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

Satire is clearly one of today’s most controversial socio-cultural topics. In this edited volume, The Power of Satire, it is studied for the first time as a dynamic, discursive mode of performance with the power of crossing and contesting cultural boundaries. The collected essays reflect the fundamental shift from literary satire or straightforward literary rhetoric with a relatively limited societal impact, to satire’s multi-mediality in the transnational public space where it can cause intercultural clashes and negotiations on a large scale. An appropriate set of heuristic themes – space, target, rhetoric, media, time – serves as the analytical framework for the investigations and determines the organization of the book as a whole. The contributions, written by an international group of experts with diverse disciplinary backgrounds, manifest academic standards with a balance between theoretical analyses and evaluations on the one hand, and in-depth case studies on the other.

Do the notions of “World Lingua Franca” and “World Literature” now need to be firmly relegated to an imperialist-cum-colonialist past? Or can they be rehabilitated in a practical and equitable way that fully endorses a politics of recognition? For scholars in the field of languages and literatures, this is the central dilemma to be faced in a world that is increasingly globalized. In this book, the possible banes and benefits of globalization are illuminated from many different viewpoints by scholars based in Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, and Oceania. Among their more particular topics of discussion are: language spread, language hegemony, and language conservation; literary canons, literature and identity, and literary anthologies; and the bearing of the new communication technologies on languages and literatures alike. Throughout the book, however, the most frequently explored opposition is between languages or literatures perceived as “major” and others perceived as “minor”, two terms which are sometimes qualitative in connotation, sometimes quantitative, and sometimes both at once, depending on who is using them and with reference to what.

The articles in this volume examine historical, cultural, literary and political facets of translation in Turkey, a society in tortuous transformation since the 19th century from empire to nation-state. Some draw attention to tradition in Ottoman practices and agents of translation and interpreting, while others explore the republican period, starting in 1923, with the revolutionary change in script from Arabic to Roman coming in 1928, making a powerful impact on publication and translation practices. Areas covered include the German Jewish academic involvement in translation, traditional and current practices of translating from Kurdish into Turkish, censorship of translated literature, intralingual translations from Ottoman into modern Turkish, pseudotranslation, ideological manipulation and resistance in translation, imitativeness vs. originality and metonymics of literary reviewing.

The Book of the Order of Chivalry was written in Catalan by Ramon Llull between 1274 and 1276 and is one of the author’s earliest works. After his death, it achieved a wide dissemination throughout Europe in part because it was considered the theoretical manual on knighthood par excellence. The book was written in Catalan for knights who might not have a knowledge of Latin. Llull devotes his treatise to the definition of the duties of a perfect knight. In addition, he is interested in delving into the religious and moral aspects of chivalry as well as in trying to reform this institution.

This edition is based on the Catalan text from Luanco’s Libro de la Orden de Caballería del B. Raimundo Lulio, which is included here in facsimile format thanks to the generosity of the Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres de Barcelona. To this are added new Spanish and contemporary English translations. In addition, this volume includes an edition of Caxton’s 16th century English translation.

Reports on crime in newspapers do not provide a neutral representation of criminals and their offences but instead construct them in accordance with societal discourse surrounding this issue. This book takes an interdisciplinary approach at the intersection of Linguistics, Criminology, and Media Studies and demonstrates how Linguistics can contribute to the study of crime in the media. By combining the tools offered by Corpus Linguistics and Critical Stylistics (a text-based framework for Critical Discourse Analysis), evidence is provided for predominant perceptions of crime and their underlying ideologies in both British and German society. This study names and illustrates the most significant linguistic devices used to construct offenders, victims, and crimes in two newspaper corpora compiled from the German and British press. These devices are then linked to criminological frameworks.

Iconicity: East Meets West presents an intersection of East-West scholarship on Iconicity. Several of its chapters thus deal with Asian languages and cultures, or a comparison of world languages. Divided into four categories: general issues; sound symbolism and mimetics; iconicity in literary texts; and iconic motivation in grammar, the chapters show the diversity and dynamics of iconicity research, ranging from iconicity as a driving force in language structure and change, to the various uses of images, diagrams and metaphors at all levels of the literary text, in both narrative and poetic forms, as well as on all varieties of discourse, including the visual and the oral.

Literary Translation in Modern Iran: A sociological study is the first comprehensive study of literary translation in modern Iran, covering the period from the late 19th century up to the present day. By drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of culture, this work investigates the people behind the selection, translation, and production of novels from English into Persian. The choice of novels such as Morier's The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan, Austen's Pride and Prejudice, and Vargas Llosa's The War of the End of the World provides insights into who decides upon titles for translation, motivations of translators and publishers, and the context in which such decisions are made.The author suggests that literary translation in Iran is not a straightforward activity. As part of the field of cultural production, literary translation has remained a lively game not only to examine and observe, but also often a challenging one to play. By adopting hide-and-seek strategies and with attention to the dynamic of the field of publishing, Iranian translators and publishers have continued to play the game against all odds.

The book is not only a contribution to the growing scholarship informed by sociological approaches to translation, but an essential reading for scholars and students of Translation Studies, Iranian Studies, and Middle Eastern Studies.

How is it that some texts achieve the status of literature? Partly, at least, because the relationship they allow between their writers and the people who respond to them is fundamentally egalitarian. This is the insight explored by members of the Åbo literary communication network, who in this new book develop fresh approaches to literary works of widely varied provenance. The authors examined have written in Ancient Greek, Táng Dynasty Chinese, Middle, Modern and Contemporary English, German, Romanian, Polish, Russian and Hebrew. But each and every one of them is shown as having offered their human fellows something which, despite some striking appearances to the contrary, amounts to a welcoming invitation. This their audiences have then been able to negotiate in a spirit of dialogical interchange.

Part I of the book poses the question: How, in offering their invitation, have writers respected their audiences’ human autonomy? This is the province of what Åbo scholars call "communicational criticism". Part II asks how an audience negotiating a literary invitation can be encouraged to respect the human autonomy of the writer who has offered it. In Åbo parlance, such encouragement is the task of "mediating criticism". These two modes of criticism naturally complement each other, and in their shared concern for communicational ethics ultimately seek to further a post-postmodern world that would be global without being hegemonic.

Exploring Second Language Creative Writing continues the work of stabilizing the emerging Creative Writing (SL) discipline. In unique ways, each essay in this book seeks to redefine a tripartite relationship between language acquisition, literatures, and identity. All essays extend B.B. Kachru’s notion of “bilingual creativity” as an enculturated, shaped discourse (a mutation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis). Creative Writing (SL), a new subfield to emerge from Stylistics, extends David Hanauer’s Poetry as Research (2010); situating a suite of methodologies and interdisciplinary pedagogies, researchers in this book mobilize theories from Creativity Studies, TESOL, TETL, Translation Studies, Linguistics, Cultural Studies, and Literary Studies. Changing the relationship between L2 writers and canonized literary artefacts (from auratic to dialogic), each essay in this text is essentially Freirean; each chapter explores dynamic processes through which creative writing in a non-native language engages material and phenomenological modes toward linguistic pluricentricity and, indeed, emancipation.

How does reading fiction affect young people? How can they transfer fictional experience into real life? Why do they care about fictional characters? How does fiction enhance young people's sense of self-hood? Supported by cognitive psychology and brain research, this ground-breaking book is the first study of young readers' cognitive and emotional engagement with fiction. It explores how fiction stimulates perception, attention, imagination and other cognitive activity, and opens radically new ways of thinking about literature for young readers. Examining a wide range of texts for a young audience, from picturebooks to young adult novels, the combination of cognitive criticism and children’s literature theory also offers significant insights for literary studies beyond the scope of children’s fiction. An important milestone in cognitive criticism, the book provides convincing evidence that reading fiction is indispensable for young people’s intellectual, emotional and social maturation.

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.

The writing and reading of so-called literary texts can be seen as processes which are genuinely communicational. They lead, that is to say, to the growth of communities within which individuals acknowledge not only each other’s similarities but differences as well. In this new book, Roger D. Sell and his colleagues apply the communicational perspective to the past four centuries of literary activity in English. Paying detailed attention to texts – both canonical and non-canonical – by Amelia Lanyer, Thomas Coryate, John Boys, Pope, Coleridge, Arnold, Kipling, William Plomer, Auden, Walter Macken, Robert Kroetsch, Rudy Wiebe and Lyn Hejinian, the book shows how the communicational issues of addressivity, commonality, dialogicality and ethics have arisen in widely different historical contexts. At a metascholarly level, it suggests that the communicational criticism of literary texts has significant cultural, social and political roles to play in the post-postmodern era of rampant globalization.

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.