Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization


Book Description

Responding to the frequent attacks against contemporary literary studies, Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization establishes the continuing vitality of the discipline and its rigorous intellectual engagement with the issues facing today's global society.







A Reference Guide for English Studies


Book Description

This text is an introduction to the full range of standard reference tools in all branches of English studies. More than 10,000 titles are included. The Reference Guide covers all the areas traditionally defined as English studies and all the field of inquiry more recently associated with English studies. British and Irish, American and world literatures written in English are included. Other fields covered are folklore, film, literary theory, general and comparative literature, language and linguistics, rhetoric and composition, bibliography and textual criticism and women's studies.




The Wounds of Possibility


Book Description

Bringing together writers, translators, poets, and leading scholars of cultural theory, literary theory, comparative literature, philosophy, history, political science, music studies, and education, The Wounds of Possibility aims to offer an in-depth and wide-ranging study of George Steiner’s imposing body of work. This book is a timely volume of important essays on one of the most provocative thinkers, critics, and philosophers now writing. During an era in which the question of the ethical and of the status of the work of art, and its relation to the theological dimension, has returned with renewed urgency, Steiner’s work provides rich resources for reflection and it is hoped that the volume will stand on its own as a rich, nuanced accompaniment to the reading of Steiner’s work. With their broad range of thematic foci, theoretical approaches, and stunning constellations of quoted material from different backgrounds, all the essays in the book try to reflect upon the relation between human identity and language, ethics and literature, philosophy and art, and they all offer what we regard as being the most comprehensive engagement with Steiner’s work to date.




Transregional Reformations


Book Description

This volume invites scholars of the Catholic and Protestant Reformations to incorporate recent advances in transnational and transregional history into their own field of research, as it seeks to unravel how cross-border movements shaped reformations in early modern Europe. Covering a geographical space that ranges from Scandinavia to Spain and from England to Hungary, the chapters in this volume apply a transregional perspective to a vast array of topics, such as the history of theological discussion, knowledge transfer, pastoral care, visual allegory, ecclesiastical organization, confessional relations, religious exile, and university politics. The volume starts by showing in a first part how transfer and exchange beyond territorial circumscriptions or proto-national identifications shaped many sixteenth-century reformations. The second part of this volume is devoted to the acceleration of cultural transfer that resulted from the newly-invented printing press, by translation as well as transmission of texts and images. The third and final part of this volume examines the importance of mobility and migration in causing transregional reformations. Focusing on the process of 'crossing borders' in peripheries and borderlands, all chapters contribute to the de-centering of religious reform in early modern Europe. Rather than princes and urban governments steering religion, the early modern reformations emerge as events shaped by authors and translators, publishers and booksellers, students and professors, exiles and refugees, and clergy and (female) members of religious orders crossing borders in Europe, a continent composed of fractured states and regions.




Hans Christian Andersen and Music


Book Description

Hans Christian Andersen was the most prominent Danish author of the nineteenth century. Now known primarily for his fairy tales, during his lifetime he was equally famous for his novels, travelogues, poetry, and stage works, and it was through these genres that he most often reflected on the world around him. With the bicentennial of Andersen's birth in 2005, there is still much about the writer that is not yet common knowledge. This book explores a single aspect of that void - his interest in and relationship to the musical culture of nineteenth-century Europe. Why look to Andersen for information about music? To begin, Andersen had a musical background. He enjoyed a brief career as an opera singer and dancer at the Royal Theater in Copenhagen, and in later years he went on to produce opera libretti for the Danish and German stage. Andersen was also an avid music devotee. He made thirty major European tours during his seventy years, and on each of these trips he regularly attended opera and concert performances, recording his impressions in a series of travel diaries. In short, Andersen was a well-informed listener, and as this book reveals, his reflections on the music of his age serve as valuable sources for the study of music reception in the nineteenth century. Over the course of his life, Andersen embraced and then later rejected performers such as Maria Malibran, Franz Liszt, and Ole Bull, and his interest in opera and instrumental music underwent a series of dramatic transformations. In his final years, Andersen promoted figures as disparate as Wagner and Mendelssohn, while strongly objecting to Brahms. Although such changes in taste might be interpreted as indiscriminate by modern-day readers, this study shows that such shifts in opinion were not contradictory, but rather quite logical given the social and cultural climate of the age.




The Colonial Comedy: Imperialism in the French Realist Novel


Book Description

Nineteenth-century French Realism focuses on metropolitan France, with Paris as its undisputed heart. Through Jennifer Yee's close reading of the great novelists of the French realist and naturalist canon - Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant - The Colonial Comedy reveals that the colonies play a role at a distance even in the most apparently metropolitan texts. In what Edward Said called 'geographical notations' of race and imperialism the presence of the colonies off-stage is apparent as imported objects, colonial merchandise, and individuals whose colonial experience is transformative. Indeed, the realist novel registers the presence of the emerging global world-system through networks of importation, financial speculation, and immigration as well as direct colonial violence and power structures. The literature of the century responds to the last decades of French slavery, and direct colonialism (notably in Algeria), but also economic imperialism and the extension of French influence elsewhere. Far from imperialist triumphalism, in the realist novel exotic objects are portrayed as fake or mass-produced for the growing bourgeois market, while economic imperialism is associated with fraud and manipulation. The deliberate contrast of colonialism and exoticism within the metropolitan novel, and ironic distancing of colonial narratives, reveal the realist mode to be capable of questioning its own epistemological basis. The Colonial Comedy argues for the existence in the nineteenth century of a Critical Orientalism characterized by critique of its own discursive foundations. Using the tools of literary analysis within a materialist approach, The Colonial Comedy opens up the domestic Paris-Provinces axis to signifying chains pointing towards the colonial space.




Shakespeare Survey: Volume 68, Shakespeare, Origins and Originality


Book Description

Shakespeare Survey is a yearbook of Shakespeare studies and production. Since 1948, the Survey has published the best international scholarship in English and many of its essays have become classics of Shakespeare criticism. Each volume is devoted to a theme, or play, or group of plays; each also contains a section of reviews of that year's textual and critical studies and of the year's major British performances. The theme for Volume 68 is 'Shakespeare, Origins and Originality'. The complete set of Survey volumes is also available online at http://www.cambridge.org/online/shakespearesurvey. This fully searchable resource enables users to browse by author, essay and volume, search by play, theme and topic, and save and bookmark their results.




Fifteenth-Century Studies Vol. 24


Book Description

15th-c. adaptations of Chrétien de Troyes, the use of motifs, and standard features including current state of research and book review section. Setting the tone for volume 24 is a trio of articles on 15th-century French adaptations of Chrétien de Troyes's Arthurian romances. Norris Lacy examines adaptation and reception in Cligés, Jane Taylor writes on the importance of cultural details to reception studies of both Erec and Cligés, and Maria Timelli on structural aspects of Erec. Other studies of romance include MaryLynn Saul's article on courtly love and patriarchal marriage institutions in Malory, and Anne Caillaud's piece on gender conventions of courtly love as a vehicle for misogyny in Antoine de la Sale's Petit Jehan de Saintre. Hans-Joachim Behr deals with an adaptation of the 12th-century historical figure of Heinrich von der Löwe in his article on the poetic workof Michel Wyssenherre. Roxana Recio's article on Spanish "amplifications and glosses" draws connections between translation, reception, and interpretation.Moving from romance to legend, Peter De Wilde, in his article on the legendary matter of St. Patrick's journeys to Purgatory, relates a 15th-century account of one Englishman's "visionary pilgrimage" to that destination.A second area of concentration in the volume is the thematic and structural use of motifs. Rainer Goetz discusses archery in Spanish poetry of love and death; Georg Roellenbleck courtly pastimes and the term passe temps inFrench poetry. James Wilkins focuses on the "body as currency" in French passion plays. Kristine Patz moves into art history, examining the importance of the Pythagorean ypsilonin the work of the Italian painter Mantegna.Dealing with the turn to Renaissance humanism are articles by Grady Smith on the short literary career and Latin dramas of Titus Livius Frulovisi, and by Christiane Raynaudon humanism and good government in the Latin Romuleon. Franco Mormando investigates a darker moment: the 1426 witch trial in Rome and the role of Bernardino of Siena as its instigator and chronicler. Rouben Choulakian writes on the poetry of Charles d'Orlean




Comparative Literature and Comparative Cultural Studies


Book Description

Articles in this volume focus on theories and histories of comparative literature and the field of comparative cultural studies. Contributors are Kwaku Asante-Darko on African postcolonial literature; Hendrik Birus on Goethe's concept of world literature; Amiya Dev on comparative literature in India; Marian Galik on interliterariness; Ernst Grabovszki on globalization, new media, and world literature; Jan Walsh Hokenson on the culture of the context; Marko Juvan on literariness; Karl S.Y. Kao on metaphor; Kristof Jacek Kozak on comparative literature in Slovenia; Manuela Mourao on comparative literature in the USA; Jola Skulj on cultural identity; Slobodan Sucur on period styles and theory; Peter Swirski on popular and highbrow literature; Antony Tatlow on textual anthropology; William H. Thornton on East/West power politics in cultural studies; Steven Totosy on comparative cultural studies; and Xiaoyi Zhou and Q.S. Tong on comparative literature in China. The papers are followed by an index and a bibliography of scholarship in comparative literature and cultural studies compiled by Steven Totosy, Steven Aoun, and Wendy C. Nielsen.