Tom Cheesman Knihy

Francis James Child (1825-1896) was to the traditional balladry of the English-speaking world what the Brothers Grimm were to fairytales. His edition of The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882-1898) has never been superseded: it is an invaluable resource for scholars in many disciplines, as well as for singers, poets and other writers. Marking the centenary of both the scholar and his work, this volume presents authoritative new research on his editorial practice, his correspondence with key contributors in the British Isles, and the heirs to the ballad research tradition which he established. Other groups of essays debate the aesthetic distinctiveness of the «Child ballads» and interpret them in relation to wide-ranging historical and contemporary cultural contexts. Up-to-date guides to bibliographic, archival and online research resources, and a select discography, are provided for the benefit of students and others approaching traditional narrative song for the first time.

Feridun Zaimoglu made a spectacular entrance onto the German cultural scene in 1995 with Kanak Sprak: a volume of incendiary texts based on interviews with disaffected Turkish German youths, using an invented, stylized literary language, a hybrid of multiple varieties of German with a hip hop beat. A prolific and acclaimed novelist, dramatist, newspaper columnist, visual artist and live performer, Zaimoglu has remained in the public eye through controversy and reinvention. His more recent work appropriates German literary traditions in radically new ways, adapting Romantic styles, narrative forms and motifs to postmodern conditions. This volume features the suppressed original first chapter of Leyla, Zaimoglu’s critically and commercially most successful novel, first published in 2006, as well as an extensive interview with the author. Critical essays on his writing by major scholars in the field cover issues of gender, language and power, the politics of ethnicity, religion, Romanticism and anti-modernism, and the challenges of translating his work. This is the first volume of criticism in any language dedicated to Zaimoglu’s literary work.

Tom Cheesman focuses on Turkish German writers' perspectives on cosmopolitan ideals and aspirations, ranging from glib affirmation to cynical transgression and melancholy nihilism.

This book introduces anglophone readers to the ballad picture show, a cultural institution which anticipated both the cinema and the tabloid press. Sensationalist tales of murder and miracles, both performed and sold as lurid chapbooks.