Utrecht Publications in General and Comparative Literature

It has always been thought difficult, if not impossible, to define what the philosophy of Carlyle was. Ever since the publication of Sartor Resartus in 1833-1834, the view that Carlyle had a theistic conception of the universe has been defended as well as opposed. At a time, therefore, when Carlyle’s work as a whole is being reappraised, his philosophy should first and foremost be dealt with. Carlyle’s life-philosophy is based on the inner experience of a process of ‘conversion’, which set in with an incident that occurred to him at Leith Walk, Edinburgh. This study – which settles the old question of the date of the incident – demonstrates that the inner struggle, the dynamics of which are described most fully in Sartor, is analogous to the Jungian process of individuation. For the first time in critical literature, the basic ideas of Carlyle’s philosophy are thus linked to depth psychology and shown to be analogous to the fundamental concepts of Analytical Psychology.

In recent criticism, it has been asserted that the crisis recorded in Sartor is akin to the crisis of doubt said to underlie Jean Paul’s “Rede des todten Christus” (1796), which is probably the first poetic expression of nihilism in European literature and has become a classic. Apart from demonstrating that, in the last fifty years at least, the “Rede” has erroneously been interpreted as a dream of annihilation, this book invalidates the view of Jean Paul as victim of the skepticism of his age, and argues that, contrary to what is usually maintained, the “Rede” is not the document of a crisis, but of a belief which had become antiquated and obsolete for Carlyle.

The International Courtly Literature Society aims to promote the study of courtly literature, primarily, but not exclusively, of medieval Europe. The 45 articles selected here from the papers presented at the 5th Congress center around three themes: rhetoric and courtly literature, the audience of courtly literature, and courtly literature in a comparative perspective. There are contributions by specialists in Old French Literature on such diverse topics as Adenet le Roi, Rene d'Anjou, Le Bel Inconnu, and 15th-century prose chronicles; by Provencalists on the eternal topic of courtly love; by Anglicists on Chaucer, Henryson, Malory, and others; by Germanists on Heinrich von Morungen, der Schwanritter, and Walther von der Vogelweide; by Hispanists on La Celestina and the Historia Troiana; there are also articles on Italian, Dutch, and Scandinavian literature, and two relating to Persian and Arabic courtly texts.

Dutch literature of the 17th century, while not as famous as other elements of the culture of the Dutch Golden Age, deserves independent focus, not only because of its own intrinsic worth, but also because of the evidence of strong social concern that it presents and the light it sheds on other aspects of the Golden Age. Despite this, outside the Netherlands the literature has not been examined closely, undoubtedly because of the language barrier, but also because there is no reasonable introduction to the material in English. This book fills that lacuna. Richly illustrated, it groups its subjects thematically: politics, religion, nature, daily life. Because Golden Age painting, in particular, is so famous, the book devotes a special chapter to the connection between poetry and painting. A concluding chapter shows the republic's function as a European literary trading center with brisk import and export. Included also are texts and translations of poems and extensive bibliographies for further study.

This book is a study of the role of the imagination. It focuses on the imaginative use of language in literature (poetry and narrative prose); but it also touches on some more comprehensive issues, for the questions it discusses are questions regarding the relationship between mind, reality and unreality. The first two chapters survey the thinking about the imagination in the history of philosophy. The main trends and the main problems are discussed, particularly in respect of the (positive or negative) evaluation of imagination. The subsequent chapters investigate the role of the imagination from a closer point of view. How is it that imagination appears in literary art? Central topics of discussion are the nature of narrativity, of fictional discourse and fictional objects, of realistic fiction, of symbolism and metaphor. Moreover, the similarities (both real and imagined) between literature and the other arts are explored. In all chapters attention is paid to the problem of the value of art and literary imagination. The last chapter addresses this issue head-on. In particular, it attempts to define the value of literature in relation to science.

Scholars and students working on the early courtly and chivalric literature of medieval Europe will have often felt the need for contemporary theoretical material with which to illustrate their arguments about courtesy and chivalry in romances, etc. The present volume, which presents critical editions of the two earliest didactic poems of this kind in the vernacular (both date from the first quarter of the thirteenth century), was conceived partly to fill this need. This book will be of interest not only to specialists in Old French literature, but also to those studying other literatures; both texts are known to have circulated in England in the fourteenth century and are therefore of importance for anglicists; L’Ordene de Chevalerie was adapted into Middle Dutch and Italian several times and provides excellent material for comparatists, netherlandists and italianists; moreover, given the germinal place of Old French literature in the culture of the Middle Ages, both poems are worthy of study in the context of the evolution of the ideals of courtesy and chivalry as European literary phenomenon.
Each critical text is accompanied by an extensive literary introduction and philological apparatus, and translations into modern English prose have been appended to render the poems more accessible to non-romanists.

The aim of this investigation is to reconsider the cultural confrontation between England and Ireland from a new methodological perspective, and to trace how this confrontation resulted in a particular notion, literary as well as political, of Irish nationality.

“The long history of censorship is a parallel and equally powerful history of literature. Censors bear witness to the power of the word even more forcefully than the writers and the readers they consider dangerous.” (Index on Censorship 6/1996)

A critical assessment of literature produced under censorship needs to take into account that the stategies of the censors are answered by strategies of the writers and the readers. To recognize self-censoring strategies in writing, it is necessary to know the specific restrictions of the censorship regime in question. In South Africa under apartheid all writers were confronted with the question of how to respond to the pressure of censorship. This confrontation took a different form however, depending on what group the writer belonged to and what language he/she used. By looking at white writers writing in Afrikaans and white and black writers writing in English, this book gives the impact of censorship on South African literature a comparative examination which it has not received before. The book considers works by J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, André Brink, and others less known to readers outside South Africa like Karel Schoeman, Louis Krüger, Christopher Hope, Miriam Tlali and Mtutuzeli Matshoba. It treats the censorship laws of the apartheid regime as well as, in the final chapter, the new law of the Mandela government which shows some surprising similarities to its predecessor.

Margreet de Lange teaches Comparative Literature at Utrecht University and coordinates the University’s interdisciplinary program of South African Studies. She received her Ph.D. from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

“De Lange expertly sketches in the historical and literary backgrounds as she goes, taking us right up to the recent (unsatisfactory) revision of the censorship laws, making The Muzzled Muse a vitally important summary of literary censorship in South Africa, and a handbook of what to guard against in the future.”

Shaun de Waal, Mail & Guardian Sept. 26 to October 1, 1997

In Gorbachev's Russia and outside of it the strength and scope of Russian nationalism is currently a subject of strenuous scholarly debate. The many and varied forms national ideology takes in Russian literature are the subject of this collection of essays. Over the past two hundred years Russians have used their literature to express both conformist and nonconformist views on the relationship between the individual and society and on Russian national destiny. Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Grossman, Tvardovsky, Rasputin, Zinovyev and others have taken diverse stands in regard to Russian nationalism, and their points of view are explored in this book. Several chapters offer suggestive overviews of nationalism's role in literature. The influence of Stalinist mentality on nationalism is also explored, as are the overt expressions of nationalist sentiments in the conditions of Gorbachev's glasnost. This book offers a rare insight into the present Soviet Russian literary scene, and it will help refocus future studies of Russian literature.

This study describes in detail the development of Coleridge’s attitude to nature as it is reflected in his poetry. It analyses the different stages of Coleridge’s search for a meaningful relation to nature from an uncritical adoption of the eighteenth century conventions in his early poetry to a projectionist view in his poems of 1802. It offers challenging new readings of some of Coleridge’s major poems like ‘The Ancient Mariner’ and ‘Dejection: an Ode’, and tries to rehabilitate some minor ones, like ‘The Picture’. Attention is also paid to his relation with Wordsworth. It discusses in detail the philosophical background of Coleridge’s views and considers the contribution of German thought to his development. As a whole this study affords a new insight into the genesis of romanticism in England.