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Despite its increasing prominence in university syllabi and anthologies, travel writing continues to be excluded from the canon of early modern literature. Its exclusion can be attributed to the view, articulated explicitly and implicitly, that its formal and stylistic conventions render it insufficiently 'literary'. Such assessments reveal a tendency to read early modern travel accounts using aesthetic criteria that are anachronistic, disconnected from the discursive contexts in which these accounts were originally written and read. This article examines one of the genre's most distinctive features, one which has shaped its relationship to notions of literary value and canonicity: its preoccupation with particulars, something early modern and modern readers alike characterise as 'tedious'. Focusing on Thomas Coryate's eponymous Coryats Crudities (1611), it situates the particularity of early modern travel writing within the reconstructed contexts of classical rhetoric, early modern poetics, and travel advice, placing special emphasis on the rhetorical quality of enargeia, or vividness. In addition to offering a fresh assessment of the Crudities and modelling a new approach to the study of travel writing more generally, the article reflects on how we can expand our sense of what early modern literature might be said to comprise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, I aim to provide an overview of the relationship between women's writing and the 'canon', to suggest some reasons for its continuing marginality to that canon, and to outline briefly the ways in which the particular character and qualities of early modern women's writing require a rethinking of many of our dominant narratives about the literary history of the period. In this I draw upon the work of many critics whose work has shaped my thinking, and who are mapping out exciting new trajectories for the future direction of this field. The second part of the article focuses on setting out some ways in which early modern women's writing might provide productive challenges to current orthodoxies about the canon of Renaissance Literature. Finally, I turn to the future, and some ideas about how the category of 'women's writing' itself needs to be repositioned and reconceived. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Race formation, canon formation, and the writing of linguistic history can all be understood as processes of standardisation that differentiate through inclusion and exclusion of selected characteristics (of a human group, language use, or literary work) in synchronic moments and artificially link those moments to create diachronic histories that can span millennia. As we will show in this essay, Thomas Warton's The History of English Poetry, from the Close of the Eleventh to the commencement of the Eighteenth Century (1775–1778) enacts all three processes simultaneously in ways that are inextricably entangled, and structured by an ideology of standardisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this introduction, the editors lay out the rationale behind this special issue. The goal of this issue is to identify and disrupt the complacency surrounding the medieval and early modern canon with a view to achieving two things. Firstly, we hope to uncover new approaches to the study of premodern literature that might result in a more accurate and inclusive account of what texts were of greatest significance to readers and writers in medieval and early modern England, even if those texts have typically been excluded from discussions of the medieval and early modern literary canons over the past three centuries. Secondly, we hope to draw attention to some of the problematic roles that medieval and early modern English texts have played as foundation stones of the English literary canon, and how they might equally serve to disrupt some of the assumptions on which that canon has traditionally been founded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Against the backdrop of readings of Adalbert Stifter's 1844 Studienfassung of "Die Narrenburg" as an expression either of orientalist fantasy or of Austrian inner colonialism, this article traces the text's confusing geographies through its intertwined figurations of native and exotic plants. Often thought of (due to the etymology of vegetare) as idle, passive, inert, and mute, flora in this text suggests the tracks of colonial exploration and horticulture, as well as of orientalizing literature, and is implicated in the literary framings and formats that promote a nineteenth-century canon of "Germanness." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that Hölderlin develops a new understanding of canonicity by way of related concepts such as law, measure, and harmony. The final version of his novel Hyperion "bends" the straight rule of the canon—the metaphor underlying the notion of a literary canon—against itself, transforming it into a Heraclitean bow: a dynamic play of conflicting tones or voices. Diotima, the novel's female protagonist, has an especially important role in this transformation: not simply through her diffuse physical beauty, which flows out into her surroundings rather than being concentrated into a plastic form, but through her voice and above all her words, which correct Hyperion's own Platonizing interpretation of the Heraclitean doctrine—an interpretation that tries to conceive of the discordant unity as visual rather than radically acoustic and musical. This counter-Platonic reading of Heraclitus contributes to the political radicalness of Hölderlin's novel, which regards the agonistic polis, ultimately extended to include the relationship between human beings and nature, as itself representing the highest unity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the canonical narratives and assumptions about German literature in German Studies. The authors argue that traditional German literary texts should be re-examined to focus on voices of difference, such as linguistic, queer, racial, religious, and sexual differences. The article discusses two major responses to the conservatism and dominance of canonicity: including neglected voices in classes and creating a counter canon. The authors emphasize the need for close re-readings of the traditional literary canon to decenter it and highlight the diversity of voices within it. The article includes case studies that examine how canonical texts juxtapose voices of difference from different perspectives. [Extracted from the article]

Starting from interdisciplinary theories of canon, this essay zooms in on literary canons and the canon of the field of German Studies in particular. In comparison to many kinds of canons, academic canons, it is argued, are structured based on different and frequently opposing assumptions. On this basis, a distinction is made between the adjective "canonical," which refers to the supposedly stable functions of legitimate or illegitimate authority, and the adjective "canonic," which evokes the specific forms of critical self-reflexivity required in academic contexts. The concluding discussion addresses the specific challenges of the canonic design of German Studies in the North American context. As an interdisciplinary discipline operating at a distance from Europe, the canonics of global German Studies are relatively undefined. This can be interpreted positively as a source of freedom and flexibility but also as a challenge of self-definition in relation to various disciplinary-canonic architectures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"How Dark Is My Flower: Yosano Akiko and the Invention of Romantic Love" by Leith Morton is a comprehensive examination of the evolution of romantic love in modern Japanese literature, with a focus on the poetry of Yosano Akiko and her husband Yosano Tekkan. Morton argues that Akiko's poetry and the Myōjō circle, which she was a part of, played a crucial role in the development of modernism in Japan. The book analyzes various poems, texts, articles, and works from the late 19th century to around 1918, providing valuable insights for scholars of poetry, modernity, and Japanese literature. It also includes translations of previously untranslated works, making it a valuable resource for researchers. [Extracted from the article]

Dennis Patrick Slattery's The Fictions of Our Convictions: Essays on the Cultural Imagination (2023) investigates how beliefs, expressed through personal and cultural stories or myths, construct our self-understanding and worldviews. Part I, comprised of thirteen essays, utilizes his own life story and literary classics such as Homer's Odyssey, Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich, and Melville's Moby-Dick to reflect on a wide array of themes central to the volume: addiction, healing, imagination, and the power of language to both distort and reveal what is real. Part II provides cultural vignettes that reflect on civic matters pertaining to civility and democracy as well as existential matters such as trust, friendship, and aging. Slattery's interdisciplinary hermeneutic is deeply informed by the depth psychological perspectives of C. G. Jung and James Hillman and the mythological vision of Joseph Campbell. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Henry Beeching, Dean of Norwich: professor, poet, priest" by Peter Fanning is a biography of Henry Beeching, a scholarly priest known for his preaching and published sermons. Beeching also had a parallel career as a respected Shakespeare scholar and literary critic. The book explores Beeching's belief in the importance of character in both religion and literature, and highlights his influence on the development of Humanities. Fanning's biography provides a balanced and affectionate recognition of Beeching's contributions. [Extracted from the article]

This article argues that Heine's 1851 poem "Jehuda ben Halevy" modifies Goethe's concept of world literature to make a place within it for the geographically dispersed, multilingual literature of the Jewish diaspora. Heine's efforts to imagine Jewish literature as world literature resemble those of the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement, which made explicit the political implications of Goethean world literature by likening the arrival of Jewish literature in a world literary canon to the achievement of civil rights for German Jews. The article argues, however, that Heine goes further than Jewish scholars like Michael Sachs and Leopold Zunz by suggesting that Jewish literature not only deserves attention as world literature, but that its transculturality and multilingualism anticipate it and provide a model for future thought on world literature. Heine's reflections in "Jehuda ben Halevy" indeed foreshadow contemporary interventions in the study of world literature regarding the status of medieval literature, untranslatability, and multilingualism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

His conception of translation is much wider, including intercultural translation and even what he calls "intersemiotic translation": translation between different systems of signs such as the linguistic and the pictorial. Translation, and particularly translation from literary cultures regarded as marginal, occupies an ambiguous space in debates surrounding world literature. [Extracted from the article]

This article draws connections between cultural criminology, the Scandinavian penal exceptionalism literature and desistance research by taking a close look at two Norwegian children's books published in the 1950s. I argue that both books are fundamentally desistance stories and that their enduring success should be seen, at least in part, as a result of their articulation of broader cultural values that Norwegian parents have seen (and continue to see) as important to communicate to their children. Both books highlight redemption and forgiveness as important values. I also argue that because they have become part of the Norwegian literary canon, they continue to act as arenas for the reproduction of these values. These books may, therefore, be seen as both exhibiting and reproducing what we may call a desistance-conducive 'culture of second chances'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If Saskia Ziolkowski's and Salvatore Pappalardo's recent monographs are indications, the study of literature written in Italian is in a moment of expansion and possibility. For example, Chapter 1 addresses the reception of Kafka's I Amerika i in Italy based on its realism, unpacking how, differently from other national literatures, Kafka was read as a realist author. Finally, in Chapter 5, Ziolkowski adopts an animal studies approach to her subject, examining the ways that Italian authors have similarly taken up issues of transformation in their works, in large part inspired by Kafka's most famous work of metamorphosis. [Extracted from the article]

The teaching of literatures in English is often centred upon pedagogic models where the literary text is approached as the primary source of meaning. These pedagogies tend to foreground traditional forms of literacy whose ultimate goal is to develop learners' reading and writing skills, while fostering a respectful attitude towards the literary canon. The increasing dissemination of new digital media and their impact on how we communicate call for a pedagogy that takes account of multimodal processes of meaning making by which literary works are made to signify. Drawing on theoretical developments in such disciplines as Multiliteracies and Adaptation Studies, this article puts forward a didactic sequence for teaching Wuthering Heights to students pursuing English Language Teaching (ELT) programmes in higher education contexts where English is used as an additional language. Aimed at developing students' literary literacy, this model consists of several tasks in which both the novel and screen adaptations of it are deployed as sources of meaning. Reconfiguring traditional conceptions of literacy, the juxtaposition of literary text and film as a method to teach literary literacy promotes the development of interpretive and pedagogic skills ELT learners need to become active makers of meaning and competent teachers of English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses several of contemporary Italian writer Igiaba Scego's literary works, from her 2003 children's novella La nomade che amava Alfred Hitchcock [The Nomad Woman Who Loved Alfred Hitchcock] and her first 2004 novel Rhoda, to her latest novel, the 2020 work La linea del colore [The Colour Line]. I position this article as a tribute to scholar Adalgisa Giorgio and engage Giorgio's reading of a story by Natalia Ginzburg in order to further my exploration of Scego's work. Reading Scego through the lens of Ginzburg, I highlight Scego's complex portrayals of women, focusing on the absence of the mother, on surrogate mother figures, and on relationships between women. Reading Scego through lenses suggested by Giorgio's reading of Ginzburg, I establish common points between two Italian women writers from differing eras and contribute to the work of bringing recognition to writers such as Scego, who are often labelled under migration or G2 (second-generation migrant) epithets, as writers within the Italian literary canon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My contribution examines the creation of female collective memory and legacy in the works of Sicilian-born feminist writer Maria Rosa Cutrufelli. I analyse this aspect as both a literary and a political strategy aimed at retrieving a 'sisterhood', well-known to second-wave American feminism. Cutrufelli's novels are filled with female protagonists, or personagge, who rarely act on their own. In fact, at the basis of each character's struggle to achieve an individual agency one can identify various forms of relationships (friendship, love, political alliance, family bonds). Moreover, as is the case with her dystopian novel L'isola delle madri, unexpected connections among extremely diverse women become decisive in challenging social and symbolic paradigms, such as biological motherhood and its bond with a capitalist exploitation of reproductive bodies. Cutrufelli's reinvention of female memories corresponds to the construction of a collective legacy that reads against the grain of the Italian literary canon, in which individual heroism – along with gendered asymmetries and power relationships – has often implied an automatic identification with a strong, self-centred masculinity. On the contrary, Cutrufelli's stories insist on female relationships that go through different phases of negotiation and forms of losses and appropriation, thus calling for substantially different notions of non-hierarchical femininity. This is also confirmed by Cutrufelli's own filiations and active collaborations with fellow women writers belonging to different generations. In the light of the above, my chapter explores various forms of female bonds in Cutrufelli's writings, while also taking into consideration the significance of extra-textual elements in the writer's biography and current engagement, in order to argue for her originality in pursuing a specific, 'hybrid' approach to 21st-century feminism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines intertextuality in Shimmer Chinodya's Chairman of Fools (Harare: Weaver Press, 2005), focusing on the novel's entanglement with earlier texts and its extra-literary context. It argues that the text exhibits generic, stylistic, and thematic entanglements with its precursor texts, particularly Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions (Harare: Zimbabwe Publishing House, 1988) and Dambudzo Marechera's Mindblast, or, the Definitive Buddy (Harare: College Press, 1984), and with the post-2000 Zimbabwean context, in ways that enrich and extend current and earlier understandings of these texts. It establishes that, besides generic and stylistic entanglements, Chairman of Fools dialogues with these precursor texts in the representation of the figure of the non-conformist artist, discourses of gender, and discourses of mental breakdown. It also engages with discourses of the post-2000 Zimbabwean crisis, inclusive of the "crisis of masculinity". The symbiosis of this intertextuality makes visible the non-hierarchical relationships that exist amongst these related texts, both literary and non-literary, and brings into focus the instability and permeability of the boundaries often used to order and create demarcations within and between these texts. The intertextuality also points at some of the literary continuities and discontinuities in the Zimbabwean literary canon—and hence its evolution—together with social and ideological shifts in Zimbabwean society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mignon establishes new links between canonized authors of Turkish literature with authors long left on the fringes of Turkish nationalist literary history to rethink "Turkish literature" as "Literature in Turkish" ( I Türkçe Edebiyat i ). I Uncoupling Language and Religion i offers a revisionist history of Turkish literature to include in the Turkish literary canon marginalized authors from the post-imperial era. [Extracted from the article]

In the 2002 Afterword to the revised edition of his widely influential monograph I Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance i (first published in 1984), David Norbrook positions the study as an attempt to eschew oppositions between old and new historicisms, often framed (by new historicists) in terms of "a Dark Ages of simple-minded positivism and a Golden Age of theoretical progress", being concerned instead "to locate opposing radical and conservative traditions of analysis going back to the early modern period itself, and to suggest that the polemics of the early modern period are still inescapably present in today's debates" (271). As Niall Allsopp observes in his shrewd and illuminating new monograph, I Poetry and Sovereignty in the English Revolution i , however, this "structural division between royalists and republicans" imposed a certain conceptual limit to understanding "the contingencies of political allegiance" in writers and writing of the middle seventeenth century (see 1-3 and esp. In its relative narrowness of compass, I Poetry and Sovereignty in the English Revolution i cedes a certain amount of argumentative ground to more capacious surveys of mid-century writing structured around the polarities of royalist and republican. [Extracted from the article]

Despite ongoing attempts to disrupt the white cis-hetero-masculine nature of the literary canon the secondary school English curriculum remains tethered to its lineage. In conversation with feminist new materialist scholars who argue that the stories we read and write have material affects on who we are becoming, this paper argues that in order to mobilise change in the secondary years of schooling, interventions into the canon must move beyond (re)forming text lists or providing teachers with readymade pedagogical resources. Drawing on the Australian context, the authors outline some of the contemporary challenges teachers face in diversifying and decolonising the curriculum. Drawing on their Literary Linking Methodology the authors discuss a pilot project that seeks to unsettle the canon by supporting teachers to undertake extended immersion with both contemporary literary texts and archival research. Accordingly, this paper contributes to understandings of the tensions and challenges teachers face in introducing contemporary Australian texts into the curriculum and offers insights into the ways in which professional learning might be (re)imagined so that English teachers might draw on available cultural resources as researchers and literary knowledge producers in the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This commentary mainly points out the values and problems of the translation of Chinese ethnic classics by using the literature method. The conclusions are: Chinese ethnic classics are the essence and core of traditional Chinese culture, the translation and dissemination of Chinese ethnic classics is the impetus for inter-cultural communication, and even a kind of "literary diplomacy" and "cultural diplomacy," which is the business card of the Chinese ethnic culture to the outside world. In view of the current problems such as low volume, poor quality in translated Chinese ethnic classics, and indirect-faithfulness in translation, this commentary with theoretical study makes some new thinking from the five aspects: translation talent, translation principle, communication method, communication effect, and sustainable research, which is expected to provide reference for the translation and dissemination of ethnic classics in the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses Ricardo Piglia's extensive engagement with 'Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote' in his critical and fictional work, examining the ways in which Piglia politicizes Borges's celebrated story. Building upon Piglia's well-documented attempt to reconcile Borges with left-wing criticism, the article engages in close dialogue with Robin Fiddian's Postcolonial Borges: Argument and Artistry (2017) to elaborate the geopolitical significance of Piglia's novel Respiración artificial (1980) and his wider oeuvre. In order to do so, the article pays particular attention to the narratorial strategies that Piglia deploys in the novel, and the literary alter-ego he creates to carry the authorial subject into the work, analysing the unique position Piglia assigns to Borges's story within the Argentine canon. Thus it will be proposed that Piglia effectively re-orders Argentine literary history from the perspective of 'Pierre Menard' to augment the political significance of the story. In developing these arguments, it will ultimately be shown that Piglia seeks to become the titular character, reproducing his literary experiments further to develop the postcolonial critique contained in Borges's original story. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contextualises Xing Danwen's role in creating the posed photography of Ma Liuming from 1993 to 1995, the canon of East Village performance art in China, and how this experience prompted her to reflect on gender issues in later works. I compare similar shots of performance work by Rong Rong and Xing Danwen and discuss the role of a gendered power structure in the making of a performance art canon. These images have been received as documentations, yet it was through dialogue with the camera and two genders that Ma and Xing developed their unique paths to performance art and conceptual photography in the 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article theoretically and empirically analyses the allocation of recognition and status in a scientific community and of the rank 'classic' to better comprehend the selective and reputational mechanisms at work since the beginning of the discipline. The aim is to examine the process of canonisation and the exclusionary logic, which systematically eliminates certain knowledge of specific scholars over time. The role of cultural capital , such as excellent scientific work and its recognition, is taken into consideration in contrast to social capital, such as influential social positions within the field, and to personal attributes such as gender, regarding their relevance for status. A unique database of 957 scholars representing the field of early German sociology was created, and a quantitative analysis was conducted. The results indicate the field was structured very unequally with high rewards for scholars with social capital. However, other than what one might expect, social power does not appear to be relevant for joining the classics canon in the twentieth century. Regardless of the type of capital, while there is great continuity for the most successful male scholars without social positions, women were largely excluded. Exclusionary mechanisms, eliminating the knowledge produced by minorities, may still be at work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relationship between life-writing, domestic space and cultural memory , discussing Bernadette Devlin's 1969 memoir The Price of My Soul, and Nell McCafferty's 1988 book Peggy Deery, an account of the life of the Derry-woman of the title. I draw on the work of memory studies scholars including Astrid Erll (2011. Memory in Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan) on literature and the 'canon' of cultural memory and examine how such memory in Ireland has been informed by sentimentalized visions of women's experiences in the home. These versions are challenged by Devlin and McCafferty's feminist life-writing project; the home here is an explicitly political space, and I explore how it is described as such, drawing on the work of feminist theorist Silvia Federici (2012. Wages Against Housework. In: Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle. Oakland: PM Press, pp. 15–22) and critic Susan Fraiman (2017. Extreme Domesticity: A View from the Margins. New York: Columbia University Press). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the dual and paradoxical conception of the Arabic literary canon in Orientalist and Nahḍa discourses in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—an era of great change and closer mutual cultural awareness between Europe and the Arab world. What Arabic literature had long signified to European scholars since Antoine Galland's eighteenth-century translation of The Arabian Nights (mysticism, Romanticism and a platform to explore sexual taboos) was very different from how the nationalist-minded Nahḍa intellectuals wanted to reconfigure it as the hallmark of the rational "Golden Age" of Arab civilization. Sexuality became a site of contestation between certain Orientalists who praised Arab literary "frankness" and an anxious class of Arab scholars who wanted to "cleanse" the Arabic literary canon and reconfigure it in line with modern, European standards of "respectability" and "politeness." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My love affair with Tambudzai Sigauke began in 1998 when I first read I Nervous Conditions i in college. When I read, on the final page, that Tambu's mental liberation would be 'a long and painful process ... whose events stretched over many years and would fill another volume' (Dangarembga [3], 208), I did not know whether that volume would materialize in the form of an actual sequel. What if the second and third novels in the Tambu trilogy are also the novels we need rather than the novels we want in the twenty-first century - critical interventions into a postcolonial literary-historical imagination that require us to reassess not only where the character stands under postcoloniality but where we stand as well?. [Extracted from the article]

This paper investigates the multidirectional circulation of the Trotzkopf series in the Low Countries and Germany. Emmy von Rhoden's Der Trotzkopf (1885), a classic of German children's literature, and its sequels were almost immediately translated into Dutch. However, Stijfkopje als Grootmoeder (1904) the sequel that completes the series, was written by the Dutch writer Suze la Chapelle-Roobol. Translated into German it was treated as an original part of the official series. Through a functional analysis of the text based on criteria formulated by Aleida Assmann in her essay on written folklore, this article tries to uncover the transnational mechanisms of canonization, circulation, and reception behind the series. It reveals that consecration and circulation were largely reception- and commerce-driven and not initiated by critics and literary institutions as is often the case for canonical works of adult fiction, confirming earlier findings in research on the canonization of children's literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Ugandan literary canon is comparable to other regional postcolonial fiction in its obsession with verisimilitude in the representation of nationalist themes, as prominently reflected in the works of eminent Ugandan writers such as Okot p'Bitek, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, and Moses Isegawa. These authors' seemingly neat and stable critique of Ugandan society through realistic modes of representation has recently been disrupted by works of contemporary writers who experiment with new forms and themes in their writing. While gender and sexuality have been foregrounded in contemporary Ugandan writing, some authors, such as Innocent Immaculate Achan, Lillian Aujo Akampurira, and Dilman Dila, have tried out sci-fi motifs in their works. In this article, I explore how three of Dila's short stories—"A Wife and a Slave", "Two Weddings for Amoit", and "The Taking of Oleng"—use sci-fi tropes with implicit queer tangents to provide insights into post-Armageddon Ugandan fictional futures. I argue that Ugandan sci-fi texts that feature post-Armageddon settings deploy queerness to interrogate how marginal subjects, who are often depicted as metaphors for the redemptive futurity of their societies, use queerness to articulate the trauma of their exclusion from the social collective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on English playwright Aphra Behn and her dramatic canon. Topics include importance of text selection in non-traditional authorship-attribution studies, sub-genres are of almost equal importance in reducing experimental noise, Behn constrains the selection of dramatic texts to only comedies, and editorial interpolation that must be removed by deferring to the earliest edition for stylistic studies.

Recent scholarship on early modern Spanish poet Juan Boscán (c. 1490–1542) has considerably enhanced his reputation as a lyricist and established a more consequential place for his work in the literary canon. Such characterization can be said to have an early echo in the image of Boscán that we find in his sonnet CXVI ('Amor m'embia un dulce sentimiento') and in Garcilaso de la Vega's Elegía II and Égloga II. In these poems, Boscán is described as a gifted poet whose writings will survive time and will earn him fame among his contemporaries. A careful examination of this flattering image of Boscán reveals its indebtedness to the symbols and the vocabulary associated with fame in Petrarch's Triumphs and other texts related to this allegorical poem. Garcilaso and Boscán cannibalized these texts in an effort to raise Boscan's poetry and reputation to the level of their Tuscan predecessors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an introduction to the Journal's literary feature, this contribution aims to shed light on recent scholarship on Palestinian literature with a view to integrating discussions of literature more concretely within the broader field of Palestine studies. The contribution structures the discussion of the articles by Amal Eqeiq and Nora Parr around three enigmas that preoccupy scholars of Palestinian literature: writing a national literature without a nation-state, writing silence and nonlinearity, and writing fragmentation and wholeness. It highlights that challenges for scholarship on Palestinian literature revolve around rethinking conventional categorizations, canonizations, and periodizations to better understand how a national literature emerged in a context of exile, fragmentation, and statelessness, and how processes of cultural production operate in extranational conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines opposition to the Louisiana Purchase by Federalist and former U.S. representative Fisher Ames, who based his position upon the example of the fall of ancient Rome described in classic historical literature with which Ames was very familiar. The article also discusses Ames's education at Harvard, the shared ideology of Ames with other Harvard graduates and Federalists such as John Adams, James Otis, Jr., and John Quincy Adams, and his views about democracy as different from a federal republic.

The article examines the role of runaway advertisements in aiding the re-enslavement of slaves during the Romantic era. Topics discussed include the Consolidated Slave Act (1788), the description of maroonage and canonization, and the efforts of slaves for their emancipation as recorded in runaway advertisements printed in British West Indian newspapers in the Romantic era.

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.

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]

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]