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The Routledge Companion to Global Comparative Literature is a collection of papers by influential scholars who are engaged in comparative literary studies and addresses a central and highly important question about the discipline: if Eurocentrism has been integral to comparative literature, and if the world we live in is undergoing radical changes, then how can, or should, the discipline change to overcome this problem, of the discipline as well as of literary history, to accommodate non-Western traditions? Addressing this significant matter and taking different approaches in response to the state of the discipline, the papers in this volume offer diverse ways of overcoming Eurocentrism: the role of institutions and the changes they need to undergo; possible ways of practicing a truly global comparative literature; the history of the discipline outside Europe; premodern histories of ideas and the non-European origins of modernity; translation, orientalism and area studies; publishing and literary circulation; and modern technologies and their impact on literary dissemination and the discipline. This collection assesses comparative literature at a timely historical moment and will broaden the field by addressing the students and scholars of comparative literary studies all over the world with significant hints for more inclusive histories of world literature.

This book aims to study the representation of motherhood in self-life writing by English-speaking authors. It highlights the particular issues women writers are faced with when they try to combine their vocation as artists with their duties towards their children. For those women who claim their right to be both mothers and writers, several cultural myths need to be taken down, chief among which is the representations that we have of what being an artist should be like, as well as the role a mother should have towards her children. This book looks at self-life writing by women from English-speaking countries to reveal the common themes and tropes which recur in texts written on the subject of motherhood, by looking at them from both a literary and a cultural perspective. It also aims to demonstrate that a new generation of women writers is taking up the subject and forging a new literary tradition.

This volume offers unique, interdisciplinary perspectives by evaluating, analyzing, and interpreting how the past, the present, and potential futures may be affected by pandemic storytelling. The chapters analyze the interplay between various disciplines that explore COVID-19 narratives and study the influence of pandemics on storytelling. The authors invite you to delve into the intricate social, cultural, and political dynamics between anthropocentric societies, human nature, and their implications for an understanding of our interactions with others and environments. Most importantly, this volume initiates insightful conversations, highlighting that in times of crisis the most valuable thing we can hold on to is human connection.

This volume calls for a Narratology of Diversity by investigating narratives of non-normative bodies and minds. It explores mental health representations in literature, including neurodiversity, the body-mind nexus, and embodied non-normativities, therein emphasizing the importance of understanding diverse psychological conditions as represented in narratives. The contributions include perspectives from a wide variety of scholars of European, North American, and comparative literature and culture. While post-classical narratology has evolved through phases of diversification and consolidation, this volume represents innovation in understanding narrative development to embrace new areas of social awareness, including gendered narratologies (specifically feminist and queer narratologies) and post-colonial criticism, paving the way for a more inclusive narratology.

In this compelling new book, A. Robert Lee tackles the questions: how, and why, does a literary work assume the mantle of ‘modern'? He shows, with wit and verve, that writing as far back as Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales can be called ‘modern'. That the term further applies to John Skelton's poetry and to Shakespeare's Hamlet and to the sexual and theological verse of John Donne. That ‘modern'literary experimentation holds as you read Sterne's Tristram Shandy, the poetry of Byron, the gothic of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, the essays of Hazlitt, a novel like Conrad's The Secret Agent and the work of Samuel Butler, Lytton Strachey and Ford Madox Ford. That with writers such as Mina Loy, Dorothy Richardson and Jean Rhys you have a gallery of the feminist modern. These ‘ultra'moderns segue into the postmodern turn of B.S. Johnson and Ann Quin and to boundary-pushing contemporary fiction, from Bernardine Evaristo to Alan Hollinghurst. However singular each writer, Lee argues persuasively for a distinctive collection of ‘modern'voices.

This book offers an analytical model for the interpretation of theory-informed novels – American, English, French, German, and Italian – from the past 50 years. Works discussed include Laurent Binet's The 7th Function of Language, Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, Patricia Duncker's Hallucinating Foucault, Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, David Lodge's Small World, and Juli Zeh's Dark Matter. Erik Schilling shows how these works not only incorporate elements of theory in playful, intertextual ways, but productively work with theory – for instance, by elaborating the complexities of the roles of author and reader or by confronting the quest for meaning with an infinite network of signs. Schilling argues that the novels do not merely adopt theory; they create theory – and this theorizing literature requires new forms of interpretation.

The first volume of A Comparative Literary History of Modern Slavery explores literary representations of enslavement with a focus on the emotions. The contributors consider how the diverse emotions generated by slavery have been represented over a historical period stretching from the 16th century to the present and across regions, languages, media and genres. The seventeen chapters explore different framings of emotional life in terms of ‘sentiments'and ‘affects'and consider how emotions intersect with literary registers and movements such as melodrama and realism. They also examine how writers, including some formerly enslaved people, sought to activate the feelings of readers, notably in the context of abolitionism. In addition to obvious psychological responses to slavery such as fear, sorrow and anger, they explore minor-key affects such as shame, disgust and nostalgia and address the complexity of depicting love and intimacy in situations of domination. Two forthcoming volumes explore the literary history of slavery in relation to memory and to practices of authorship.

This interdisciplinary book investigates the various ways in which North American and European modern and contemporary artists, authors, and musicians have returned to earlier works of their own, engaging in inventive revivals and transformations of the past in the present. The book is distinctive in its focus on such revisits, as well as in the diversity of art forms under review: in addition to visual art, the book explores fiction, poetry, literary criticism, film, rock music, and philosophy. This scope, together with the time-span covered in the book, from the 1850s to the twenty-first century, allows for a broad view on retrospection and revision. The case studies presented here offer a multifaceted exploration of the widely different goals to which practitioners of the arts have made retrospection and revision functional against the background of cultural, social, political, and personal forces.

What is at stake in Freud's enduring preoccupation with a process supposedly diverting sexuality into cultural activity? In this study, a leading scholar of psychoanalysis and literature re-opens the old question of sublimation in a critical reading that explores one of the last remaining puzzles of Freudian thought. Using the rigorous framework provided by Jean Laplanche, Luke Thurston resituates sublimation as an unfinished Freudian concept bound up with a much wider history of philosophical and literary reflection. Exploring the misunderstanding and reinvention of sublimation both in accounts of cultural history and in Lacan's celebrated reading of Antigone, Thurston challenges some of the prevalent assumptions still seen in contemporary “theory.” Thurston links his critical investigation of psychoanalysis to modernist literature, discovering both parallels and alternatives to Freud's idea of sublimation in little-known works by May Sinclair and David Jones. The study concludes by arguing that these modernist artists, both of whom were significantly affected by trauma during the First World War, produced work radically at odds with the established canons of representation, and that this “anti-hermeneutic” art can be linked to a “Copernican” sublimation, a process not controlled by the ego but vitalizing it and decentring its habitual structure.

The Emerging Contours of the Medium explores a crucial aspect of media thinking, focusing particularly on the'mediality'of literature, a medium that remains today on the margins of the theoretical discussion of media. The book was written by a collective of authors based in the Institute of Czech Literature, Czech Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic. Even though interest in the technological and media aspects of literature has been slowly building momentum in the past several decades, from comparative perspectives to written culture to new media, the concept of the medium has not informed this process, and its systematic integration into literary studies has never been effectively carried out. Nor has the specific mediality of literature been successfully integrated into the general concept of media/lity in media science. Contributors to this work provide both an explanation of and solution to this mutual blindness, setting out from the question: What are the conditions for elaborating a media-theoretical framework in which to situate literature as a medium? The Emerging Contours of the Medium, available for the first time in English, is divided into three parts, which correlate to the three main research areas of the principles for a media theory of literature. Part 1 develops a perspective of the (pre)history of media thinking, grounding the principles of the genealogical integration. Part 2 concentrates on and develops the related perspectives of media philosophy and media anthropology. Part 3's main focus is the way media – as dispositifs interlinking the parameters of perception and communication – provide the ground for making emergent media phenomena visible, whether it be between media (in their mutual synergy or discrepancies), between media artefacts, or between human and apparatus.Stanislava Fedrová is Head of the Department of Art Historiography and Theory at the Institute of Art History at the Czech Academy of Sciences, researcher at the Institute of Czech Literature of the Czech Academy of Sciences and Assistant Professor of Literature and Intercultural Communication at Masaryk University, Czech Republic. Her scholarly interests include literary theory, art theory, visual culture and intermedial research, with a focus on the relations between verbal and visual media. She is co-author, with Alice Jedlicková, of Visible Descriptions: Visuality, Suggestivity and Intermediality of Literary Description (2016). Tomáš Chudý works as an independent researcher, translator (Kittler, Luhmann, Taylor etc.) and lawyer for the Czech National Bank. His research interests include media philosophy and the interrelation of technical and humanist paradigms by means of working with signs, as well as interlinking social and economic aspects in technically mediated communication. He has published in scholarly journals, such as Social Studies, and he is the co-author, with Richard Müller et al., of the Czech edition of The Emerging Contours of the Medium: Literature and Mediality (2020). Alice Jedlickova is Senior Researcher at the Institute of Czech Literature of the Czech Academy of Sciences, and Associate Professor of Literature and Intercultural Communication at Masaryk University, Czech Republic. Her research interests include intermedial studies (socio-spatial relations of cultural representations) and its history, literary theory, diachronic poetics and the theory of narrative. She is the editor of, and principle contributor to Narrative Modes of 19th Century Czech Prose (2022), and co-author, with Stanislava Fedrová, of the interdisciplinary inquiry Visible Descriptions: Visuality, Suggestivity and Intermediality of Literary Description (2016). She has published on transmediation as a marker of cultural continuity and on the potential of intermedial approach in edu

This edited volume aims to reposition intertextuality in relation to recent trends in critical practice. Inspired by the work of Sara Ahmed in particular, our authors explore and reconfigure classic theories of authorship, influence and the text (including those by Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Harold Bloom), updating these conversations to include intersectionality specifically, broadly understood to include gendered, racial and other forms of social justice including disability, and the progressive impact of the transmission and transformation of texts. This diverse volume includes discussions of major canonical works such as James Joyce's Ulysses alongside the recent contemporary literature by authors such as Siri Husvedt and Maggie O'Farrell, as well as theoretical interventions. This volume also engages with how intertextuality can facilitate interdisciplinary and ekphrastic thinking and representation, as the inspiration of music and the visual arts for texts and their transmission is addressed. The choice of intertexts become deliberately political, ethical and artistic signifiers for the authors discussed in this volume, and our contributors are thus enabled to address topics ranging from visual impairment to Shakespearean motherhood to the influence of Jazz culture on writing on the Northern Irish Troubles.

Dans un passage de son Roman bourgeois (1666), Antoine Furetière prête à l'un de ses personnages le projet burlesque d'un livre intitulé Rubricologie, ou de l'invention des titres et rubriques, où il est montré qu'un beau titre est le véritable proxénète d'un livre. Le présent ouvrage prend au sérieux cette entreprise, pour comprendre ce que, durant le xviie siècle, le titre fait au livre et réciproquement. Quels sont les ressorts et les manifestations de l'enjeu commercial des titres? Dans quels contextes s'inscrivent-ils? Quels en sont les effets de sens, y compris dans leur forme matérielle? Quelles pratiques de lecture induisent-ils? L'étude menée dans ce volume s'attache à répondre aux nombreuses questions que suscite le tout premier énoncé d'un livre.

Quand des modernes relisent les Anciens… traite de quelques écrivains modernes ou contemporains qui ont en commun de s'être un jour réclamés de Rome ou de la Grèce. Certains, en se frottant aux Anciens, ont voulu « délivrer un message » ; d'autres se sont simplement divertis. Quand Paul Valéry traduit les Bucoliques de Virgile entre 1942 et 1944, il ne se confond pas avec Jean Giono présentant vers la même époque « les pages immortelles de Virgile », et encore moins avec Hermann Broch composant La Mort de Virgile. Même chose quand Vintila Horia en 1960, David Malouf en 1978, Christoph Ransmayr en 1988 puisent dans l'œuvre d'Ovide la matière de leurs propres romans. Sans parler des variations que brodèrent Giono, Giraudoux, Georges Sion, André Maurois autour de l'Odyssée, de Plaute, du Satyricon, de Tibulle. Sauf que tous sont partis des mêmes modèles, et c'est ce qui fait l'unité, l'unité dans la diversité, de ces lectures à cheval sur deux siècles.

This volume is a critical investigation into the contemporary phenomenon of the dissensus of the globe and the planet, and the new terrains of consciousness that need to be negotiated towards a possibility for transformation. It examines the possibilities of alternate, sustainable modes of being and existing in a world which requires a unified, ethical, biopolitical worldview. The book explores themes like philosophical posthumanism and planetary concerns; disruption of cultural and intellectual inequality; bodily movement through nomadic subjectivity; dystopic spatialities of game(re)play; globalization, and speculative imaginaries of the body; and theory of multiplicity. It also discusses the impact of COVID-19 on human beings, the role of the neoliberal media, the question of rights of robots and cyborgs in sci-fi movies, and representation of refugees in literature.This book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of English literature, political philosophy, cultural studies, literary cultures, post-colonial studies, critical theory, and social anthropology.

Nicht nur die Zeit des Menschen, auch die Eigenzeiten der Literatur stehen heute in einem vielschichtigen Spannungsverhältnis zur Zeit der Natur. Doch welche Mittel besitzt die Literatur, um die menschliche Wahrnehmungsfähigkeit für die Zeiten anderer Lebewesen oder gar für planetarische Zeitmaße zu sensibilisieren? Wie geht die zunehmende Mathematisierung der Zeit in sie ein? Und in welchem Verhältnis stehen literaturhistorische Zäsuren zu Paradigmenwechseln in den Naturwissenschaften? Diesen und weiteren Fragen geht der Sammelband nach, indem er exemplarisch die Genealogie der literarischen Verzeitlichung von Natur nachvollzieht – von den kosmischen Fiktionen um 1800 bis zu den Geschichten vom Anthropo-, Cthulhu- und Kapitalozän, die das 21. Jahrhundert prägen.​

Over the past decade cultural theory has seen a number of'turns'- the materialist turn, the animal turn, the affective turn - that address the human as an affective, embodied, and ultimately vulnerable animal embedded in dense webs of more-than-human relations, in short as a posthuman phenomenon. Care philosophy shares this focus on embodiment and vulnerability in its insistence on interdependence as the defining condition of human life, making it well positioned for a posthuman turn. To this end, Curious Kin in Fictions of Posthuman Care draws together contemporary narrative fictions that challenge humanist conceptions of care in their imaginative depiction of more-than-human affective bonds, arguing for an expansion care philosophy's central figure: the embodied, embedded, and encumbered'human'. Fictional narratives of care between humans and robots, bioengineered creatures, clones, nonhuman animals, aliens or inanimate things, highlight the limits of humanist ethical models'capacity to register and accommodate posthuman relational intimacies, while gesturing towards a model of care able to accommodate networked interdependencies that extend beyond the human realm. Texts by Margaret Atwood, Louise Erdrich, Louisa Hall, Eva Hornung, Kazuo Ishiguro, Bhanu Kapil, and Jesmyn Ward, along with films and television programmes like Robot and Frank, Under the Skin, and Real Humans, depict a range of scenarios in which more-than-human care relations not only supersede human-human relationships, but suggest new human/animal/machine ways of being that offer novel insights into the possible presents and futures of posthuman care. Curious Kin in Fictions of Posthuman Care reveals how these fictions do their own theorizing, imagining the politics, ethics and aesthetics of specific, contextualized scenarios of posthuman contact and companionship. Interweaving posthuman theory, care philosophy and contemporary fiction, Curious Kin in Fictions of Posthuman Care offers generative visions of care that make room for the incredible range of affects, energies, behaviours, attachments and dependencies that produce and sustain life in more-than-human worlds.

Dangerous, dark and difficult to detect, poisons have been a common character in literature from ancient times to the modern day. Their ability to perform deadly deeds at a distance is a common device for creating dramatic tension and playing on our real life fears. But what is fact and what is pure fiction? From Shakespeare and Dickens to Hugo and Poe, the macabre world of literary poisonings is as large as it is fascinating. Utilising real forensic science Poisonous Tales explores the real science inspiring the toxins and tinctures in our favourite works. Could a poison really mimic death in Romeo and Juliet? What is the cause of the mad Hatter's malady in Alice in Wonderland? And could a stone from the stomach of a goat really have been used as an antidote in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince? Through these and many more ‘cases'we discover the captivating truth in the texts and how real-life tragedies can replicate themselves in fiction.

From the acclaimed author of The Shakespeare Wars and Explaining Hitler comes a stirring manifesto on love in the modern age.Who wrote the book of love?In an impassioned polemic, Ron Rosenbaum—who has written books on the mysteries of Hitler's evil, the magic of Shakespeare's words, and the terrifying power of thermonuclear explosions—takes on perhaps his greatest challenge: the nature of love. Rosenbaum argues that what we know as love is imperiled now by the quantifiers, the digitizers, and their algorithms, who all seek to reduce love to electrical, chemical, and mathematical formulas.Rosenbaum brings excitement to his thinking as he interrogates the neuroscience of love, with its “trait constellations,” and the efforts of others to turn all human lovers into numerical configurations. He asks us why our culture has become so obsessed with codifying and quantifying love through algorithms. The very capacity that makes us human, Rosenbaum argues, is being taken over by numerical methods of explanation.In Defense of Love is more than an examination of the intersection of love with literature and science. It is a celebration of the persistence of a mysterious and uncanny phenomenon: the inexorable power of love.

Die Digitalisierung hat eine Weiterentwicklung literarischer Schreibweisen und Verfahren angeregt und zu ihrer Beschreibung neue poetologische Begriffe hervorgebracht. Einige der scheinbar neuen Verfahren, wie etwa der Einsatz von Listen und Gesten der Überaffirmation, finden sich jedoch schon in früheren literarischen Programmen, zum Beispiel in der Pop-Literatur. Die Beiträge des Bandes fragen nach formalen Kontinuitäten, Brüchen und anderen Formen der Bezugnahme auf historische Vorläufer in der jüngsten Gegenwartsliteratur. Um herauszufinden, ob ein postdigitales Zeitalter auch ästhetisch konturiert werden kann, beleuchten sie Innovationen und Bezüge der neuesten Literatur zu literarischen Traditionen, etwa zur Romantik, Avantgarde oder Postmoderne.

Literary Onomastics surveys different methods of studying names in works of literature and offers representative works of literary onomastic analysis. Included in this volume are qualitative studies that examine select names as well as quantitative studies that examine entire systems of names. These studies of literary names straddle centuries, cross genres, and defy simple categorization. Leading and emerging scholars in this field provide insight into the namecraft of William Shakespeare, Philip Sidney, John Donne, Julia Alvarez, Ursula K. Le Guin, Zadie Smith, George R. R. Martin, and Britain's Rebel Writers. The theories and methods they employ are associated with cultural, linguistic, rhetorical, feminist, and ethnic studies. Collectively, these scholars demonstrate the many approaches available to the study of names and naming practices in literary works. Additionally, they consider how names function in a variety of genres and mediums, including poetry, novels, science fiction, and fantasy.

Europas Literatur: Wann und unter welchen Bedingungen entstand sie? Was sind ihre spezifischen Merkmale? Auf diese Fragen antwortet das vorliegende Buch. Sein Ansatz ist europäistisch, nicht nationalsprachlich. Es geht zunächst um die antike Revolution der Rationalität, die Erfindung von Philosophie und Wissenschaft. Damit beginnt in Europa ein postmythisches Zeitalter. Das verändert auch die Literatur fundamental. Der Autor beschreibt, wie die Gattungen Drama, Roman, Lyrik, wie auch die Poetik Europas auf diese Situation reagieren und gerade jene Bereich des menschlichen Bewusstseins literarisch erforschen, welche die Rationalität von sich ausgeschlossen hat: Sinnlichkeit, Emotionen, Fantasie.

Writing as a competitive athlete, an academic, and a woman, Leslie Heywood merges personal history and scholarship to expose the'anorexic logic'that underlies Western high culture. She maneuvers deftly across the terrain of modern literature, illustrating how this logic—the privileging of mind over body, of hard over soft, of masculine over feminine—is at the heart of the modernist style. Her argument ranges from Plato to women's bodybuilding, from Franz Kafka to Nike ads. In penetrating examinations of Kafka, Pound, Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and Conrad, Heywood demonstrates how the anorexic aesthetic is embodied in high modernism. In a compelling chapter on Jean Rhys, Heywood portrays an author who struggles to develop a clean, spare,'anorexic'style in the midst of a shatteringly messy emotional life. As Heywood points out, students are trained in the aesthetic of high modernism, and academics are pressured into its straitjacket. The resulting complications are reflected in structures as diverse as gender identity formation, sexual harassment, and eating disorders. Direct, engaging, and intensely informed by the author's personal involvement with her subject, Dedication to Hunger offers a powerful challenge to cultural assumptions about language, gender, subjectivity, and identity. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1996.

Esta obra reúne um conjunto diversificado de textos que abordam temas relativos aos estudos literários, em perspectiva interdisciplinar e múltipla. Conjunto de ensaios produzidos por pesquisadores de diferentes instituições de ensino, com abordagens diversificadas sobre temas, obras e autores, proporcionando uma leitura atual no campo dos estudos literários. Os textos tecem relações com outras áreas, tais como a História, a Filosofia, a Política e afins.

En busca de las palabras reúne los textos críticos y filosóficos sobre literatura y arte escritos por Oscar del Barco a lo largo de más de cuarenta años. En todos ellos es posible advertir una constante: la concepción del arte como una manifestación de lo sagrado, donde tanto el creador como el receptor no son más que oportunidades para la aparición del misterio de la existencia. A contrapelo de la mayoría de las corrientes estéticas contemporáneas, Oscar del Barco defiende el arte como un propulsor de lo místico: una forma de éxtasis en la que el sujeto se extingue en lo absoluto. Para esto somete a crítica las ideas de representación y mímesis, con el propósito de deslegitimar los dualismos entre lenguaje y realidad, sujeto y objeto, espíritu y cuerpo. Los filósofos a los que acude, como Nietzsche y Blanchot, le sirven para acercarse —nunca analizar ni develar el sentido, algo contra lo que explícitamente se pronuncia— a Mallarmé, Artaud, Macedonio Fernández o Juan L. Ortiz. En su prólogo, sostiene Carlos Riccardo:'Y si'Blanchot nunca abandona sus temas', cabe destacar que Oscar del Barco tampoco abandona los suyos. Son'temas'o líneas de fuerza que parecen emerger desde una zona central y efectivizarse en los diversos campos donde operan —el teórico-político, el filosófico, el poético— y desde donde se propagan, por debajo de la superficie, alcanzando múltiples perspectivas'.

The three works considered in Hierarchy and Mutuality in Paradise Lost, Moby-Dick and The Brothers Karamazov display a striking overlap in their concern with hierarchy and mutuality as parallel and often intersecting way of how human beings relate to each other and to divine forces in the universe. All three contain adversarial protagonists whose stature often commands admiration from audiences less ready to confront their motives and deeds than to be swayed by their verbal harangues. Why the quest for personal power should disturb the serenity of mutual love with such compelling force is an issue that Milton, Melville and Dostoevsky address with varying degrees of self-consciousness. In their texts the seeds of disaster seem to sprout in both spiritual and barren soil, sometimes nurtured by a hierarchy that gave them birth, at others in reaction against a hierarchy that would stifle their energy. The purpose of this study is to analyze the origins and the consequences of such tensions.

Zahlreiche Fachkollegen und Schüler haben sich zusammengefunden, um in diesem Band Alberto Martino zu seinem 60. Geburtstag die Ehre zu erweisen. Mit diesem Geschenk soll der Forscher und Lehrer gewürdigt werden, dessen beständiges Interesse an den literarischen Wechselbeziehungen in Europa und an einer sozialgeschichtlich orientierten, auf Quellen-material fundierten Literaturgeschichte vielen als Anregung diente, ja sogar zum Vorbild wurde.

This book comprehensively explores the space of literary tourism and how literature can introduce, promote, and contribute to the awareness of cultural landmarks. Aimed not only at literature enthusiasts, but also at those who love to travel along less beaten paths, In the Poets'Footsteps: Literature, Tourism, and Promotion tells the story of literary tourism between the beginning of the 1800s and today. Giovanni Capecchi surveys the methods most used today, namely printed and online literary guides, that offer a wide panorama of writers'homes and evaluates literary festivals as events capable of giving cultural and economic opportunities to the territories that host them. Rich in examples and'case studies', capable of linking literature and economics, the book is itself a journey: a trip to real or imaginary locations, in the footsteps of poets, to discover places that have hosted and inspired great writers. After its success in Italy, where the second edition is about to be published, this book is now being released simultaneously in English and in Spanish.

Literary Invention and the Cartographic Imagination: Early Modern to Late Modern is a wide-ranging, inter- and transdisciplinary approach grounded in the twin rigors of theory and history, which, through close readings of authors from Edmund Spenser to Olga Tokarczuk, and through considered discussions of the ideologies of walking and mapping, in performance art and cultural representation, assesses and analyses the significance of maps to literary texts, and which examines the ways in which the literary maps imaginary and real worlds. Together, the essays demonstrate convincingly the close relationship between text, map and culture.

With this volume, the editors Katharina Edtstadler, Sandra Folie, and Gianna Zocco propose an extension of the traditional conception of imagology as a theory and method for studying the cultural construction and literary representation of national, usually European characters. Consisting of an instructive introduction and 21 articles, the book relates this sub-field of comparative literature to contemporary political developments and enriches it with new interdisciplinary, transnational, intersectional, and intermedial perspectives. The contributions offer [1] a reconsideration and update of the field's methods, genres, and theoretical frames; [2] trans-/post-national, migratory, and marginalized perspectives beyond the European nation-state; [3] insights into geopolitical dichotomies such as Orient/Occident; [4] intersectional approaches considering the entanglements of national images with notions of age, class, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity/race; [5] investigations of the role of national images in visual narratives and music.

As the Bible indicates, our lives are a construction zone, for our bodies are temples of the divine Spirit. Formed initially in the image of God, human beings lost intimacy with God through corruption, rebellion, or neglect. In response, the divine Creator loves us back into relationship, providing means of grace to help restore us to wholeness, beginning with our body and continuing through our mind, soul, and spirit. As buildings need cleaning, maintenance, and ongoing care, so our inner temple needs spiritual stimulus, cleaning, and care. Rebuilding the Temple is the fourth book in Vande Kappelle's series on spirituality and the arts. Books in this series reinforce the essential principle underlying all authentic spirituality:'Go deep in any one place and you will meet the infinite aliveness that is God, for God is everywhere!'Whereas earlier books consider the connection of spirituality with creative arts such as poetry, film, music, theater, drama, dance, and modern literature, this volume takes readers on a journey through classic Christian literature, beginning with the Bible and continuing through inspirational works written by diverse spiritual mentors such as Augustine, Dante, Luther, Calvin, Teresa of Avila, George Fox, Blaise Pascal, Henri Nouwen, A. W. Tozer, John McLaren, John Shelby Spong, Richard Rohr, and Marcus Borg. Reading their works reminds us that Christian literature is most practical and inspirational when it takes a narrative approach to theology, interpreting the spiritual journey through the ongoing stories of people and communities rather than trying to capture timeless truths analytically or through rational argumentation. Like its companion texts, Wading on Water, Deep Splendor, and Deeper Splendor, this volume is useful for individual or group study. Each chapter concludes with questions suitable for discussion or reflection.

Life's ultimate adventure--its grandest game and greatest challenge--is the spiritual transformation of the self. According to Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, personality and spirituality are interrelated, spirituality flowing out of individuality. Noting that people differ in fundamental ways, even though they possess the same instincts to drive them from within, Jung discovered that preference, rather than instinct, upbringing, environment, or genetic conditioning, is central to personality. The task of spirituality, then, is not to help us achieve correct doctrine or attain saintly status, but rather to help us best understand our humanity. This endeavor drives Deeper Splendor, a study of spirituality and personality in modern literature. We focus on modern literature, rather than on theology, philosophy, psychology, or sociology, because, as this volume makes clear, one of the best resources for studying transformative spirituality is great literature. The great power of literature is that it speaks of human action and thought, not in the dry, matter-of-fact terms of history, ethics, psychology, or some other science, but in ways that are lively, uplifting, and productive. Engaging with great literature is like beginning a love affair. Such encounters may appear daunting at first, but when you fall in love, you want to know everything about the object of your love, and every encounter leaves you wanting more. When literature enhances spirituality--as is true in the dozen or more selections examined in Deeper Splendor--each literary moment renders us more fully alive. Like its companion texts, Wading in Water and Deep Splendor, this volume is useful for individual or group study. Each chapter concludes with questions suitable for discussion or reflection.

Imaginative Ecologies: Inspiring Change through the Humanities highlights the role literature and visual arts play in fostering sustainability. It weaves together contributions by international scholars, practitioners and environmental activists whose insights are brought together to illustrate how creative imaginations can inspire change. One of the most outstanding characteristic of this volume is its interdisciplinarity and its varied methods of inquiry. The field of environmental humanities is discussed together with ideas such as the role of the public intellectual and el buen vivir. Examples of ecofiction from the UK, the US and Spain are analysed while artistic practices aimed at raising awareness of the effects of the Anthropocene are presented as imaginative ways of reacting against climate change and rampant capitalism.

A timely story of a forgotten emotionCheerfulness: A Literary and Cultural History tells a new story about the cultural imagination of the West wherein cheerfulness — a momentary uptick in emotional energy, a temporary lightening of spirit — functions as a crucial theme in literary, philosophical, and artistic creations from early modern to contemporary times. In dazzling interpretations of Shakespeare and Montaigne, Hume, Austen and Emerson, Dickens, Nietzsche, and Louis Armstrong, Hampton explores the philosophical construal of cheerfulness — as a theme in Protestant theology, a focus of medical writing, a topic in Enlightenment psychology, and a category of modern aesthetics. In a conclusion on cheerfulness in pandemic days, Hampton stresses the importance of lightness of mind under the pressure of catastrophe. A history of the emotional life of European and American cultures, a breathtaking exploration of the intersections of culture, literature, and psychology, Cheerfulness challenges the dominant narrative of Western aesthetics as a story of melancholy, mourning, tragedy, and trauma. Hampton captures the many appearances of this fleeting and powerfully transformative emotion whose historical and literary trajectory has never before been systematically traced.

Perhaps no concept has become dominant in so many fields as rapidly as the Anthropocene. Meaning'The Age of Humans,'the Anthropocene is the proposed name for our current geological epoch, beginning when human activities started to have a noticeable impact on Earth's geology and ecosystems. Long embraced by the natural sciences, the Anthropocene has now become commonplace in the humanities and social sciences, where it has taken firm enough hold to engender a thoroughgoing assessment and critique. Why and how has the geological concept of the Anthropocene become important to the humanities? What new approaches and insights do the humanities offer? What narratives and critiques of the Anthropocene do the humanities produce? What does it mean to study literature of the Anthropocene? These are the central questions that this collection explores. Each chapter takes a decidedly different humanist approach to the Anthropocene, from environmental humanities to queer theory to race, illuminating the important contributions of the humanities to the myriad discourses on the Anthropocene. This volume is designed to provide concise overviews of particular approaches and texts, as well as compelling and original interventions in the study of the Anthropocene. Written in an accessible style free from disciplinary-specific jargon, many chapters focus on well-known authors and texts, making this collection especially useful to teachers developing a course on the Anthropocene and students undertaking introductory research. This collection provides truly innovative arguments regarding how and why the Anthropocene concept is important to literature and the humanities.

This book explains the elimination of maternal characters in American, British, French, and German literature before 1890 by examining motherless creations: Pygmalion's statue, Frankenstein's creature, homunculi, automata, androids, golems, and steam men. These beings typify what is now called artificial life, living systems made through manufactured means. Fantasies about creating life ex-utero were built upon misconceptions about how life began, sustaining pseudoscientific beliefs about the birthing body. Physicians, inventors, and authors of literature imagined generating life without women to control the process of reproduction and generate perfect progeny. Thus, some speculative fiction before 1890 belongs to the literary genealogy of transhumanism, the belief that technology will someday transform some humans into superior, immortal beings. Female motherless creations tend to operate as sexual companions. Male ones often emerge as subaltern figures analogous to enslaved beings, illustrating that reproductive rights inform readers'sense of who counts as human in fictions of artificial life.

Writing Plague: Language and Violence from the Black Death to COVID-19 brings a holistic and comparative perspective to “plague writing” from the later Middle Ages to the twenty-first century. It argues that while the human “hardware” has changed enormously between the medieval past and the present (urbanization, technology, mass warfare, and advances in medical science), the human “software” (emotional and psychological reactions to the shock of pandemic) has remained remarkably similar across time. Through close readings of works by medieval writers like Guillaume de Machaut, Giovanni Boccaccio, and Geoffrey Chaucer in the fourteenth century, select plays by Shakespeare, and modern “plague” fiction and film, Alfred Thomas convincingly demonstrates psychological continuities between the Black Death and COVID-19. In showing how in times of plague human beings repress their fears and fantasies and displace them onto the threatening “other,” Thomas highlights the danger of scapegoating vulnerable minority groups such as Asian Americans and Jews in today's America. This wide-ranging study will thus be of interest not only to medievalists but also to students of modernity as well as the general reader.

Essays from a master critic on how artistic giants from modernism onward confronted mortality—forging unexpected links between Twain, Woolf, Mahler, Wittgenstein, Beckett, Toni Morrison, and more While much about modernism remains up for debate, there can be no dispute about the connection between modernist art and death. The long modern moment was and is an age of war, genocide, and annihilation. Two world wars killed perhaps as many as 100 million people, through combat, famine, holocaust, and ghastly attacks on civilians. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is the fifth global pandemic since 1918, with more than a half-million American deaths and counting. It can hardly come as a surprise, then, that many of the touchstones of modernism reflect on death and devastation. In Philip D. Beidler's exploration of the modernist canon, he illuminates how these singular voices looked extinction in the eye and tried to reckon with our finitude—and their own. The Great Beyond:Art in the Age of Annihilation catalogs through lively prose an eclectic selection of artists, writers, and thinkers. In 16 essays, Beidler takes nuanced and surprising approaches to well-studied figures—the haunting sculpture by Saint-Gaudens commissioned by Henry Adams for his late wife; Luchino Visconti's adaptation of Mann's Death in Venice; and the author's own long fascination with Beckett's Waiting for Godot. The threads and recurring motifs that emerge through Beidler's analysis bridge the different media, genres, and timeframes of the works under consideration. Protomodernists Crane and Twain connect with near-contemporary voices like Sebald and Morrison. Robert MacFarlane's 21st-century nonfiction about what lies underneath the earth echoes the Furerbunker and the poetry of Gertrud Kolmar. Learned but lively, somber but not grim, The Great Beyond is not a comfortable read, but it is in a way comforting. In tracing how his subjects confronted nothingness, be it personal or global, Beidler draws a brilliant map of how we see the end of the road.

An exploration of Marcel Proust and Anthony Powell's greatest literary achievements.There are few writers about whom opinions diverge so widely as Anthony Powell, whose Dance to the Music of Time sequence is one of the most ambitious literary constructions in the English language. In Different Speeds, Same Furies, Perry Anderson measures Powell's achievement against Marcel Proust's celebrated In Search of Lost Time.The literature on Dance is a drop in the ocean compared to that on Proust. Yet in construction of plot and depiction of character, Anderson ranks Powell above him. How much do particular advantages of this kind matter, and why is Powell an odd man out in English letters? At once so similar and dissimilar, the intricate retrospectives of the two novelists on bohemia and Society, upbringing and mortality, relationships and personality, invite interrelated judgements.The closing chapters of Different Speeds, Same Furies reach beyond their handlings of time to chart the historical novel from Waverley to Underworld, and the breakthrough in epistolatory fiction of Montesquieu's Persian Letters, held together by what its author described as ‘a secret chain which remains, as it were, invisible'.

In diesem grundlegenden Werk geht es um die Darstellung und Interpretation einer Kulturgeschichte der Literatur im Spannungsfeld von buchstäblichem Verstehen und symbolischer Deutung. Ausgangspunkt einer kritischen Diskussion philosophischer und literaturtheoretischer Positionen ist eine Reflexion über das Bild Offenes Buch von Paul Klee. Darauf aufbauend wird eine Poetik der Bedeutungsoffenheit entwickelt, die Philologie als eine Kulturgeschichte der Literatur versteht. An den Leitbegriffen von Poiesis (Philologie als Überlieferungsgeschichte), Katharsis (Philologie als Wirkungsgeschichte) und Aisthesis (Philologie als Deutungsgeschichte) wird das Modell PoiKAi generiert, mit dem sich eine Kulturgeschichte der Literatur schreiben lässt. Umfangreiche Register (Begriffe, Quellentitel, Namen) erschließen das Buch zusätzlich als Enzyklopädie.

This book is an exploration of the viability of applying the post structuralist theory of intertextuality to early modern texts. It suggests that a return to a more theorised understanding of intertextuality, as that outlined by Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes, is more productive than an interpretation which merely identifies ‘source'texts. The book analyses several key early modern texts through this lens, arguing that the period's conscious focus on and prioritisation of the creative imitation of classical and contemporary European texts makes it a particularly fertile era for intertextual reading. This analysis includes discussion of early modern creative writers'utilisation of classical mythology, allegory, folklore, parody, and satire, in works by William Shakespeare, Sir Francis Bacon, John Milton, George Peele, Thomas Lodge, Christopher Marlowe, Francis Beaumont, and Ben Jonson, and foregrounds how meaning is created and conveyed by the interplay of texts and the movement between narrative systems. This book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students of early modern literature, as well as early modern scholars.

A “delightful” (Vanity Fair) collection from the longest-running, most influential book review in America, featuring its best, funniest, strangest, and most memorable coverage over the past 125 years.Since its first issue on October 10, 1896, The New York Times Book Review has brought the world of ideas to the reading public. It is the publication where authors have been made, and where readers first encountered the classics that have enriched their lives. Now the editors have curated the Book Review's dynamic 125-year history, which is essentially the story of modern American letters. Brimming with remarkable reportage and photography, this beautiful book collects interesting reviews, never-before-heard anecdotes about famous writers, and spicy letter exchanges. Here are the first takes on novels we now consider masterpieces, including a long-forgotten pan of Anne of Green Gables and a rave of Mrs. Dalloway, along with reviews and essays by Langston Hughes, Eudora Welty, James Baldwin, Nora Ephron, and more. With scores of stunning vintage photographs, many of them sourced from the Times's own archive, readers will discover how literary tastes have shifted through the years—and how the Book Review's coverage has shaped so much of what we read today.

Ist die Krise ein konstitutives Phänomen der Moderne? Die Beiträge dieses Bandes, die auf eine interdisziplinäre Vortragsreihe der Neuphilologischen Fakultät der Universität Heidelberg zurückgehen, widmen sich dieser Frage anhand von literarischen Texten des 19., 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts. Im Dialog zwischen der Literaturwissenschaft und benachbarten kultur-, sozial- und geschichtswissenschaftlichen Disziplinen zeichnen sie nach, wie ökonomische, politische und kulturelle Modernisierungsschübe als kollektive Krisenerfahrung in Werken der Weltliteratur ihren ästhetischen Ausdruck finden. Sie beleuchten Aspekte, in denen Literatur sozialwissenschaftlichen Methoden in der Beschreibung der Krise(n) der Moderne überlegen sein kann.

Die Arbeit systematisiert das Politische in der unmittelbaren Gegenwartsliteratur. Die philologische Analyse ausgewählter Erzähltexte wird dabei unter Einbezug politischer Theorien methodisch erweitert, um thematische und ästhetische Neuausrichtungen zu kennzeichnen. Mit bislang ungehörten Stimmen, Perspektiven und Narrativen entwerfen die untersuchten Texte insbesondere literarische Reflexionsräume des Politischen im Sinne des geregelten Streits.

This book explores the history of women's engagement with writing experimentally. Women writers have long used different narratives and modes of writing as a way of critiquing worlds and stories that they find themselves at odds with, but at the same time, as a way to participate in such spaces. Experimentation—of style, mode, voice, genre and language—has enabled women writers to be simultaneously creative and critical, engaged in and yet apart from stories and cultures that have so often seen them as ‘other'. This collection shows that women writers in English over the past 400 years have challenged those ideas not only through explicit polemic and alternative representations but through disrupting the very modes of representation and story itself.

Michelle Zerba's Modern Odysseys explores three major writers in global modernism from the Mediterranean, Anglo-European Britain, and the Caribbean whose groundbreaking literary works have never been studied together before. Using language as an instrument of revolution and social change, C. P. Cavafy, Virginia Woolf, and Aimé Césaire gave expression to the forms of human experience we now associate with modernity: homoeroticism, transsexuality, and racial consciousness. More specifically, Zerba argues that Odyssean tropes of diffusion, isolation, passage, and return give form to works by these writers but in ways that invite us to reconsider and revise the basic premises of reception studies and intellectual history. Combining close readings of literary texts with the study of interviews, essays, diaries, and letters, Zerba advances a revisionary account of how to approach relationships between antiquity and modernity. Instead of frontal encounters with the Odyssey, Cavafy, Woolf, and Césaire indirectly—but no less significantly—engage with Homer's epic poem. In demonstrating how such encounters operate, Modern Odysseys explores issues of race and sexuality that connect antiquity with the modern period.

People concerned with spirituality are seekers; instead of possessing truth, they seek to be possessed by it. Thus, a fully spiritual person is forever learning and growing. William Blake, the seminal mystic poet who worked to bring about change both in the social order and in common ways of thinking, taught that'all we need to do is cleanse the doors of perception, and we shall see things as they are--infinite.'And nothing cleanses--and enlarges--the doors of perception like great literature. Whether it be poetry, a short story, a novel, historical fiction, fantasy literature, or biographical writing, the literary experience is slightly beyond a reader's horizon of understanding. When literature enhances spirituality--as is true of the dozen or more selections examined in Deep Splendor--each literary moment confounds in order to keep us forever enthralled, forever longing. The authors and works examined in this study explore timeless spiritual themes such as coming of age, relationships, self-integration, the struggle of good versus evil, the nature of change, and the corruptive aspects of power. When we think about great literature, it is easy to focus objectively on the literature itself, on what makes literature'bad'or'good.'However, another essential distinction involves the reader, replacing the category'good book'with that of'good reader.'As master teacher C. S. Lewis wrote, a quality of good readers is that they seek an enlargement of their being. Deep Splendor will teach you how to read great literature and how to be a good reader.

Hitherto classified as a form of genre fiction, or as a particular aesthetic quality of literature by H. P. Lovecraft, the weird has now come to refer to a broad spectrum of artistic practices and expressions including fiction, film, television, photography, music, and visual and performance art. Largely under-theorized so far, The American Weird brings together perspectives from literary, cultural, media and film studies, and from philosophy, to provide a thorough exploration of the weird mode. Separated into two sections – the first exploring the concept of the weird and the second how it is applied through various media – this book generates new approaches to fundamental questions: Can the weird be conceptualized as a generic category, as an aesthetic mode or as an epistemological position? May the weird be thought through in similar ways to what Sianne Ngai calls the zany, the cute, and the interesting? What are the transformations it has undergone aesthetically and politically since its inception in the early twentieth century? Which strands of contemporary critical theory and philosophy have engaged in a dialogue with the discourses of and on the weird? And what is specifically “American” about this aesthetic mode?As the first comprehensive, interdisciplinary study of the weird, this book not only explores the writings of Lovecraft, Caitlín Kiernan, China Miéville, and Jeff VanderMeer, but also the graphic novels of Alan Moore, the music of Captain Beefheart, the television show Twin Peaks and the films of Lily Amirpour, Matthew Barney, David Lynch, and Jordan Peele.

This book comprises what may be called exercises in ‘comparative cinema'. Its focus on endings, near-endings and ‘late style'is connected with the author's argument that comparative criticism itself may constitute an endgame of criticism, arising at the moment at which societies or individuals relinquish primary adherence to one tradition or medium. The comparisons embrace different works and artistic media and primarily concern works of literature and film, though they also consider issues raised by the interrelationship of language and moving and still images, as well as inter- and intra-textuality. The works probed most fully are ones by Theo Angelopoulos, Ingmar Bergman, Harun Farocki, Theodor Fontane, Henry James, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Chang-dong Lee, Roman Polański, Thomas Pynchon, and Paul Schrader, while the key recurrent motifs are those of dusk, the horizon, the labyrinth, and the ruin.

Una passeggiata letteraria dal Quattrocento a oggi, attraverso sentieri mai scontati, che conquisterà il lettore. Incontri con romanzieri quali Camilleri, Soldati, Bonaviri, Consolo, confronti tra ambigui segretari di lettere e memorialisti, confini tra verità e impostura in Sciascia, enigmi svelati tra le pagine dell'imprescindibile Manzoni, fino a Pasolini e al racconto per immagini di Tullio Pericoli. Trenta racconti critici tutti legati dalla passione per la lettura del testo con una speciale lente, quella che scova fra le righe della pagina connessioni sorprendenti.

Woolf's first and most popular volume of essays. This collection has more than twenty-five selections, including such important statements as'Modern Fiction'and'The Modern Essay.'