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In this book, ethnographer and poet Michael Jackson addresses the interplay between modes of writing, modes of understanding, and modes of being in the world. Drawing on literary, anthropological and autobiographical sources, he explores writing as a technics akin to ritual, oral storytelling, magic and meditation, that enables us to reach beyond the limits of everyday life and forge virtual relationships and imagined communities. Although Maurice Blanchot wrote of the impossibility of writing, the passion and paradox of literature lies in its attempt to achieve the impossible--a leap of faith that calls to mind the mystic's dark night of the soul, unrequited love, nostalgic or utopian longing, and the ethnographer's attempt to know the world from the standpoint of others, to put himself or herself in their place. Every writer, whether of ethnography, poetry, or fiction, imagines that his or her own experiences echo the experiences of others, and that despite the need for isolation and silence his or her work consummates a relationship with them.
"Between One and One Another is a lively and fascinating exploration of the interplay between being a part of the lives of others, and being apart from them. Michael Jackson, one of the leading and most innovative anthropologists today, draws on a wealth of anthropological, literary, philosophical, and autobiographical resources to make his case on the matter. It's clear that a lifetime of learning and reflection has gone into the thoughts invested in this text."—Robert Desjarlais, author of Counterplay: An Anthropologist at the Chessboard
For the first time in English the world community of scholars is systematically assembling and presenting the results of recent research in the vast literature of Soren Kierkegaard. Based on the definitive English edition of Kierkegaard's works by Princeton University Press, this series of commentaries addresses all the published texts of the influential Danish philosopher and theologian.
The relationship between literature and life can be construed as a counterpoint of fate and freewill. Rather than equating fate to the ‘hand we are dealt’ which is reducible to the social or familial environments into which we are born, this book explores the idea of fate through the books that shape our lives and under whose influence we write. Writing in this sense is seen as beyond its utility of making meaning. It is a way of recovering agency in the face of overwhelming experiences. In juxtaposing factuality and fiction, the author makes a case for a radically empirical approach to human experience.
A noted literary critic examines the life of the prolific Danish writer whose works captivated readers across Europe.
Hans Christian Andersen is indisputably the best known of all Scandinavian writers, his tales and stories having been translated probably into more languages than any other work except the Bible. He is also one of the greatest travelers of nineteenth-century belles lettres and few were the major European cities, capitals, and countries he did not visit, many of them several times: Vienna, Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig, Weimar, Paris, and London. He met and became friends with some of the most outstanding representatives of the European artistic community: Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas père, Franz Grillparzer, Heinrich Heine, the Brothers Grimm, Wilhelm von Kaulbach, Franz Liszt, ...
This book offers new, often unexpected, but always intriguing portraits of the writers of classic fairy tales. For years these authors, who wrote from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, have been either little known or known through skewed, frequently sentimentalized biographical information. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were cast as exemplars of national virtues; Hans Christian Andersen's life became—with his participation—a fairy tale in itself. Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, the prim governess who wrote moral tales for girls, had a more colorful past than her readers would have imagined, and few people knew that nineteen-year-old Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy conspired to kill her much-older husband. Important figures about whom little is known, such as Giovan Francesco Straparola and Giambattista Basile, are rendered more completely than ever before. Uncovering what was obscured for years and with newly discovered evidence, contributors to this fascinating and much-needed volume provide a historical context for Europe's fairy tales.
Nordic Romanticism: Translation, Transmission, Transformation is an edited collection exploring the varied and complex interactions between national romanticisms in Britain, Denmark, Germany, Norway and Sweden. The collection considers both the reception and influence of Nordic romanticism in Britain and Germany and also the reciprocal impact of British and German romanticism in the Nordic countries. Taken as a whole, the volume suggests that to fully understand the range of these individual national romanticisms we need to see them not as isolated phenomena but rather as participating, via translation and other modes of reception, in a transnational or regional romanticism configured around the idea of a shared cultural inheritance in ‘the North’.
In Hans Christian Andersen in American Literary Criticism of the Nineteenth Century, Herbert Rowland argues that the literary criticism accompanying the publication of Hans Christian Andersen’s works in the United States compares favorably in scope, perceptiveness, and chronological coverage with the few other national receptions of Andersen outside of Denmark. Rowland contends that American commentators made it abundantly evident that, in addition to his fairy tales, Andersen wrote several novels, travelogues, and an autobiography which were all of more than common interest. In the process, Rowland shows that American commentators “naturalized” Andersen in the United States by confronting the sensationalism in the journalism and literature of the time with the perceived wholesomeness of Andersen’s writing, deploying his long fiction on both sides of the debate over the nature and relative value of the romance and the novel, and drawing on three of his works to support their positions on slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction.
A pioneering scholarly collection of essays outlining D.H. Lawrence's reception and influence in Europe