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From as early as classical antiquity there has been an interplay between literature and medicine. The first book of Homer's Ilias recounts the plague that swept the camp of the Achaeans. While this instance concerns a full-length book, it is the aphorism that is of greater importance as a literary technique for the dissemination of medical knowledge, from the "Corpus Hippocraticum" of antiquity until the "Aphorismi de cognoscendis et curandis morbis" (1715) by Herman Boerhaave. In addition, the subject of illness and its impact on mankind was explored by great numbers of poetic scholars and scholarly poets.This collection offers fourteen articles which all highlight the relation between disease and literature. It entails a first-ever overview of Dutch-language research in this field, whereby the literary and cultural functions of medical knowledge and the poetics of medical and literary writing are in the focus.
In a global age where people, goods and cultural products transcend the boundaries of geography and temporality as never before, it is only natural that literary and cultural studies turn their attention to Goethe's nineteenth-century notion of a Weltliteratur. Offering their own Twenty-First Century perspectives - across generations, nationalities and disciplines - the contributors to this anthology explore the idea of world literatue for what it may add of new connections and itineraries to the study of literature and culture today. Covering a vast historical material from witness accounts of the fall of Constantinople to Hari Kunzru's contemporary representations of multicultural London, ...
The Fictional World of Javier Marías offers a fresh perspective on the narrative universe of one of Spain’s most distinguished contemporary authors. In order to establish the origin and meaning of uncertainty in his fiction, this book presents interpretations of a range of issues inherent to Marías’s canon, in particular those related to the nature of language. With the relationship between language and uncertainty at its heart, this study considers the use of foreign languages, translation, and the effect of silence through an analysis of: Todas las almas (1989), Corazón tan blanco (1992), Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí (1994) and Tu rostro mañana (2002-2007).
In recent years, historians have revealed the many ways in which German women supported National Socialism-as teachers, frontline auxiliaries, and nurses, as well as in political organizations. In mainstream culture, however, the women of the period are still predominantly depicted as the victims of a violent twentieth century whose atrocities were committed by men. They are frequently imagined as post hoc redeemers of the nation, as the "rubble women" who spiritually and literally rebuilt Germany. This book investigates why the question of women's complicity in the Third Reich has struggled to capture the historical imagination in the same way. It explores how female authors from across the political and generational spectrum (Ingeborg Bachmann, Christa Wolf, Elisabeth Plessen, Gisela Elsner, Tanja D ckers, Jenny Erpenbeck) conceptualize the role of women in the Third Reich. As well as offering innovative re-readings of celebrated works, this book provides instructive interpretations of lesser-known texts that nonetheless enrich our understanding of German memory culture. Katherine Stone is Assistant Professor in German Studies at the University of Warwick.
Los ensayos que componen el presente volumen tienen como fin alumbrar zonas todavía poco exploradas en la teoría y la crítica de la autoficción desde nuevos enfoques y nuevas metodologías.
This book offers a substantial examination of how contemporary authors deal with the complex legacies of authoritarian regimes in various Spanish-speaking countries. It does so by focusing on works that explore an under-studied aspect: the reliance of authoritarian power on medical notions for political purposes. From the Porfirian regime in Mexico to Castro’s Cuba, this book describes how such regimes have sought to seize medical knowledge to support propagandistic ideas and marginalize their opponents in ways that transcend specific pathologies, political ideologies, and geographical and temporal boundaries. Medicine, Power, and the Authoritarian Regime in Hispanic Literature brings together the work of literary scholars, cultural critics, and historians of medicine, arguing that contemporary authors have actively challenged authoritarian narratives of medicine and disease. In doing so, they continue to re-examine the place of these regimes in the collective memory of Latin America and Spain.
In the West, we have been presented with a so-called ‘memory boom’ over the last couple of years. An interdisciplinary field has emerged that explores representations of the past through different commu-nication channels, genres and media. This book contains a number of essays on the traumatic and conflict-ridden history of Spain and Italy and how this has been represented in the artefacts of memory coming from different genres and media (literary fiction, films and television, memoirs, commercials, historiographic material, etc.) The essays all deal with the processes connected to memories, negotiations and possible reconciliations, which are tied to the conflicted and disrupted histori...
Few literary phenomena are as elusive and yet as persistent as realism. While it responds to the perennial impulse to use literature to reflect on experience, it also designates a specific set of literary and artistic practices that emerged in response to Western modernity. Landscapes of Realism is a two-volume collaborative interdisciplinary investigation of this vast territory, bringing together leading-edge new criticism on the realist paradigms that were first articulated in nineteenth-century Europe but have since gone on globally to transform the literary landscape. Tracing the manifold ways in which these paradigms are developed, discussed and contested across time, space, cultures an...
After decades of uncomfortable silence, Spain has now started dealing with its violent twentieth-century past. In recent years, a vibrant memory discourse has emerged in Spanish society: the number of films, TV series, newspaper articles, history books, and memorials dedicated to the Civil War of 1936-1939 and the ensuing dictatorship of Franco has increased dramatically. Literature has also played its part in provoking and maintaining this memory boom, and as a consequence, the study of contemporary Spanish novels has started revolving around questions on the responsibility of the author, on the impact of literature in society, on its role in shaping memories, and on its ethical status. This book takes up these questions in an attempt to combine the outlook of collective memory studies with the theoretical demands of Poststructuralist theories. Focusing on themes such as haunting and the uncanny, nostalgia, the Bildungsroman genre, and autobiography, its author analyses memory narratives in fourteen novels by foremost Spanish authors like Javier Marías, Luis Goytisolo, Enrique Vila-Matas, and Manuel Vicent. -- From publisher's website.