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For 2,500 years literature has been condemned in the name of authority, truth, morality and society. But in making explicit what a society expects from literature, anti-literary discourse paradoxically asserts the validity of what it wishes to deny. The threat to literature’s continued existence, William Marx writes, is not hatred but indifference.
The first extensive study of the intersection between family and social hierarchy within early modern literary production.
This handbook brings together 42 contributions by leading narratologists devoted to the study of narrative devices in European literatures from antiquity to the present. Each entry examines the use of a specific narrative device in one or two national literatures across the ages, whether in successive or distant periods of time. Through the analysis of representative texts in a range of European languages, the authors compellingly trace the continuities and evolution of storytelling devices, as well as their culture-specific manifestations. In response to Monika Fludernik’s 2003 call for a "diachronization of narratology," this new handbook complements existing synchronic approaches that t...
Compassion's Edge traces the relation between compassion and toleration after France's Wars of Religion. This is not, however, a story about compassion overcoming difference but one of compassion reinforcing division. It provides a robust corrective to today's hope that fellow-feeling draws us inexorably and usefully together.
The Routledge Handbook of Fiction and Belief offers a fresh reevaluation of the relationship between fiction and belief, surveying key debates and perspectives from a range of disciplines including narrative and cultural studies, science, religion, and politics. This volume draws on global, cutting edge research and theory to investigate the historically variable understandings of fictionality, and allows readers to grasp the role of fictions in our understanding of the world. This interdisciplinary approach provides a thorough introduction to the fundamental themes of: Theoretical and Philosophical Perspectives on Fiction Fiction, Fact, and Science Social Effects and Uses of Fiction Fiction...
When Dutch and subsequently French voters rejected the Draft Treaty for a Constitution for Europe in Spring 2005, many voices called for a pause for reflection. This book is, in part, a result of that moment of reflection. We wanted to contribute to the debate about Europe but crucially, we sought to do so by taking a step back from the problem formation and agenda-setting of Brussels. For the authors of this volume, one key to establishing critical distance has been the reappraisal of the historical perspective. Another has been the problematisation of 'Europe as a space' as opposed to looking for a definition of borders. The authors also seek critical distance through a focus on the tensio...
In today’s academe, the fields of science and literature are considered unconnected, one relying on raw data and fact, the other focusing on fiction. During the period between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, however, the two fields were not so distinct. Just as the natural philosophers of the era were discovering in and adopting from literature new strategies and techniques for their discourse, so too were poets and storytellers finding inspiration in natural philosophy, particularly in astronomy. A work that speaks to the history of science and literary studies, Fictions of the Cosmos explores the evolving relationship that ensued between fiction and astronomical authority. By exam...
Richard Hakluyt, best known as editor of The Principal Navigations (1589; expanded 1598-1600), was a key figure in promoting early modern English colonial and commercial expansion. His work spanned every area of English activity and aspiration, from Muscovy to America, from Africa to the Near East, and India to China and Japan, providing up-to-date information and establishing an ideological framework for English rivalries with Spain, Portugal, France, and the Netherlands. This interdisciplinary collection of 24 essays brings together the best international scholarship on Hakluyt, revising our picture of the influences on his work, his editorial practice and his impact.
Transnational Tolstoy renews and enhances our understanding of Tolstoy's fiction in the context of "World Literature," a term that he himself used in What is Art? It offers a fresh perspective on Tolstoy's fiction as it connects with writers and works from outside his Russian context, including Stendhal, Flaubert, Goethe, Proust, Lampedusa and Mahfouz. Foster provides an interlocking series of cross-cultural readings ranging from nineteenth-century Germany, France, and Italy through the rise of modernist fiction and the crisis of World War II, to the growth of a worldwide literary outlook from 1960 onward. He emphasizes Tolstoy's writings with the most consistent international resonance: War and Peace and Anna Karenina, two of the world's most compelling novels. Transnational Tolstoy also discusses a shorter work, Hadji Murad. It shares the earlier novels' historical sweep, social breadth, and subtle interplay among a large cast of characters. Along with bringing Tolstoy's gifts to bear on a Muslim protagonist, it also represents his most sustained attempt at world literature.
Richard Hakluyt and Travel Writing in Early Modern Europe is an interdisciplinary collection of 24 essays which brings together leading international scholarship on Hakluyt and his work. Best known as editor of The Principal Navigations (1589; expanded 1598-1600), Hakluyt was a key figure in promoting English colonial and commercial expansion in the early modern period. He also translated major European travel texts, championed English settlement in North America, and promoted global trade and exploration via a Northeast and Northwest Passage. His work spanned every area of English activity and aspiration, from Muscovy to America, from Africa to the Near East, and India to China and Japan, p...