Boredom and melancholy in the experience of reading.

Contemporary graphic novels show an interesting shift from the extraordinary to the ordinary in slice-of-life stories in which nothing happens. Present-day graphic accounts are inhabited by melancholic characters whining about the lack of meaning in life. This book examines this intriguing transition and brings a historical, aesthetical and narratological approach to comics in which boredom is not only a topic, but also awakens a deliberate...

The analysis of translated texts and investigations into the cognitive mechanisms involved in the process of translation have been at the core of translation studies so far. Yet Personality Matters ventures into the previously uncharted territories by bringing the translator’s inherent psychological and cognitive features into the limelight. Combining psychology and translation studies, this monograph looks into the role of the translator’s psychological features in self-revision, the mai...

Countless literary endeavours by ‘new Germans’ have come into the spotlight of academic research since the turn of the 21st century. Yet ‘minority writing’ and its distinctive renegotiation of traditional concepts of cultural identity are far from a recent phenomenon in German literature. More than a hundred years ago, German-Jewish writers put a clear stamp on German modernism and were intensely engaged in various cultural and political discourses on Jewish identity. This book is the...

Bringing together the work of an array of North American and European scholars, this collection highlights a previously unexamined area within global comics studies. It analyses comics from countries formerly behind the Iron Curtain like East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Ukraine, given their shared history of WWII and Communism. In addition to situating these graphic narratives in their national and subnational contexts, Comics of the New Europe pays part...

Postcolonialism and migration are major themes in contemporary French comics and have roots in the Algerian War (1954–62), anti-racist struggle, and mass migration to France. This volume studies comics from the formal dismantling of the French colonial empire in 1962 up to the present. French cartoonists of ethnic minority and immigrant heritage are a major focus, including Zeina Abirached (Lebanon), Yvan Alagbé (Benin), Baru (Italy), Enki Bilal (former Yugoslavia), Farid Boudjellal (Alger...