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In this volume a team of three dozen international experts presents a fresh picture of literary prose fiction in the Romantic age seen from cross-cultural and interdisciplinary perspectives. The work treats the appearance of major themes in characteristically Romantic versions, the power of Romantic discourse to reshape imaginative writing, and a series of crucial reactions to the impact of Romanticism on cultural life down to the present, both in Europe and in the New World. Through its combination of chapters on thematic, generic, and discursive features, Romantic Prose Fiction achieves a unique theoretical stance, by considering the opinions of primary Romantics and their successors not a...
In their readings of texts, the authors address the topics of theory, narrative, aesthetics, the idea of the text, and of specific moments in cultural history. The chapters cover a range of authors: Plato, Ovid, Dante, Petrarch, Chariteo, Ariosto, Tasso, Cervantes, Kleist, Gode, Edith Wharton, Pirandello, Kafka, Sartre, Saint-John Perse, Paz, Roubaud, Sanguineti, and Tomlinson. They also deal with philosophers: Peirce, Nietzsche, Saussure, Husserl, Marc Bloch, Lucien Febvre, Heidegger, Jakobson, Sartre, Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Lyotard, and Deleuze. The book opens up our relationships to the past and the usefulness or otherwise of the metaphors we use in our attempt to understand and participate in it. Although Countercurrents deals diversely with literary periods, authors, and critics, it speaks within the civilized and civilizing universe of our language and the texts we create. Running beneath the antihumanistic flotilla that skims the surface of texts for theory, the authors plumb for treasures from the ocean's floor.
Hemingway's last work published during his lifetime remains one of his most popular and best known. A man's symbolic quest to land the catch of a lifetime engages classic themes of the human struggle against nature as well as explores the intersection of expectation and desire. Features a bibliography and notes on the essay contributors.
This is a strange, darkly ironic novel published under the nom de plume of Bonaventura, originally in German, in 1804. It is a true child of the romantic agony: the narrator and anti-hero, a night watchman named Kreuzgang, was once a poet. Now stripped of all Romantic illusion, he works as a watchman, which gives him a vantage on the follies of other citizens. To Kreuzgang, life is a grotesque, macabre and sordid joke sprung by a mechanical and heartless force. A cult classic in some literary circles (Gothic lit fans and specialists in German Romanticism), the book is uncannily cinematic: Every night, Kreuzgang goes on his rounds and stops to peer into a window or door where he observes a fr...
Benito Perez Galdos has been described as 'the greatest Spanish novelist since Cervantes.' His work constitutes a major contribution to the nineteenth-century novel, rivalling that of Dickens of Balzac and making him an essential candidate for any course on the fiction of the period. Jo Labanyi's study is supported by a wide-rangting introduction, a section of contemporary comment, headnotes to each piece and helpful appendix material.
A History of World Literature is a fully revised and expanded edition of The Routledge Concise History of World Literature (2012). This remarkably broad and informative book offers an introduction to “world literature.” Tracing the term from its earliest roots and situating it within a number of relevant contexts from postcolonialism, decoloniality, ecocriticism, and book circulation, Theo D’haen in ten tightly-argued but richly-detailed chapters examines: the return of the term “world literature” and its changing meaning; Goethe’s concept of Weltliteratur and how this relates to current debates; theories and theorists who have had an impact on world literature; and how world literature is taught around the world. By examining how world literature is studied around the globe, this book is the ideal guide to an increasingly popular and important term in literary studies. It is accessible and engaging and will be invaluable to students of world literature, comparative literature, translation, postcolonial and decoloniality studies, and materialist approaches, and to anyone with an interest in these or related topics.
Written using critical theory, especially by Walter Benjamin, Blanchot and Derrida, Allegory and the Work of Melancholy: The Late Medieval and Shakespeare reads medieval and early modern texts, exploring allegory within texts, allegorical readings of texts, and melancholy in texts. Authors studied are Langland and Chaucer, Hoccleve, on his madness, Lydgate and Henryson. Shakespeare's first tetralogy, the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III conclude this investigation of death, mourning, madness and of complaint. Benjamin's writings on allegory inspire this linking, which also considers Dürer, Baldung and Holbein and the dance of the dead motifs. The study sees subjectivity created as ob...
Continuing the work undertaken in Vol. 1 of the History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe, Vol. 2 considers various topographic sites—multicultural cities, border areas, cross-cultural corridors, multiethnic regions—that cut across national boundaries, rendering them permeable to the flow of hybrid cultural messages. By focusing on the literary cultures of specific geographical locations, this volume intends to put into practice a new type of comparative study. Traditional comparative literary studies establish transnational comparisons and contrasts, but thereby reconfirm, however inadvertently, the very national borders they play down. This volume inverts the expansive mo...
The essays gathered here examine the legacy of Roxolana, a sixteenth-century Ukrainian woman who, from harem slave, became legal wife and advisor of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. The collection views Roxolana from Western and Eastern European perspectives, as source material is taken from England, Italy, France, Spain, Germany, Turkey, Poland, and Ukraine. Also included are six European source texts, here translated into modern English for the first time.