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A retranslation of a given text can be produced with an awareness of a pre-existing translation in the same target language. The results are textual similarities and/or differences between the retranslation and its predecessor. These similarities and/or differences attest to a textual relationship between the two (re)translations. This paper refers to this relationship as ‘the intertextual relationship between (re)translations’ and these textual similarities and differences as ‘intertextuality in retranslation’ (IR). By comparing three English versions of a Chinese short story, ‘Kong Yiji’, this paper intends to shed light via a practical analysis of the intertextual relationship between (re)translations and display how to identify two types of IR, i.e. ‘filiation’ and ‘dissidence’, in real texts, particularly (re)translations of literary classics. The study finds that, despite the absence of paratexts indicating their extratextual ties, the identified instances of IR between the three versions of ‘Kong Yiji’ suggest that the earliest version played an important role in the production of the later two. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I investigate how Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870) engages with Aleksandr Pushkin’s (1799-1837) family history in his travelogue Voyage en Russie (1858-1861). It has sometimes been argued that Dumas’s reluctance to portray heroic black characters and to address his slave ancestry reveals his internalization of the racial prejudice prevalent in nineteenth-century French society. However, my reading proposes that the French writer explores his own origins and their relation to personal, national, and authorial legitimacy by rewriting Pushkin’s genealogy. The accentuated importance of African legacy in the construction of Pushkin’s identity—especially evident in the portrayal of the poet’s death—exalts diversity as crucial to national vitality as well as to literary creation, and points to a strategy of indirect self-legitimization on Dumas’s part. Through the fictionalization of Pushkin’s life and death, Dumas (re)establishes his status as a leader of the French Romantic movement and envisions his own postmortem canonization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Problems of authorship and attribution pose significant methodological challenges for researchers of Welsh-language women poets before 1800. These issues are contingent on the prevailing oral and manuscript cultures of transmission characteristic of Wales’s bardic culture, from which women were largely excluded. This article explores the unstable Welsh-language canon of poetry by women and highlights examples of problematic authorship and attestation. It also interrogates the diachronic wishful thinking of the Welsh feminist agenda alongside the synchronic reality of early modern women poets: is there a coherent female tradition and was it visible to early modern women poets? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article takes as its main focus the current collaboration between JSTOR and Field Day to digitize all five volumes of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (1991–2002) and make these volumes available and searchable within the existing online JSTOR collection. Its central ambition is to consider the impact of this digital transformation on our understanding of Irish women's literary history and, in particular, historic and current debates over the ideologies of national canon-formation in Ireland. This research argues that such transformations have the potential to significantly intervene in, and move forward, the objectives of Irish feminist historiographers and their attempts to disrupt the conventional linear alignment of Irish women's history and literature. In doing so, new discourses are potentially opened up for thinking about digital technologies and their increasingly meaningful relationship with feminist, gender, and women's studies within the humanities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports that school canon (SC), that was used in the final years of high school totally consisted of works that were written during a different historical period and were originally intended for an adult readership, and these works made up a significant part of the elementary and junior high school curricula. It mentions information on the Society of Russian Literature.

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In this article I focus on the problems and possible consequences deriving from putting together literary productions from the Americas, Europe and Israel by Palestinian authors and authors of Palestinian descent who may write in languages other than Arabic. Due to their daily engagement in the languages of local majorities, literature from these distinct contexts is commonly characterized by the authors’ attempts at preserving cultural boundaries and exploring national identities both against the backdrop and under the influence of foreign cultural elements. I present critical readings of Anglophone, Latinate and Hebrew literary productions to facilitate my proposal for the necessity of establishing a polylingual literary category to include these texts in the national canon, and suggest a theoretical framework for reading them within both local and transnational contexts as well as alongside Palestinian literary productions composed in Arabic. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper develops the concept of fictive publics through the proximate gestures of rewriting, refolding and refleshing of certain characters. Feminist and queer rewritings of canonical literary texts have become a fairly lucrative area of publication, from Angela Carter’s now classic fairy tale collectionThe Bloody Chamber(1979) to Kathy Acker’sEurydice in the Underworld(1997), and a more recent spate of mythological rewritings including Ali Smith’sGirl Meets Boy(2007) and Ursula K. Le Guin’sLavinia(2008). The intervention into patriarchal mythical structures via rewriting has been well documented, but the ways in which this interrelates with the philosophical feminist and new materialist projects of the radical rewriting of modernity itself has not yet been investigated. In this paper, I argue that a paradoxical relationality structures the concept of fictive publics, which is analogous to the modernist gesture of defamiliarization. Publics presuppose a proximity of strangers, and the concept of proximity is vital to queer studies. Rewriting is constituted by a particular type of radical and contentious movement which has significance for feminist thought. Using these examples, I explore the creative process of radical rewriting as a material gesture of intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the circulation of value in the literary market by investigating the interlinkages between African writers’ organisations and international literary award institutions. It focuses on selected writers’ organisations such as FEMRITE,Kwani?,Storymoja,Farafina, andWritivism, investigating how they participate in placing contemporary African literature in the global literary marketplace especially through their creative writing programmes. The article pays attention to the intersection between literary awards and creative writing programmes on the continent in mediating the process of literary production. I attempt to place the literary text within the mechanisms of its production by examining the various structures that frame the creative writing programmes on the continent. The article borrows from John Guillory’s (1993) ideas on the canon in which he argues that the process of canonisation is directly influenced by the distribution of, or the access to, the means of literary production. I argue that these local writers’ outfits are not only taking over the role of literary canonisation from the mainstream literary institutions such as the universities, publishers, and international award bodies, they are also consolidating their position as major players in the African literary and cultural fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The works of Guido da Verona were proscribed in the Index of Prohibited Books in 1920, thus receiving unexpected publicity from the Vatican’s ban. In 1930, on the contrary, the controversies which followed the publication of the irreverent parody of Alessandro Manzoni’sI promessi sposi marked the rapid decline of Da Verona’s career. This essay discusses Guido da Verona’s struggle with both ecclesiastical and fascist censorship, thus highlighting the effects of book forbiddance on the Italian literary canon of the early twentieth century and of its impact on the definition of an Italian national literature. Finally, the article reflects on the central role played by book censorship in the context of the tense political relationship between Pius XI and Mussolini in the wake of the Concordat of 1929. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The rise of the professional author in the mid-nineteenth century was accompanied by serious concerns about the future of national literature. As market pressures and censorship increasingly shaped the landscape of literary production, post-patronage writing thematized the plight of the author. This article focuses on the work of Karl Gutzkow (1811–78), who as a professional writer campaigned for authors’ rights and insisted on the need to support new talent instead of fixating on memorialization. Through a consideration of Gutzkow's writings on prominent as well as marginalized German authors, the article traces his development of a theory for writing Künstlerromane and -novellen focusing specifically on historic authors. Finally, a reading of Gutzkow's fictionalized Rousseau biographyWie kam es, daß Rousseau seine Kinder aussetzte?reveals that Gutzkow put this theory into practice with a view to exposing the material hardships that could compromise an author's ability to produce serious literature worthy of the national canon. Rather than celebrating literary heroes of the past, the Künstlernovelle becomes a political statement: a literary genre with the potential to effect change by shining a light on the material obstacles to authorial success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the significant role played by international literary awards in African literary canon formation. It focuses on the Commonwealth Short Story Prize (CWSSP) and the Caine Prize for African Writing (CP) as major award institutions for contemporary African literatures. The paper aims to position these prize competitions in the context of African literary and cultural production by foregrounding the intricate relationship between the text and the award institutions to point at the different roles they each play in the process of canon formation. It argues that canonicity through the award sector is influenced by several factors from the point of production to the presentation of the literary award. The paper uses the word “taste” to refer to the aesthetic qualities of a text as prescribed by the literary award. It then explores the process of this judgement of the aesthetic qualities of the prize texts, exploring factors such as economic and political patronage and its effects in literary taste creation. It concludes that taste in literary production, mediated through the institution of the award industry, is significantly influenced by the economic, political and cultural contexts of production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recurrent but relatively unquestioned element in the canonisation ofAdventures of Huckleberry Finnis that the novel is about securing a meaningful way forward for the American child. The sense is that the novel deserves to live and to have a future because it is about a child, and tied in with the need for the young nation to project and to determine its future. This might seem, to apply the terms of queer debate, to lend weight to ‘reproductive futurism’: the child and ‘American family values’ are to the fore, while sexual minorities and alternative social models are excluded. The present essay re-readsHuckleberry Finnand Twain's other Huck narratives, using the coordinates of queer theory. The result is a more equivocal picture. Twain does use Huck to assert the rights of the white American family, but he also uses him to explore alternative ideas of social organisation. More fundamentally, Twain increasingly finds that the idea of the child is no longer a sufficient motive for believing in and projecting a future. Rather, his writing leads the reader towards the impossibility of the future, both for the nation and its child. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How are English texts selected to teach students from culturally diverse backgrounds in Australia and England? The English curricula in both countries aim for students to read and interpret meanings through texts, while learning about their culture, and that of cultural others. However, the current list of prescribed texts in both curricula are dated and are not frequently changed, nor are new culturally diverse and contemporary texts easily added to reading lists. This makes some curriculum aims difficult to achieve if students are disengaged or do not relate to the content or themes in the prescribed texts. This article proposes that a post-colonial theoretical approach be considered when selecting texts to teach contemporary students from diverse cultural backgrounds. A post-colonial approach does not mean selecting post-colonial texts, or texts that address post-colonial themes, but is rather a method of selecting and comparing literature of any genre that engages with historical and contemporary issues, with particular focus on race, social class and gender. A post-colonial approach would mean that culturally diverse students may better engage with discussions of contemporary issues using a wider range of texts in classrooms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last generation we have identified the large group of women writers active in Britain during the long Romantic age, and we have established indices and archives allowing a nearly complete access to their output. What remains to be done, however, is still a tall order: recovering lost biographies, relations with male authors and a male publishing establishment, the patronage and networks relied on for support, the means by which public influence was gained, not to mention a sustained critical commentary of the kind accumulated by canonical male authors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article talks about the late poet and educator Salomé Ureña in Dominican Republic. It also discusses the Dominican culture and the gendered process of canonization. Topics discussed are Dominicans' perception of blackness or whiteness; relation between race, gender and national identity; and nationality in the Dominican Republic.

This article reports on the first two phases of a project to promote the classics through English at Key Stage 3, a scion of the Cambridge Schools Classics Project. We discuss the primary importance of speaking and listening in the English classroom both for the individual and the collective, and reflect on the power and importance of using classic tales in English as a means of promoting good-quality oracy. We comment on the precarious position of both oracy and story in the 2014 national curriculum. We report on the impact of a project during which student teachers were introduced to classical oral storytelling and encouraged to use it in their teaching. Findings suggest that the student teachers recognised oracy and storytelling as fundamental to their developing pedagogy and that they saw the need to promote oracy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The importance of the concept of Europe as a source of meaning and object of contested discursive battles during the fundamental transition towards modernity of the Sattelzeit (1750–1850) can hardly be overstated. The Weimar Classics (Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Wieland) made important contributions both to Enlightenment debates about Europe before the French Revolution and to the discursive battles about the continent taking place in the aftermath of the French Revolution in a context of heightened epistemic uncertainty and ideological confrontation. The paper aims to investigate Goethe's representation of Europe as an almost millenarian civilisation endangered at the end of the eighteenth century by a double process of economic and political modernisation. Particular attention is paid to how Goethe rooted his perception of Europe as a civilisation in geographic and climatic assumptions and how he compared the continent to other civilisational entities such as America, China, India or Persia. Finally, the political implications Goethe derived from his perception of Europe as an ailing civilisation shall be contrasted with democratic, romantic and conservative discourses about the continent in the aftermath of the French Revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay argues that modernist ideas of unfinished, deathly, impersonal, and ‘disabled’ art subvert Harold Bloom's authoritarian version of canonicity. Taking a range of examples from British, American, and European poetry, it argues that supplementary traits in both the working practices and forms of contemporary writing radically oppose the humanist presuppositions of canon-formation, even when these are expressed (as in the case of Angela Leighton'sOn Form) in the most benign and generous terms. Literary works that make a virtue of being prosthetic, broken, voiceless, and club-footed should not be seen as aberrations in the history of form and taste; they evince the non-identical basis of artistic practice in general. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents literary criticism of the novel "Pilgrimage" by Dorothy M. Richardson and the novel "Villette" by Charlotte Brontë. Particular focus is given to the influence of canonical literary traditions, such as the Bildungsroman and the roman fleuve, and feminine literary traditions, such as those used by Brontë, on Richardson's novel. According to the author, "Pilgrimage" can be seen as a link between 19th-century feminine and 20th-century modernist literary styles.

This article explores teaching and learning perspectives in relation to a first-year English Literature module on foundational literary texts and considers the value of certain assessment modes. The essay discusses methodological and pedagogical questions and argues that the module provides a contextual platform from which first-year students are able to appreciate issues of cultural and textual transmission. The article concludes that the material and the assessment format contribute to furthering an undergraduate research agenda and provides students with the opportunity to reflect on their own learning. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Research on the reading habits of the more intellectually inclined young people of Russia shows that their allegiance is to the more serious classics of literature rather than to contemporary popular fiction. Thus, the literary tastes of the older generation of Russian intellectuals are being preserved by the younger generation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the reciprocity between children’s literature and educational ideals in Dutch rewritings of international literary classics published for children between 1850 and 1950. It analyses the assumed pedagogical power of rewritings of international literary classics for children from the perspective of three theoretical concepts: (1) cultural transmission as a strategy of educational ambition in its capacity to serve social initiation, (2) adaptation as a transformation strategy to adjust an artefact to a specific audience, and (3) gate keepership as the determining factor in the communication situation of literature for children. Comparing original masterpieces that were originally not, or not specifically, meant for children with their derivatives sheds light on the strategies that were used to mould narratives into pedagogical examples. It shows how protagonists were educated along the lines of the ever-changing pedagogical discourse brought about by historically variable concepts of childhood and displays the transition of the educational value of subjection to external mastery to the ideal of self-mastery of the child. Moreover, it shows how rewritings not only functioned as agents in the transmission of literary artefacts, but by means of that, also provided for the transmission of culture. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Through a brief history of a widely published canon debate in nineteenth century Orissa, this article describes how anxieties about the quality of ‘traditional’ Oriya literature served as a site for imagining a cohesive Oriya public who would become the consumers and beneficiaries of a new, modernized Oriya-language canon. A public controversy about the status of Oriya literature was initiated in the 1890s with the publication of a serialized critique of the works of Upendra Bhanja, a very popular pre-colonial Oriya poet. The critic argued that Bhanja’s writing was not true poetry, that it did not speak to the contemporary era, and that it featured embarrassingly detailed discussions of obscene material. By unpacking the terms of this criticism and Oriya responses to it, I reveal how at the heart of these discussions were concerns about community building that presupposed a new kind of readership of literature in the Oriya language. Ultimately, this article offers a longer, regional history to the emerging concern of post-colonial scholarship with relationships between publication histories, readerships, and broader ideas of community – local, Indian, and global. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Until recently it was believed that Christian Huygens’ earliest publication of his pendulum invention was Horologium of 1658. He published the more famous general treatise, Horologium Oscillatorium, fifteen years later in 1673. Two years ago, an article1 suggesting an unknown collaboration in developing the clock pendulum between Huygens and the Paris clockmaker Isaac Thuret, presented the evidence of Benjamin Martin, an 18th century educationalist and retailer of scientific material. Martin described a Huygens publication of 1657 and reproduced the illustration it contained. This illustration shows a different clock from the one drawn in Horologium and different also from those previously considered as Huygens’ earliest surviving examples. However, the illustration is similar to part of a plate in Horologium Oscillatorium and this similarity caused one historian to cast doubt on the existence of the 1657 publication.2 This article, with information presented for the first time, seeks to prove the existence of that work and thereby establish it in the canon of Huygens’ writings while re-examining the invention in the light that it casts. 1Whitestone, Sebastian, ‘The Identification and Attribution of Christiaan Huygens’ First Pendulum Clock', Antiquarian Horology, December (2008), 201–222. 2Plomp, R., ‘Letter', Antiquarian Horology, December (2009), 714–17. See also author's reply, ibid, 717–19. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Literary critics review the developments of the 2001-10 period in fiction and find both cause for hope and, in the increasing commercialization of Russian literature and the cursory view taken toward Russia's classical tradition, reasons for pessimism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the Italian reception of Henrik Ibsen's works in 1883-1891. It states that he is dependent on intermediaries and commercial agents to spread his works abroad. Critic Angelo De Gubernatis and agents and translators Alfredo Mazza, Pietro Galletti and Luigi Capuana made the early attempts to introduce Ibsen in Italy. It also discuss the contribution of theatrical agents Enrico and Icilio Polese on the marketing and canonization of Ibsen's work.

This study aims to demonstrate a nuanced and complex version of Jin Shengtan's (1608-61) interpretation of Du Fu's (712-70) poetry and examine how he maneuvers the self into a dialogue with the hermeneutic past. As a well-known critic in the seventeenth-century China, Jin Shengtan distinguishes himself through his innovative reading strategies (especially application of the fenjie approach) as well as strong attack on a common claim in previous hermeneutics about inexplicable nature of Du Fu's poems. At the same time, however, the way Jin manifests such creativity often involves a seemingly self-effacing submission to certain canonical rules of reading Du Fu shaped by the earlier hermeneutics. To defend familiar canonical reading rules, Jin risks the very painful consequence of letting his self be engulfed in the past; but at the same time the dissociation of the self through his readiness toward 'obedience' to the past, paradoxically, powerfully reinforces the sense of self since in many cases he forces himself to be more creative in order to conform to these rules. Through successes and failures in his confrontation with the past, Jin celebrates a paradoxical self who is connecting and breaking with the past at the same time. Such hermeneutic phenomenon draws our attention to the function of hermeneutic continuity and helps us appreciate the dynamics under the surface of the historically constructed 'ahistoricity' of Du Fu. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of what constitutes the literary canon continues to vex us. This article highlights some representative cases from the Middle Ages, the Baroque, the age of the Enlightenment, and the twentieth century. The focus rests on the recently rediscovered seventeenth-century poet and composer Erasmus Widmann, whose works deserve to be included in the canon, or at least into our literary history, if that does not represent the canon already. As this article indicates, the quest for what makes up really 'good' or important literature continues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the transatlantic dimension of early American writing as an important perspective for an understanding of the development of literary criticism and self-reflectivity in colonial America and the young United States. Similarities and differences vis-à-vis the British debates are analysed, with special emphasis being placed on the particularity of American literary production in the eighteenth century. The question of how literary value was defined discursively in the later eighteenth century is considered by exploring two exemplary mechanisms of literary selection; the anthology and the literary magazine, both of which were imported into American culture from Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This case study discusses Argentine author Luis Pérez, Gaucho literature, 19th century Argentine popular literature, literary canon, and the political response to Pérez's writings in Buenos Aires, Argentina in the 1830s. The author uses historical sources which include Pérez's papers, letters written by his contemporaries, and printed criticisms of Pérez written by the city of Buenos Aires which describe him as seditious, criminal, and a "tavern orator."

An essay is presented regarding the canon of the Western literature which was described using the planetary approach. It discusses the well-known Anglo-American literary studies by Joseph Conrad entitled "Heart of Darkness" which exposes the elements of imperialism, sexism, and racism resulting to criticism by Chinua Achebe. It also discusses the East Asian literary confusion which emerges through the need for reader's recognition in the core areas.

The article focuses on canon, that has been used by literary critics and literary theorists. It states that canon has been a debatable topic in the English literature culture wars. It states that the debate over canon is because of the post-structuralist deconstruction of master narratives, techniques and values previously assumed as standard by literary critics and scholars.

This essay examines the characteristics of the anthology as a literary “meta-genre”. It looks at a range of English-language anthologies of South Asian writing published after independence, and discusses how they have shaped an idea of the subcontinent and its literature for national and transnational audiences. By examining these diverse anthologies, the essay aims to expand prevailing notions of a South Asian literary canon beyond the dominance of the Indian English novel and the nation as a unifying factor for literary production. In the process, the essay explores the relationship between literary value and socio-political engagement in our reading of South Asian writing, with specific reference to the role of the anthology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various papers published within this issue including one by Davies, Eissa and Ferris on the Atlantic dimension of Spain and its empire after 1808 and another one by Lawless and Ginger on cases of the renewal of the literary canon.

Compiling a large-scale Qing History is an important cultural project. To achieve complete success in this, it is worth learning from successful experience in history compilation at all times and from all over the world, especially that of the Chinese historiographic tradition. This tradition demonstrates (1) the advantage of compiling a history of the previous dynasty; (2) the importance of government involvement; and (3) the strength of combining efforts of experts and researchers from different fields. These observations suggest that we should lose no time in starting to compile the Qing History, and that the success of this compilation depends on strong support from the government and the unrelenting efforts of experts and researchers from various fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines a production of Calderón's El alcalde de Zalamea, performed in Zalamea by residents of Zalamea, as a specific exercise in presentism that connects the cultural situation of the peasantry in sixteenth-century Spain with that of its rural areas today. In this analysis I bring to bear the notion of 'coloniality of power' upon rural cultural practices. While the Counter-Reformation's quasi-mythical image of the peasant as Cristiano viejo was exploited and imposed at the cost of eliminating local rural culture, the historic image of the Zalamea is exploited today for the sake of picturesque exoticism and nostalgia. Yet, I examine how, even from a subaltern position, these local productions redefine Zalamea as a historic De Certeaunian 'space' scripted by local quotidian practices rather than as a fixed place invented by Calderón. In addition to the geographic position of Zalamea as a marginal topos, away from the national and the urban centres, another aspect designates its productions as subculture: their situation in the borderlands between high culture and everyday life. The people of Zalamea have reappropriated the Calderonian text and turned it into a site of empowerment and subaltern knowledge. Besides valuing their productions as specific cultural expressions, I also propose them as a model for community productions of historical plays and as a contribution to the construction of a geographic politics of identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]