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

Proposing a new theory of fiction, this work reviews the confusion about perceived realism, metaphor, virtual worlds and the seemingly obvious distinction between what is true and what is false. The rise of new media, new technology, and creative products and services requires a new examination of what ‘real’ friends are, to what extent scientific novelty is ‘true’, and whether online content is merely ‘figurative’. In this transdisciplinary theory the author evaluates cognitive theories, philosophical discussion, and topics in biology and physics, and places these in the frameworks of computer science and literary theory. The interest of the reader is continuously challenged on matters of truth, fiction, and the shakiness of our belief systems.

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.

The articles assembled in Semblance and Signification explore linguistic and literary structures from a range of theoretical perspectives with a view to understanding the extent, prevalence, productivity, and limitations of iconically grounded forms of semiosis. With the complementary examination of large theoretical issues, extensive corpus analysis in several modern languages such as Italian, Japanese Sign Language, and English, and applied close studies across a range of artistic media, this volume brings a fresh understanding of the cognitive underpinnings of iconicity. If primary and secondary modelling systems are rarely studied in tandem, it is clear from this volume that their fruitful juxtaposition yields striking insight into the cognitive concerns that pervade current semiotic research.

Further developing the line of argument put forward in his Literature as Communication (2000) and Mediating Criticism (2001), Roger D. Sell now suggests that when so-called literary texts stand the test of time and appeal to a large and heterogeneous circle of admirers, this is because they are genuinely dialogical in spirit. Their writers, rather than telling other people what to do or think or feel, invite them to compare notes, and about topics which take on different nuances as seen from different points of view. So while such texts obviously reflect the taste and values of their widely various provenances, they also channel a certain respect for the human other to whom they are addressed. So much so, that they win a reciprocal respect from members of their audience. In Sell’s new book, this ethical interplay becomes the focus of a post-postmodern critique, which sees literary dialogicality as a possible catalyst to new, non-hegemonic kinds of globalization. The argument is illustrated with major reassessments of Shakespeare, Pope, Wordsworth, Dickens, Churchill, Orwell, and Pinter, and there are also studies of trauma literature for children, and of ethically oriented criticism itself.

In Translation and the Problem of Sway Douglas Robinson offers the concept of "sway" to bring together discussion of two translational phenomena that have traditionally been considered in isolation, i.e. norms and errors: norms as ideological pressures to conform to the source text, and deviations from the source text as driven by ideological pressures to conform to some extratextual authority. The two theoretical constructs around which the discussion of translational sway is organized are Peirce's "interpretant" as rethought by Lawrence Venuti and "narrativity" as rethought by Mona Baker. Robinson offers a series of “friendly amendments” to both, looking closely at specific translation histories (Alex. Matson to and from Finnish, two English translations of Dostoevsky) as well as theoretical models from Aristotle to Peirce to expand the range and power of these concepts. In addition to translation and interpreting scholars this book will be of interest to scholars of communication and social interaction.

Au sein de la vaste entreprise qu'est l'Histoire comparée des littératures de langues européennes, la sous-série portant sur la Renaissance, dont fait partie le volume que voici, représente à plusieurs égards une gageure novatrice. La Renaissance a souvent et abondamment été étudiée comme transformation de la civilisation occidentale, en Italie avant tout, par la redécouverte de ses sources gréco-latines et l'absorption de celles-ci par la pensée et la culture contemporaines, et notamment par le christianisme post-médiéval. Certes, l'histoire déjà existante de divers pays d'Europe et de diverses aires linguistiques n'a pas manqué de prendre en compte les manifestations littéraires et artistiques de ces phénomènes. Mais il manquait une vision d'ensemble qui fût attentive aux multiples relations passées et présentes des oeuvres entre elles, au travers des frontières. C'est le but que se propose la sous-série Renaissance en tentant de décrire, dans toute sa complexité interlinguistique, interlittéraire, interculturelle et internationale l'époque qui s'étend de 1400 à 1610 (dates peut-être arbitraires mais fournissant du moins une hypothèse quant à la situation chronologique du phénomène Renaissance). Maturations et mutations (1520–60) explore cette tranche chronologique particulière, dans de multiples domaines de la culture et du littéraire au sein des cultures, en examinant une série de grandes réalisations de l'esprit humain telles qu'elles s'expriment, avec leurs ressemblances et leurs différences, en diverses langues européennes. Plutôt que d'imposer une notion arbitrairement unifiée de la Renaissance (parce qu'il est collectif, mais aussi parce que la multiplicité des survivances et des émergences défie toute généralisation) l'ouvrage que voici tente de saisir l'élan renaissant, là où il se présente, dans toute sa diversité et sa maturité.This volume is part of a book set which can be ordered at a special discount: https://www.benjamins.com/series/chlel/chlel.special_offer_epo.pdf

A Comparative History of Literatures in the Iberian Peninsula is the second comparative history of a new subseries with a regional focus, published by the Coordinating Committee of the International Comparative Literature Association. As its predecessor for East-Central Europe, this two-volume history distances itself from traditional histories built around periods and movements, and explores, from a comparative viewpoint, a space considered to be a powerful symbol of inter-literary relations. Both the geographical pertinence and its symbolic condition are obviously discussed, when not even contested.

Written by an international team of researchers who are specialists in the field, this history is the first attempt at applying a comparative approach to the plurilingual and multicultural literatures in the Iberian Peninsula. The aim of comprehensiveness is abandoned in favor of a diverse and extensive array of key issues for a comparative agenda.

A Comparative History of Literatures in the Iberian Peninsula undermines the primacy claimed for national and linguistic boundaries, and provides a geo-cultural account of literary inter-systems which cannot otherwise be explained.

This volume is part of a book set which can be ordered at a special discount: https://www.benjamins.com/series/chlel/chlel.special_offer_chlip.pdf

How do characters tell stories in plays and for what dramatic purpose? This volume provides the first systematic analysis of narrative episodes in drama from an interactional perspective, applying sociolinguistic theories of narrative and insights from conversation analysis to literary dialogue. The aim of the book is to show how narration can become drama and how analysis of the way a character tells a story can be the key to understanding its role in the unfolding action. The book’s interactional approach, which analyses the way in which the characteristic features of everyday conversational stories are used by dramatists to create literary effects, offers an additional tool for dramatic criticism. The book should be of interest to scholars and students of narrative research, conversation and discourse analysis, stylistics, dramatic discourse and theatre studies. Winner of 2012 Esse Book Award for Language and Linguistics

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.