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

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.

These new translations of Bernat Metge’s Libre de Fortuna e Prudència (1381) into Spanish (verse) and English (prose) make this key early work by 14th-century Catalonia’s most challenging writer available to the wider audience it has longed deserved. As with Metge’s masterwork, Lo somni (The Dream), recently translated by Cortijo Ocaña and Elisabeth Lagresa (Benjamins, 2013), the writing of The Book of Fortune and Prudence seems to have been precipitated by a larger crisis in Catalan society, in this case, an all-too-familiar-sounding banking crisis. Drawing on sources ranging from Boethius, to the Roman de la Rose to Arthurian fable, Metge unveils the workings of the world through his two allegorical women, Fortune (good and bad) and Prudence, in a search for consolation in the midst of inexplicable reversals of fortune--those of others, and perhaps his own. But as in the Somni, Metge refuses here to offer pat solutions to the crises of his day, offering what is perhaps one of our earliest glimpses of the impact of new ideas coming from Italy in the Iberian Peninsula. The work is written in the popular noves rimades form (octosyllabic rhymed couplets) in the challenging mix of Occitan and Catalan common to verse writing in 14th century Catalonia. Cortijo’s and Martines’s tri-lingual edition, together with its fine introduction and notes, is an extremely valuable contribution as it makes this unduly neglected text of the later Iberian Middle Ages available for students and other readers in a broadly accessible, yet scholarly, form. (Prof. John Dagenais, UCLA)

Among the numerous discursive carriers through which translations come into being, are channeled and gain readership, translation anthologies and collections have so far received little attention among translation scholars: either they are let aside as almost ungraspable categories, astride editing and translating, mixing in most variable ways authors, genres, languages or cultures, or are taken as convenient but rather meaningless groupings of single translations. This volume takes a new stand, makes a plea to consider translation anthologies and collections at face value and offers an extensive discussion about the more salient aspects of translation anthologies and collections: their complex discursive properties, their manifold roles in canonization processes and in strategies of cultural censorship. It brings together translation scholars with different backgrounds, both theoretical and historical, and covering a wide array of European cultural areas and linguistic traditions. Of special interest for translation theoreticians and historians as well as for scholars in literary and cultural studies, comparative literature and transfer studies.

This work is composed of two parts. The first or introductory part, contains a palaeographical discussion about Bodleian Library, MS Auctarium D.2.19, that is to say, the MacRegol Gospels or the Rushworth Gospels, edited by Kenichi Tamoto, and which forms the second and main part of this book. The provenience of the MS, the Latin text, the use of the MS, and the Old English gloss are discussed in detail in the introductory part. The chief aim that the author set himself is firstly to survey preceding printed versions of the MS, such as Stevenson & Waring (1856-65) and W.W. Skeat (1871-87), and secondly to publish the complete edition of the MS with the whole Latin text interlineally glossed in Old English. This work will stimulate further research into the MS, in particular the comparative study of Old English glosses, such as those of the Lindisfarne Gospels.

Fictions of Adolescent Carnality considers one of the most controversial topics related to adolescents: their experience of desire. In fiction for adolescents, carnal desire is variously presented as a source of angst, an overwhelming experience over which one has no control, bestial, disgusting and, just occasionally, a source of pleasure. The on-set of desire, within the Anglophone tradition, has been closely associated with the loss of innocence and the end of childhood. Drawing on a corpus of 200 narratives of adolescent desire, Kokkola examines the connections between sociological accounts of teenagers’ sexual behaviour, adult fears for and about their off-spring and fictional representations of adolescents exploring their sexuality. Taking up topics such as adolescent pregnancy and parenthood, queer sexualities, animal-human connections and sexual abuse, Kokkola provides wide-ranging insights into how Anglophone literature responds to adolescents’ carnal desires, and contributes to on-going debates on the construction of adolescence and the ideology of innocence.

By taking an interdisciplinary approach — with methods drawn from narratology, aesthetics, social psychology, education, and the empirical study of literature — The Art of Sympathy in Fiction will interest scholars in a variety of fields. Its focus is the sympathetic effects of stories, and the possible ways these feelings can contribute to what has been called the “moral imagination.” Part I examines the dynamics of readers’ beliefs regarding fictional characters and the influence of those impressions on the emotions that readers experience. The book then turns its attention to sympathy, providing a comprehensive definition and considering the ways in which it operates in life and in literature. Part I concludes with a discussion of the narratological and rhetorical features of fictional narratives that theoretically elicit sympathy in readers. Part II applies these theories to four stories that persuade readers to sympathize with characters who seem unsympathetic. Finally, based on empirical findings from the responses of adolescent readers, Part III considers pedagogical approaches that can help students reflect on emotional experiences that result from reading fiction.

Curial e Güelfa és una novel·la anònima del segle XV escrita en llengua catalana, desconeguda fins al segle XIX i publicada por primera vegada el 1901. Es tracta d’una obra singular, a cavall entre l’Edat Mitjana i el Renaixement, en què es conjuminen magistralment els components cavalleresc i sentimental i la influència de l’Humanisme. Encara que el protagonista realitza les seues gestes per Itàlia, Alemanya, Hongria, França, Anglaterra, Grècia, Terra Santa, Egipte i Tunis, el seu ambient és bàsicament italià. El seu anonimat i la seva llengua han desorientat els lingüistes i els historiadors de la literatura que s’hi han acostat. La novel·la, ara accessible en anglès, espanyol, francès, portugués i italià — en traduccions promogudes per IVITRA, basades en l’edició filològica del prof. Antoni Ferrando (2007) —, atrau cada vegada més l’atenció dels estudiosos, no sols per la seva redacció exquisida i la seva ben traçada estructura, sinó pel seu ric rerefons cultural europeu. El present volum d’estudis intenta respondre a gran part d’aquests interrogants, amb quaranta aportacions molt rellevants tant en l’aspecte lingüístic com en el cultural.

Curial e Güelfa is a 15th century anonymous romance written in Catalan, unknown until the 19th century and first published in 1901. It is a singular work, halfway between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, in which the features of chivalry and sentimentalism and a touch of Humanism are brilliantly combined. Although the main character performs his heroic deeds in Italy, Germany, Hungary, France, England, Greece, the Holy Land, Egypt and Tunisia, the atmosphere is essentially Italian. Its anonymity and its language have always disconcerted the linguists and literary historians who have approached it. The novel, now available in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Italian — in translations sponsored by IVITRA, based upon Prof. Antoni Ferrando’s philological edition (2007) — and in German, is increasingly attracting the attention of scholars, not only because of its delighting style and its wonderfully traced structure, but also because of its rich cultural European background. This volume of studies tries to solve most of these questions with forty outstanding contributions, all of them very important both from a linguistic and a cultural point of view.

In our everyday life we are flooded by a pandemonium of information which consciousness organizes into more easily manageable phonetic and semantic categories. In poetry reading, however, the total effect of a poem is not only obtained by some of these categories but also by precategorial information, for which there is a growing body of empirical evidence of its psychological reality. In the Tip of the Tongue phenomenon, a great amount of diffuse precategorial information is present but fails to “grow together” into a compact word, generating a feeling of some dense, undifferentiated mass. Poetic language typically exploits such precategorial information for its effects. By way of theoretical considerations and close readings, this book explores the semantic and phonetic strategies by which a text may increase or decrease the impact of such information. It investigates the conditions that boost or inhibit overtone fusion in rhyme and alliteration. By seeking empirical evidence for the claims he makes in different fields such as music, art, literature, linguistics, experiments in the speech laboratory, the author provides ample and sound examples (ambiguity intended) in an almost conversational tone, which makes us really anticipate reading each new chapter.

The book Post-Socialist Translation Practices explores how Communism and Socialism, through their hegemonic pressure, found expression in translation practice from the moment of Socialist revolution to the present day. Based on extensive archival research in the archives of the Communist Party and on the interviews with translators and editors of the period the book attempts to outline the typical and defining features of the Socialist translatorial behaviour by re-reading more than 200 translations of children's literature and juvenile fiction published in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY). Despite the variety of different forms of censorship that the translators in all Socialist states were subject to, the book argues that Socialist translation in different cultural and linguistic environments, especially where the Soviet model tried to impose itself, purged the translated texts of the same or similar elements, in particular of the religious presence. The book also traces how ideologically manipulated translations are still uncritically reprinted and widely circulated today.