Foreign Language Study

The sixteen short stories in this anthology demonstrate the scope of the modern Italian narrative between 1930 and 1960. To this end, the collection contains writings by both established writers, such as moravia, Vittorini, Pavese and Pasolini, as well as by lesser-known figures such as Santucci and Daví.

The anthology aims to provide sixth-form and university students of Italian with high-quality and stimulating reading material, representing a range of styles and themes. The Italian text is accompanied by a comprehensive critical introduction in English and notes to clarify difficult points of language and style and to explain cultural and topographical allusions. An extensive vocabulary supports the reading and suggestions for further reading are offered.

The most complete guide available to the correct pronunciation of German for native English speakers. Revised and updated, a new feature for this edition is that the discussion of English-speaking learners' pronunciation problems has been extended to include American learners, reflecting the worldwide usage of the first volume. Each chapter deals with a separate aspect of the problems of modern German pronunciation; vowels, consonants, stress and intonation, and the reduced ('weak') forms of conversational pronunciation. Comprehensively illustrated with clear pronunciation and intonation diagrams emphasising common problems experienced when learning German. The Manchester University Press website also gives readers access to nineteen audio files which complement the content of the book, providing examples of pronunciation, stress and intonation, and listening exercises.

This groundbreaking book is about what ‘popular culture’ means in France, and how the term’s shifting meanings have been negotiated and contested. It represents the first theoretically informed study of the way that popular culture is lived, imagined, fought over and negotiated in modern and contemporary France.

It covers a wide range of overarching concerns: the roles of state policy, the market, political ideologies, changing social contexts and new technologies in the construction of the popular. But it also provides a set of specific case studies showing how popular songs, stories, films, TV programmes and language styles have become indispensable elements of ‘culture’ in France. Deploying yet also rethinking a ‘Cultural Studies’ approach to the popular, the book therefore challenges dominant views of what French culture really means today.

This special issue of the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library is devoted to the Aldine edition of the Ancient Greek epistolographers. Published in Venice in 1499 by Aldus Manutius, the Aldine edition was the first printed edition of most of the thirty-six Greek letter collections that it contains. As such, it embodies the intersection between the medieval epistolary anthologies that predated it and the printed editions of Greek epistolographic collections that followed, which were primarily based on its text. In recent decades, the Aldien edition has been the subject of important works, which have sought to analyse its contents and sources. This issue explores the Aldine edition from three perspectives: its relationship to the epistolary collections found in medieval manuscripts, its relationship to the printed editions that followed it and its legacy and value for the modern scholar studying Ancient Greek epistolography.