National Poets, Cultural Saints: Canonization and Commemorative Cults of Writers in Europe


Book Description

In National Poets, Cultural SaintsMarijan Dović and J�n Karl Helgason explore the veneration of artists, writers, and poets in Europe, especially in the period 1840-1940, and present an analytical model of canonization for further studies on "cultural sainthood".




National Poets, Cultural Saints: Canonization and Commemorative Cults of Writers in Europe


Book Description

In National Poets, Cultural Saints Marijan Dović and Jón Karl Helgason explore the ways in which certain artists, writers, and poets in Europe have become major figures of cultural memory, emulating the symbolic role formerly played by state rulers and religious saints. The authors develop the concept of cultural sainthood in the context of nationalism as a form of invisible religion, identify major shifts in canonization practices from antiquity to the nationally-motivated commemoration of the nineteenth century, and explore the afterlives of two national poets, Slovenia's France Prešeren and Iceland's Jónas Hallgrímsson. The book presents a useful analytical model of canonization for further studies on cultural sainthood and opens up fruitful perspectives for the understanding of national movements.




Romantik 2017


Book Description

“Romantik. Journal for the Study of Romanticisms” is a multidisciplinary journal dedicated to the study of romantic-era cultural productions and concepts. The journal promotes innovative research across disciplinary borders. It aims to advance new historical discoveries, forward-looking theoretical insights and cutting-edge methodological approaches. The articles range over the full variety of cultural practices, including the written word, visual arts, history, philosophy, religion, and theatre during the romantic period (c. 1780–1840). But contributions to the discussion of pre- or post-romantic representations are also welcome. Since the romantic era was characterized by an emphasis on the vernacular, the title of journal has been chosen to reflect the Germanic root of the word. But the journal is interested in all European romanticisms – and not least the connections and disconnections between them – hence, the use of the plural in the subtitle. Romantik is a peer-reviewed journal supported by the Nordic Board for Periodicals in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NOP-HS).




Great Immortality


Book Description

Winner of the Excellence Award for Collaborative Research granted by the European Society of Comparative Literature (ESCL) In Great Immortality, twenty scholars from considerably different cultural backgrounds explore the ways in which certain poets, writers, and artists in Europe have become major figures of cultural memory. Through individual case studies, many of the contributors expand and challenge the concepts of cultural sainthood and canonization as developed by Marijan Dović and Jón Karl Helgason in National Poets, Cultural Saints: Canonization and Commemorative Cults of Writers in Europe (Brill, 2017). Even though the major focus of the book is the nineteenth-century cults of national poets, the volume examines a wide variety of cases in a very broad temporal and geographical framework – from Dante and Petrarch to the most recent attempts to sanctify artists by both the Catholic and Orthodox churches, and from the rise of a medieval Icelandic author of sagas to the veneration of a poet and national leader in Georgia. Contributors are: Bojan Baskar, Marijan Dović, Sveinn Yngvi Egilsson, David Fishelov, Jernej Habjan, Simon Halink, Jón Karl Helgason, Harald Hendrix, Andraž Jež, Marko Juvan, Alenka Koron, Roman Koropeckyj, Joep Leerssen, Christian Noack, Jaume Subirana, Magí Sunyer, Andreas Stynen, Andrei Terian, Bela Tsipuria, and Luka Vidmar.




Shakespeare's Tercentenary


Book Description

Uncovers how global Shakespeare Tercentenary commemorations addressed crises of imperial and national identities during the First World War.




Worlding a Peripheral Literature


Book Description

Bringing together the analyses of the literary world-system, translation studies, and the research of European cultural nationalism, this book contests the view that texts can be attributed global importance irrespective of their origin, language, and position in the international book market. Focusing on Slovenian literature, almost unknown to world literature studies, this book addresses world literature’s canonical function in the nineteenth-century process of establishing European letters as national literatures. Aware of their dependence on imperial powers, (semi)peripheral national movements sought international recognition through, among other things, the newly invented figure of the national poet. Writers central to dependent national communities were canonized to represent their respective cultures to the norm-giving Other – the emerging world literary canon and its aesthetic ideology. Hence, national literatures asserted their linguo-cultural individuality through the process of worlding; that is, by their positioning in the international literary world informed by the supposed universality of the aesthetic.




Romanian Literature as World Literature


Book Description

Approaching Romanian literature as world literature, this book is a critical-theoretical manifesto that places its object at the crossroads of empires, regions, and influences and draws conclusions whose relevance extends beyond the Romanian, Romance, and East European cultural systems. This “intersectional” revisiting of Romanian literature is organized into three parts. Opening with a fresh look at the literary ideology of Romania's “national poet,” Mihai Eminescu, part I dwells primarily on literary-cultural history as process and discipline. Here, the focus is on cross-cultural mimesis, the role of strategic imitation in the production of a distinct literature in modern Romania, and the shortcomings marking traditional literary historiography's handling of these issues. Part II examines the ethno-linguistic and territorial complexity of Romanian literatures or “Romanian literature in the plural.” Part III takes up the trans-systemic rise of Romanian, Jewish Romanian, and Romanian-European avant-garde and modernism, Socialist Realism, exile and émigré literature, and translation.




Voyages and Travel Accounts in Historiography and Literature. Volume 2


Book Description

Travelling is one of the most fascinating phenomena that has inspired writers and scholars from Antiquity to our postmodern age. The father of history, Herodotus, was also a traveller, whose Histories can easily be considered a travel account. The first volume of this book is dedicated to the period starting from Herodotus himself until the end of the Middle Ages with focus on the Balkans, the Byzantine Empire, the Islamic world, and South-Eastern Europe. Research on travellers who connected civilizations; manuscript and literary traditions; musicology; geography; flora and fauna as reflected in travel accounts, are all part of this thought-provoking collected volume dedicated to detailed aspects of voyages and travel accounts up to the end of the sixteenth century. The second volume of this book is dedicated to the period between Early Modernity and today, including modern receptions of travelling in historiography and literature. South-Eastern Europe and Serbia; the Chinese, Ottoman, and British perception of travelling; pilgrimages to the Holy land and other sacred sites; Serbian, Arabic, and English literature; legal history and travelling, and other engaging topics are all part of the second volume dedicated to aspects of voyages and travel accounts up to the contemporary era.




The Author's Effects


Book Description

The Author's Effects: On the Writer's House Museum is the first book to describe how the writer's house museum came into being as a widespread cultural phenomenon across Britain, Europe, and North America. Exploring the ways that authorship has been mythologised through the conventions of the writer's house museum, The Author's Effects anatomises the how and why of the emergence, establishment, and endurance of popular notions of authorship in relation to creativity. It traces how and why the writer's bodily remains, possessions, and spaces came to be treasured in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as a prelude to the appearance of formal writer's house museums. It ransacks more than 100 museums and archives to tell the stories of celebrated and paradigmatic relics—Burns' skull, Keats' hair, Petrarch's cat, Poe's raven, Brontë's bonnet, Dickinson's dress, Shakespeare's chair, Austen's desk, Woolf's spectacles, Hawthorne's window, Freud's mirror, Johnson's coffee-pot and Bulgakov's stove, amongst many others. It investigates houses within which nineteenth-century writers mythologised themselves and their work—Thoreau's cabin and Dumas' tower, Scott's Abbotsford and Irving's Sunnyside. And it tracks literary tourists of the past to such long-celebrated literary homes as Petrarch's Arquà, Rousseau's Ile St Pierre, and Shakespeare's Stratford to find out what they thought and felt and did, discovering deep continuities with the redevelopment of Shakespeare's New Place for 2016.




Transforming Author Museums


Book Description

Literary museums today must respond to new challenges; the traditional image of the author’s home museum as a sacred place of literary pilgrimage centered around a national hero has been questioned, and literary museums have begun to develop new strategies centered not only on biography, but also literary texts, imagined spaces, different readers, historical contexts, architectural concepts, and artistic interventions. As this volume shows, the changing of spaces asks how literary museums create new ways of interlinking real and literary spaces, texts, objects, readers, and tourists.