Subject collection: Literary Studies (221 titles, 1971–2015)

This book focusses on computer methodologies as a way of investigating language and character in literary texts. Both theoretical and practical, it surveys investigations into characterization in literary linguistics and personality in social psychology, before carrying out a computational analysis of Virginia Woolf’s experimental novel The Waves. Frequencies of grammatical and semantic categories in the language of the six speaking characters are analyzed using Wmatrix software developed by UCREL at Lancaster University. The quantitative analysis is supplemented by a qualitative analysis into recurring patterns of metaphor. The author concludes that these analyses successfully differentiate all six characters, both synchronically and diachronically, and claims that this methodology is also applicable to the study of personality in non-literary language. The book, written in a clear and accessible style, will be of interest to post-graduate students and academics in linguistics, stylistics, literary studies, psychology and also computational approaches.

This is the first book to present an account of literary meaning and effects drawing on our best understanding of mind and language in the form of a Cognitive Grammar. The contributors provide exemplary analyses of a range of literature from science fiction, dystopia, absurdism and graphic novels to the poetry of Wordsworth, Hopkins, Sassoon, Balassi, and Dylan Thomas, as well as Shakespeare, Chaucer, Barrett Browning, Whitman, Owen and others. The application of Cognitive Grammar allows the discussion of meaning, translation, ambience, action, reflection, multimodality, empathy, experience and literariness itself to be conducted in newly valid ways. With a Foreword by the creator of Cognitive Grammar, Ronald Langacker, and an Afterword by the cognitive scientist Todd Oakley, the book represents the latest advance in literary linguistics, cognitive poetics and literary critical practice.

Among 15th-century literature in the Romance languages, Curial and Guelfa is one of the most successful romances of chivalry. It is a veritable jewel of late medieval European literature and of narrative in the Crown of Aragon in particular. Curial shares a range of features — realism, humanity, believable deeds of chivalry, historical background, allusions to everyday life, elements of humour and parody, variation between literary and popular language — with contemporary French chivalric narratives, and with the Valencian Joanot Martorell’s Tirant lo Blanc. In this company, however, Curial stands out for the predominance in it of the sentimental component, for a significant incidence of learned elements from Greek and Latin classical culture and from the early fathers of the Christian church, and for its striking stylistic elegance. These learned elements are an indication of fresh humanistic breezes blowing from Italy. In this way the novel unites several cultural currents that converge in western Romance narrative at the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance.

This translation into English, by Max W. Wheeler, is based upon the 2008 edition by Antoni Ferrando.

This volume presents Eastern Europe and Russia as a distinctive translation zone, despite significant internal differences in language, religion and history. The persistence of large multilingual empires, which produced bilingual and even polyglot readers, the shared experience of “belated modernity” and the longstanding practice of repressive censorship produced an incredibly vibrant, profoundly politicized, and highly visible culture of translation throughout the region as a whole. The individual contributors to this volume examine diverse manifestations of this shared translation culture from the Romantic Age to the present day, revealing literary translation to be at times an embarrassing reminder of the region’s cultural marginalization and reliance on the West and at other times a mode of resistance and a metaphor for cultural supercession. This volume demonstrates the relevance of this region to the current scholarship on alternative translation traditions and exposes some of the Western assumptions that have left the region underrepresented in the field of Translation Studies.

From 1660 to c 1700, England set her eyes on Spain and on the seventeenth-century Spanish comedy of intrigue with an aim to import new plots and characters that might appeal to the Anglo-Saxon audience. As a consequence, Hispanic drama in translation enjoyed a period of relative popularity never to be repeated until the turn of the twenty-first century. By analysing a corpus of translated classical Spanish plays intended for performance, this book aims to show the strategies chosen by the translators concerned. Hence, many aspects present in the source texts are naturalized in order to meet the demands of the target culture, while others are kept to clarify the “Spanishness” of the text. This study draws significant conclusions on the validity of these mechanisms within the specific framework of Drama Translation Studies. This volume will be of interest to Hispanists, drama translation scholars and theatre practitioners.

The language of the First Riustring Manuscript, dating from ca. 1300 AD, represents the most archaic stage of Old Frisian. The mainly legal texts are famous for their historical value. However, a grammatical treatise of this important codex is still lacking. This book is meant to meet this need. It contains an inventory of the linguistic evidence as well as a synchronic study of the grammar. Moreover, historical linguistic problems are discussed wherever relevant. The book is intended for all students of Old Frisian, not just linguists but also legal historians, philologists, historians, and others.

Amadei-Pulice examines the conflict between Lope's dramatic formula (comedia) and the new polytechnic formula that in the hands of Calderon merged dramatic poetry with visual and auditory effects (comedia de teatro). The author places the Spanish baroque theater within the wider context of a revolution in the theory of representation, signs, and meanings that took place at the beginning of the seventeenth century and marked the appearance of a new dramatic style: the stile rappresentativo. Special attention is given to the techniques and applications of perspectival scenery, stagecraft, optics, and the creation of visual and sound effects contributed by the Florentine melodramma. The highlighting of Italian dramatic theory and practice reveals that Calderon was an innovator and creator of a new concept in theater.

This work is a critical evaluation of the concepts of convention and innovation as applied in the study of changing literary values, hierarchies and canons. Two approaches are analyzed: (1) the linking of convention and the subject's awareness of convention, and (2) systems theory. The merits of both approaches are discussed and an attempt is made to combine them and to regard systems of literary communication primarily as systems of conventions. Specific cases of changing conventions and innovation are illustrated with examples from the field of versification (Rimbaud), reception studies (Puskin, Goethe, George Eliot), the dichotomy of forgetting/remembering (Nietzsche, Proust), avant-garde, the American dream, and popular genres assimilated in Postmodernism.

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.