"Speech is a way of tearing out a meaning from an undivided whole." Thus does Maurice Merleau-Ponty describe speech in this collection of his important writings on the philosophy of expression, composed during the last decade of his life.

Comics and other graphic narratives powerfully represent embodied experiences that are difficult to express in language. A group of authors from various countries and disciplines explore the unique capacity of graphic narratives to represent human embodiment as well as the relation of human bodies to the worlds they inhabit. Using works from illustrated scientific texts to contemporary comics across national traditions, we discover how the graphic narrative can shed new light on everyday expe...

This innovative introduction to literary studies takes 'the life of texts' as its overarching frame. It provides a conceptual and methodological toolbox for analysing novels, poems, and all sorts of other texts as they circulate in oral, print, and digital form. It shows how texts inspire each other, and how stories migrate across media. It explains why literature has been interpreted in different ways across time. Finally, it asks why some texts fascinate people so much that they are reprodu...

Fiction has a major social impact, not least because it co-shapes the image that society has of various social groups. Drawing on a collection of 170 contemporary Dutch-language novels, Character Constellations presents a range of data-driven, statistical models to study depictions of characters in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, class, age, sexuality, and other identity categories. Incorporating the tools of network analysis, each chapter highlights an aspect of fictional social networks t...

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...

'Naming and Necessity' has had a great and increasing influence. It redirected philosophical attention to neglected questions of natural and metaphysical necessity and to the connections between these and theories of naming, and of identity.