You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Literary mimesis is an age-old concept which has been variously interpreted and at times highly contested, and which has recently been brought back to the forefront of scholarly interest. The debate around mimesis has been reactivated by approaches that re-evaluate its meaning both in the ancient texts in which it first appeared, and in the contemporary discussions of the power of literary representation. This volume presents a selection of central contributions to both the theoretical debate on mimesis and to its up-to-date critical practice. This volume approaches mimesis by emphasising the principles of knowledge, understanding and imagination that have been associated with mimesis since ...
The fourth volume of the collected papers of the ICLA congress “The Many Languages of Comparative Literature” includes articles that study thematic and formal elements of literary texts. Although the question of prioritizing either the level of content or that of form has often provoked controversies, most contributions here treat them as internally connected. While theoretical considerations inform many of the readings, the main interest of most articles can be described as rhetorical (in the widest sense) – given that the ancient discipline of rhetoric did not only include the study of rhetorical figures and tropes such as metaphor, irony, or satire, but also that of topoi, which wer...
This rich, in-depth exploration of Dada’s roots in East-Central Europe is a vital addition to existing research on Dada and the avant-garde. Through deeply researched case studies and employing novel theoretical approaches, the volume rewrites the history of Dada as a story of cultural and political hybridity, border-crossings, transitions, and transgressions, across political, class and gender lines. Dismantling prevailing notions of Dada as a “Western” movement, the contributors to this volume present East-Central Europe as the locus of Dada activity and techniques. The articles explore how artists from the region pre-figured Dada as well as actively “cannibalized”, that is, reabsorbed and further hybridized, a range of avant-garde techniques, thus challenging “Western” cultural hegemony.
The notion of the native speaker and its undertones of ultimate language competence, language ownership and social status has been problematized by various researchers, arguing that the ensuing monolingual norms and assumptions are flawed or inequitable in a global super-diverse world. However, such norms are still ubiquitous in educational, institutional and social settings, in political structures and in research paradigms. This collection offers voices from various contexts and corners of the world and further challenges the native speaker construct adopting poststructuralist and postcolonial perspectives. It includes conceptual, methodological, educational and practice-oriented contribut...
The relationship between medievalism and reception explored via a rich variety of case studies. At the intersection of the twin fields of medievalism and reception studies is the timely and fascinating question of how a contested past is deployed in the context of a conflicted and contradictory present. Despite their shared roots and a fundamental orientation towards the entanglement of past and present, the term "reception" is rarely taken up in medievalist scholarship, and they have developed along parallel but divergent lines, evolving their own emphases, problematics, sensibilities, vocabularies, and critical tools. This book is the first to reunite these two fields. Its introduction and...
This book argues that increasingly transnational reading contexts of the twenty-first century place new pressures on fundamental questions about how we read literary fiction. Prompted by the stylistic strategies of three European émigré writers of the twentieth century — Conrad, Weiss and Sebald — it demonstrates the need to pose more differentiated questions about specific effects that occur when literary narratives meet a readership with a heterogeneous historical imaginary. In conversation with reception theory, trauma theory and transnational and postcolonial studies, the study shows how historical pressures in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries require comparative literature...
Migrants and Literature in Finland and Sweden presents new comparative perspectives on transnational literary studies. This collection provides a contribution to the production of new narratives of the nation. The focus of the contributions is contemporary fiction relating to experiences of migration. The volume discusses multicultural writing, emerging modes of writing and generic innovations. When people are in motion, it changes nations, cultures and peoples. The volume explores the ways in which transcultural connections have affected the national self-understanding in the Swedish and Finnish context. It also presents comparative aspects on the reception of literary works and explores th...
This innovative collection examines key questions on language diversity and multilingualism running through contemporary debates in psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics. Reinforcing interdisciplinary conversations on these themes, each chapter is co-authored by two different researchers, often those who have not written together before. The combined effect is a volume showcasing unique and dynamic perspectives on such topics as multilingualism across the lifespan, bilingual acquisition, family language policy, language and ageing, language shift, language and identity, and multilingualism and language impairment. The book builds on Elizabeth Lanza’s pioneering work on multilingualism across the lifespan, bringing together cutting-edge research exploring multilingualism as an evolving phenomenon at landmarks in individuals’, families’, and communities’ lives. Taken together, the book offers a rich portrait of the different facets of multilingualism as a lived reality for individuals, families, and communities. This ground-breaking volume will be of particular interest to students and scholars in multilingualism, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and psycholinguistics.
While both public opinion and scholars around the world are currently pointing out the danger of increasingly popular life-logging devices, this book articulates this debate by distinguishing between automatic and manual life-logging approaches. Since new definitions of life-logging have excluded the latter approach and have been mainly focused on effortless life-logging technologies such as Google Glass and Quantified Self applications in general, this book theoretically frames life-stowing. Through extensive etymological research, this book defines life-stowing as a manual and effortful practice conducted by life-stowers, individuals who devote their life to sampling reality in predefined frameworks. Also as part of this book, an historical overview introduces life-stowers and distinguishes between Apollonian and Dionysian varieties of these practitioners. Lastly, in order to understand the future reception of lifestowing, particularly in relation to digital media, this book discloses the author’s ongoing life-stowing project to a small audience.
This book investigates the hybrid, multiform nature of contemporary poetry with particular emphasis on recent Russian lyric and its translations into German and English. Poetry translation, thriving and obstinately open-ended, is not so much a defined process as a practice of ongoing transit across linguistic and national borders. The book’s innovative format invites contemporary poets into dialogue with literary translators, editors, publishers, and scholars; the conversations among their wide-ranging essays, poems, and exchanges both model and investigate the work of transcultural dialogue. As a kind of transition, poetry translation engages the composition and disintegration of forms, revises relations of producers to receivers, mixes and rethinks genres and media, translates itself as multilingual writing or language experiment. Multiple translations of a poem do not compete but interact, reshaping the putative gulf between source and target language. In the end this volume underscores the aesthetic productivity of poetry translation and the need to nurture it. A must-read for anyone interested in the dynamic interplay of poetry, language, and culture.