups. Rather than focus on the ways others have represented these groups, Kent restores the voices of these multicultural writers to the debate about what it means to be modern.

 

This book focuses on the increase of urban multilingualism in Europe as a consequence of processes of migration and minorisation. It offers multidisciplinary, crossnational and crosslinguistic perspectives on immigrant minority languages at home and in school in six major multicultural cities across Europe. From North to South these cities are Gцteborg (Sweden), Hamburg (Germany), The Hague (The Netherlands), Brussels (Belgium), Lyon (France) and Madrid (Spain). In each of these cities, with the exception of bilingual Brussels, either a Germanic or a Romance state language has a dominant status in public life. This book is the outcome of the Multilingual Cities Project, a study based on large-scale empirical findings and carried out under the auspices of the European Cultural Foundation.

 

Edited by Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska

With the assistance of Anke Brouwers, Vanessa Joosen, Nathan Van Camp, Dirk Van Hulle, Katrien Vloeberghs and Bjцrn Thor Vilhjбlmsson

Modernism has constituted one of the most prominent fields of literary studies for decades. While it was perhaps temporarily overshadowed by postmodernism, recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in modernism on both sides of the Atlantic. These volumes respond to a need for a collective and multifarious view of literary modernism in various genres, locations, and languages. Asking and responding to a wealth of theoretical, aesthetic, and historical questions, 65 scholars from several countries test the usefulness of the concept of modernism as they probe a variety of contexts, from individual texts to national literatures, from specific critical issues to broad cross-cultural concerns. While the chief emphasis of these volumes is on literary modernism, literature is seen as entering into diverse cultural and social contexts. These range from inter-art conjunctions to philosophical, environmental, urban, and political domains, including issues of race and space, gender and fashion, popular culture and trauma, science and exile, ­all of which have an urgent bearing on the poetics of modernity.

"Radioactivity is like a clock that never needs adjusting," writes Doug Macdougall. "It would be hard to design a more reliable timekeeper." In Nature's Clocks, Macdougall tells how scientists who were seeking to understand the past arrived at the ingenious techniques they now use to determine the age of objects and organisms. By examining radiocarbon (C-14) dating--the best known of these methods--and several other techniques that geologists use to decode the distant past, Macdougall unwraps the last century's advances, explaining how they reveal the age of our fossil ancestors such as "Lucy," the timing of the dinosaurs' extinction, and the precise ages of tiny mineral grains that date from the beginning of the earth's history. In lively and accessible prose, he describes how the science of geochronology has developed and flourished. Relating these advances through the stories of the scientists themselves--James Hutton, William Smith, Arthur Holmes, Ernest Rutherford, Willard Libby, and Clair Patterson--Macdougall shows how they used ingenuity and inspiration to construct one of modern science's most significant accomplishments: a timescale for the earth's evolution and human prehistory.

This book contains over sixty of the best loved English nursery rhymes, arranged according to themes and beautifully illustrated in full colour.

A special section at the back of the book includes the music for the songs as well as notes for the parents and teachers. These give suggestions on how to use the rhymes with their children, at home and in the classroom.