Twelve scholars from the fields of English, French, and German literature here examine the complex ways in which the human body becomes the privileged semiotic model through which eighteenth-century culture defines its political and conceptual centers. In making clear that the deployment of the body varies tremendously depending on what is meant by the 'human body', the essays draw on popular literature, poetics and aesthetics, garden architecture, physiognomy, beauty manuals, pornography and philosophy, as well as on canonical works in the genres of the novel and the drama.

Virginia Woolf is the most famous twentieth-century woman writer in English. This book explores the relation between her life and her work, and charts the development of the writer who has done the most to alter the common reader's understanding of the relationship between gender and writing. Examining a wide range of novels from throughout her career, this book follows Woolf's progression from the celebration of femininity in her earlier work to her later wariness of the dangers of creating a category of 'the feminine' which might prove restrictive to women. It is argued that there is a shift in Woolf's writing from an interest in the difference of femininity to an interest in femininity as difference in a wider, philosophical sense. The book thus re-reads Woolf as a writer whose work centres on the dichotomy which continues to structure our thinking about sexual difference: between essentialism and constructionism, between the idea of gender as fixed and given and the idea of gender as socially constructed and thus open to change. In placing Woolf's writing within this dichotomy, rather than attempting to read it exclusively from one or the other perspective, this book takes the terms of debate beyond the partiality of earlier feminist accounts of her work.

Illustrated by Feliks Toposlki.

Uit het Turks vertaald door Veronica Divendal. Een Turkse student wordt door lezing van een boek aangespoord via een busreis zijn land en het landschap van zijn ziel te gaan verkennen.

Vertaling en nawoord van Rosalien van Witsen. Illustraties van Charlotte Schrameijer.

Een jongeman die van een demon een aangenaam leven heeft gekregen, stelt alles in het werk om de prijs hiervoor, het afstaan van zijn lichaam, niet te hoeven betalen.

Een traumatische gebeurtenis in hun tienerjaren drijft twee Amerikaanse zussen en een pleegbroer uit elkaar.