MANY YEARS AGO in a different age and place, in a bookstore that carried English-language books in an upscale neighborhood of Ankara, I found a novel, titled Ali and Nino, by a certain Kurban Said, an author I had never heard of. The name was undeniably one of someone from the Middle East. Thus, I was surprised to find out that the book was translated from the original German. Kurban Said was obviously a pseudonym, but whose? A few years later, this time as a graduate student at the University of Washington in Seattle, I found another copy of Ali and Nino in a used bookstore. By then, I had lost or misplaced the first one. None of my well-read professors nor any of my bookish graduate school friends had ever heard of this book written in German, though resonating with memories of other languages: Persian, Azeri, Russian, and Turkish. Who was this modern Heine, or even Nietzsche, with a piercing insight into religion, morality, and slave and philistine mentality? Wrapped in a cross-cultural and star-crossed love story, the novel chronicled the devastation brought upon the oil rich city of Baku in Azerbaijan by the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution. At the time, I thought this short novel would be a stimulating and informative addition to the German major reading list, but the book was out of print, and we were still bound by the “canon of German literature.”

Some time ago I found the English translation of another novel by this mysterious Said, The Girl from the Golden Horn (Das Mädchen vom Goldenen Horn, 1938), whose protagonist Aziyadeh, a young woman from the Ottoman court and student of Oriental languages in Berlin, was forced into exile with her widowed father when the Ottoman dynasty was banished after the First World War. Coincidentally, another Aziyadé (spelled slightly differently in French) is also the protagonist of Pierre Loti's Orientalist novel Aziyadé (1879). But this Said clearly was no Orientalist in the sense established by the other Said, Edward Said, who defined Orientalism as a methodological and disciplinary appropriation of the cultures of the Orient in its broadest geographical parameters. He (or perhaps she?) seemed to be writing from the inside…

While young Norwegian musicians had sought an education in Leipzig in the first half of the nineteenth century, painters were drawn to the academies in Düsseldorf and, later, Munich. With the emergence in France of the early impressionists and the Barbizon school, however, the European art map was redrawn. In the last two decades of the century, German academies lost much of their attraction for Norwegian art students, who elected rather to submerge themselves in la vie de bohème. In 1878, as part of the Exposition Universelle – the World's Fair in Paris – a huge exhibition of art was staged that revealed to Norwegian artists the pre-eminence of contemporary French art. Among the Norwegians who moved to Paris after the exhibition were Christian Krohg, Hans Heyerdahl and Erik Werenskiold. Attracted by liberal Parisian society, many female Norwegian artists – including Kitty Kielland, Harriet Backer and Asta Norregaard – also fled there from petty bourgeois Kristiania.

Radical Norwegian authors, too, turned their backs on the classical inspiration of Rome in favour of Paris, as Torleiv Kronen has pointed out: ‘The new republic rekindled the hope of fulfilling the old promise: freedom, equality and brotherhood. A generation of writers with Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant and the brothers Goncourt at its head augured well for a wholly new way of thinking. The arts, in particular literature, were expected to serve reality. For Norwegian writers, realists as they were, this was irresistible.’ Bjornstjerne Bjornson lived in Paris for five years (1882–87) and Jonas Lie for twenty-four years (1882–1906); the homes of these literary beacons became rallying points for Norwegian thinkers and artists.

These and other Scandinavian figures prepared the ground for the extraordinary obsession with everything Nordic that swept Paris in the 1890s. It was the second generation of Norwegian painters – those who arrived there around the same time as Delius – that would harvest the fruits; they came to a city whose art lovers could not got enough of chill northern landscapes in either naturalist or later neo-romantic styles.

KURBAN SAID's NOVEL Ali and Nino, first published in German in 1937, is not the kind of text to which one typically finds references in books on literary history, not even in the most comprehensive volumes. The novel is hard to categorize. It is, for instance, not clear to which national literature or cultural tradition the text should be assigned. Although the novel was originally published in German and with a publishing house specializing in German-language texts, the E. P. Tal Verlag in Vienna, its author's decision to go by the alias “Kurban Said” suggests to readers that his own native language might not be German. The geographical setting of the book—Azerbaijan and Persia during the first two decades of the twentieth century—reinforced this impression that the text's author might not be from a German-speaking country. Rather, the author must be a newcomer on the literary scene. His chosen alias was perhaps meant to provide the text with a certain authenticity: most likely the book was written, one could stipulate, by someone with a personal history in Azerbaijan or Persia in the early twentieth century. Above all, the alias suggested a mystery: Why this novel in German? And why was it published in Vienna? Moreover, in hindsight, the date of publication, 1937, is intriguing: Europe at the time was, as we know now, at the brink of a new and exceptionally violent world war. Ali and Nino indeed takes up the themes of violence and destruction as well, but at the same time suggests an alternative to this world of violence. Above all, Ali and Nino is a love story about two people from divergent cultural and religious backgrounds who in spite of their many differences find each other and, at least for a while, are able to create a happy life together.

For a long time Ali and Nino was what the Germans call a Geheimtipp : only known to and appreciated by a small group of insiders with either a more than superficial interest in the literature of exile or exceptional knowledge of the region (i.e., Azerbaijan, Persia, and the Middle East more generally)—areas about which Kurban Said wrote in both Ali and Nino and his subsequent novel, The Girl from the Golden Horn (first published in German also by the Vienna Tal Verlag in 1938, one year after Ali and Nino).

THE scene would not be amiss in a horror film: a young woman is shown sleeping peacefully, when suddenly a monstrous creature appears – half-human, half-animal, with an emaciated face and shaggy hair – that grabs the woman by the throat with his claws. Baring his many teeth at her with a mocking grin, he furiously tries to strangle her. Instead of a film scene, however, this nightmare is one of the visionary experiences of Julian of Norwich (c. 1343–c. 1416), found in her two writings, A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman – written in the middle of the 1380s – and A Revelation of Love, written between the 1390s and 1416. Though describing the same scene, the two accounts also differ in a striking way: in the later A Revelation Julian expands her description, adding more vivid details, a trend discernible in the entire work. The earlier account, in A Vision, is brief and lacking in detail, or in the words of Liz Herbert McAvoy ‘muted and almost dismissive’; later, however, in A Revelation Julian creates a horrifying scene with highly specific details: the monster and his threatening actions are described by Julian in ‘some of her most vivid and concrete language’.

At first glance, this expanding of a frightening experience in a later text may appear counterintuitive: not only is it unusual that an author would describe her younger self's nightmare in greater detail, but other negative moments, such as a vision of three ‘nothings’, have been removed in A Revelation. However, this scene in A Revelation shows Julian's ability as a narrator to turn a scene suggesting lack of agency into one that reveals her mastery of storytelling and her control over her narrative. I suggest that already in A Vision, but even more so in A Revelation, these scenes evoke folklore narratives in which a supernatural creature tries to strangle a sleeper. A Vision and A Revelation thus illustrate how, in medieval religious culture, ‘folklore’ (or ‘unofficial’ belief) and ‘official’ belief formed part of a spectrum of beliefs, as Carl Watkins suggests: ‘[W]e need to think of medieval religious culture as a commingling of unofficial and official belief that varies over space and time – forming not a series of cultural compartments, but a spectrum.

As chapters in this section make clear, Goethe's Faust presents a strikingly broad and detailed view of the world and the human condition. We are offered a vivid dramatic present, and also referred both backwards and forwards, to the cultural and historical past and to the emerging future, constantly forced to assess and reassess our perspectives. This chapter is concerned with the nature of Goethe's musical reference in the text. For ‘music in Goethe's Faust’ covers far more than settings or other performance music, in both content and context of the work. A substantial network of musical allusion within the verbal text cross-refers between episodes where music is played and sung, recalled, varied, repeated, [re]evaluated; thus creating and maintaining both synchronic and diachronic relations in Faust, and also setting up extra-textual points of reference.

Music can function in this way not because of what Goethe thought about music, but how. His comments on music seem inconsistent, even contradictory; but the nature of his thinking is remarkably consistent. He thought of music in terms of other things, and often also of other things in terms of music: that is, he thought metaphorically, by analogy. Goethe's musical reference in Faust has been puzzled over at least since the study by Helene Herrmann in 1916. But if we focus on his metaphorical thinking (i.e. not individual figures of speech, but the underlying analogies with music that beget figures of speech or figures in other media), new perspectives emerge on Goethe and on his work, especially on Faust. This has become possible through the development of metaphor theory. Currently part of cognitive linguistics, metaphor theory can present daunting terminology. But some of the recent insights it offers, and some of the earlier works on which it draws, reveal a great deal about metaphorical thinking and shift our perspectives on Goethe in very productive ways. Ernst Cassirer and Max Black, for example, stress that such thinking offers not a full picture, but vivid glimpses of perceived similarity between selected aspects of two fields.

The year 1000 has exercised such influence on historians of the society and politics of the western early Middle Ages that the ninth and tenth centuries have commonly been seen, at best, as little more than a period of transition after Carolingian decline; that is, as centuries destined to prepare the ground for the major changes that would arrive with the turn of the millennium. This book has sought to reconsider this vision of European development by returning to the study of rich and still underused sources – the charters pertaining to the great collections of the two regions here under study. Using these documents to build an alternative interpretation, this book argues that in the period and places examined here, northern Spain did not witness the fracture of public authority, nor the increasingly arbitrary and violent imposition of lordly power over peasants. This book in fact offers rather different conclusions, proposing that the workings of politics and the development of local society were subject to significant regional differences which only partially correspond with the prevailing paradigms attached to the study of the period.

The eighth century saw the emergence of a new political power in Asturias. According to the later chronicles, both the Liébana and Galicia were constituent parts of the Asturian political framework before the year 800. Yet throughout this book we have seen that the documents that describe the growth of the kingdom paint an impressionistic picture of a more complex reality. Political power was a complicated and fraught phenomenon in early medieval Spain, dependent in large measure on the success or otherwise with which kings won and consolidated magnate support; at no stage in the period studied here, however, were kings merely the pawns of magnates. The tenth-century fragmentation of the state that occurred elsewhere in western Europe was not matched in Spain, where kings presided over a kingdom in which royal power, although varying in effectiveness from region to region, was never completely deserted by significant factional support; an upstart class of castle-dwelling hoodlums, so crucial to changes thought to have occurred in France, did not materialise.