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

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.

Evaluation is central to literary studies and has led to an impressive list of publications on the status and history of the canon. Yet it is remarkable how little attention has been given to the role of textual properties in evaluative processes. Most of the chapters in The Quality of Literature redress this issue by dealing with texts or genres ranging from classical antiquity, via Renaissance to twentieth century. They provide a rich textual and historical panorama of how critical debate over literary quality has influenced our modes of thinking and feeling about literature, and how they continue to shape the current literary landscape. Four theoretical chapters reflect on the general state of literary evaluation while the introduction weaves the different threads together aiming at further conceptual clarification. This book thus contributes to a deeper understanding of the problems that are at the heart of past and present debates over literary quality.

The two-volume work Modernism has been awarded the prestigious 2008 MSA Book Prize!

Modernism has constituted one of the most prominent fields of literary studies for decades. While it was perhaps temporarily overshadowed by postmodernism, recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in modernism on both sides of the Atlantic. These volumes respond to a need for a collective and multifarious view of literary modernism in various genres, locations, and languages. Asking and responding to a wealth of theoretical, aesthetic, and historical questions, 65 scholars from several countries test the usefulness of the concept of modernism as they probe a variety of contexts, from individual texts to national literatures, from specific critical issues to broad cross-cultural concerns. While the chief emphasis of these volumes is on literary modernism, literature is seen as entering into diverse cultural and social contexts. These range from inter-art conjunctions to philosophical, environmental, urban, and political domains, including issues of race and space, gender and fashion, popular culture and trauma, science and exile, ­all of which have an urgent bearing on the poetics of modernity.

With contributions by researchers from India, Europe, North America and the Caribbean, In Translation – Reflections, refractions, transformations touches on questions of method and on topics – including copyright, cultural hybridity, globalization, identity construction, and minority languages – which are important for the disciplinary development of translation studies but also of interest to other fields as well, most notably comparative literature, cultural studies and world literature. The volume provides a forum for new voices to be heard alongside those of well-established scholars and for current concerns to express themselves, often focusing on practices in areas of the world other than Europe or North America, which have until now tended to dominate the field. Acknowledging difference and celebrating it, the contributions conceive of translation as a process which reconstitutes and transforms, which brings renewal and growth, an interaction in a new context, a new reading, a new writing.

This book endorses Coleridge's statement: "nothing can permanently please which does not contain in itself the reason why it is so". It conceives 'Kubla Khan' as of a hypnotic poem, in which the "obtrusive rhythms" produce a hypnotic, emotionally heightened response, giving false security to the "Platonic Censor", so that our imagination is left free to explore higher levels of uncertainty. Critics intolerant of uncertainty tend to account for the poem's effect by extraneous background information. The book consists of three parts employing different research methods. Part One is speculative, and discusses three aspects of a complex aesthetic event: the verbal structure of 'Kubla Khan', validity in interpretation, and the influence of the critic's decision style on his critical decisions. The other two parts are empirical. Part Two explores reader response to gestalt qualities of rhyme patterns and hypnotic poems in perspective of decision style and professional training. Part Three submits four recordings of the poem by leading British actors to instrumental investigation.

Stemmatology is the discipline that attempts to reconstruct the transmission of a text on the basis of relations between the various surviving manuscripts. The object of this volume is the evaluation of the most recent methods and techniques in the field of stemmatology, as well as the development of new ones. The book is largely interdisciplinary in character: it contains contributions from scholars from classical, historical, biblical, medieval and modern language studies, as well as from mathematical and computer scientists and biologists. The contributions in the book have been divided into two sections. The first section deals with various stemmatological methods and techniques. The second section focuses more specifically on the various problems concerning textual variation.An earlier volume on Studies in Stemmatology was published in 1996 and opened the most actual state of the art in stemmatology to a broad audience. That first volume was very well received by stemmatologists and also gave an impulse to new research, as several articles in the current volume clearly illustrate.

Both volumes are of interest to scholars in (historical) linguistics, literary studies, Bible studies, classical studies, medieval studies, and history.

Nonfictional Romantic Prose: Expanding Borders surveys a broad range of expository, polemical, and analytical literary forms that came into prominence during the last two decades of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth. They stand in contrast to better-known romantic fiction in that they endeavor to address the world of daily, empirical experience rather than that of more explicitly self-referential, fanciful creation. Among them are genres that have since the nineteenth century come to characterize many aspects of modern life like the periodical or the psychological case study; others flourished and enjoyed wide-spread popularity during the nineteenth century but are much less well-known today like the almanac and the diary. Travel narratives, pamphlets, religious and theological texts, familiar essays, autobiographies, literary-critical and philosophical studies, and discussions of the visual arts and music all had deep historical roots when appropriated by romantic writers but prospered in their hands and assumed distinctive contours indicative of the breadth of romantic thought.

SPECIAL OFFER: 30% discount for a complete set order (5 vols.).The Romanticism series in the Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages is the result of a remarkable international collaboration. The editorial team coordinated the efforts of over 100 experts from more than two dozen countries to produce five independently conceived, yet interrelated volumes that show not only how Romanticism developed and spread in its principal European homelands and throughout the New World, but also the ways in which the affected literatures in reaction to Romanticism have redefined themselves on into Modernism. A glance at the index of each volume quickly reveals the extraordinary richness of the series’ total contents. Romantic Irony sets the broader experimental parameters of comparison by concentrating on the myriad expressions of “irony” as one of the major impulses in the Romantic philosophical and artistic revolution, and by combining cross-cultural and interdisciplinary studies with special attention also to literatures in less widely diffused language streams. Romantic Drama traces creative innovations that deeply altered the understanding of genre at large, fed popular imagination through vehicles like the opera, and laid the foundations for a modernist theater of the absurd. Romantic Poetry demonstrates deep patterns and a sharing of crucial themes of the revolutionary age which underlie the lyrical expression that flourished in so many languages and environments. Nonfictional Romantic Prose assists us in coping with the vast array of writings from the personal and intimate sphere to modes of public discourse, including Romanticism’s own self-commentary in theoretical statements on the arts, society, life, the sciences, and more. Nor are the discursive dimensions of imaginative literature neglected in the closing volume, Romantic Prose Fiction, where the basic Romantic themes and story types (the romance, novel, novella, short story, and other narrative forms) are considered throughout Europe and the New World. This enormous realm is seen not just in terms of Romantic theorizing, but in the light of the impact of Romantic ideas and narration on later generations. As an aid to readers, the introduction to Romantic Prose Fiction explains the relationships among the volumes in the series and carries a listing of their tables of contents in an appendix. No other series exists comparable to these volumes which treat the entirety of Romanticism as a cultural happening across the whole breadth of the “Old” and “New” Worlds and thus render a complex picture of European spiritual strivings in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, a heritage still very close to our age.

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.romanticism.pdf

The purpose of this collective work is to throw new light on a period which is defined, neither in historical, nor in ideological terms, but along specific literary criteria. Across the XVIIth and the XVIIIth century, a new perspective appears on the status of literature and its relation to the author. Literature overflows the traditional limits of the so called “belles lettres” and the classical rules inherited from the tradition. Starting with The battle of the books, or with the new psychology of Marivaux’s comedies and journals, the way is paved for a new form of writing that will eventually promote a new kind of drama, rooted in real life, as well as a considerable extension of the realm of satiric inspiration. The famous “Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes” is a token of this profound change. While the prestige of the author is raised (as in Pope’s case), the domain of literature is extended to the field of social and economic life, giving models and advice even on trivial and utilitarian matters. These trends are studied in a broad European perspective by a team of scholars coming from various horizons and cultures.

As the first book of its kind, this volume with contributions from many well known scholars brings together some of the most recent original work on sign language acquisition in children learning a variety of different signed languages (i.e., Brazilian Sign Language, American SL, SL of the Netherlands, British SL, SL of Nicaragua, and Italian SL). In addition, the volume addresses methodological and theoretical issues in both sign language research and child language development in general. The book includes both overview chapters addressing matters of general concern in the study of sign language acquisition and chapters related to more specific topics such as sign language phonology, complex sentence structure and verb phrase development. This book will be of interest to sign language researchers, child language specialists and communication disorders professionals alike. The material is presented in such a way that also novices to the area of sign language study will find the text accessible.

Romantic Poetry encompasses twenty-seven new essays by prominent scholars on the influences and interrelations among Romantic movements throughout Europe and the Americas. It provides an expansive overview of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poetry in the European languages. The essays take account of interrelated currents in American, Argentinian, Brazilian, Bulgarian, Canadian, Caribbean, Chilean, Colombian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Mexican, Norwegian, Peruvian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, and Uruguayan literature. Contributors adopt different models for comparative study: tracing a theme or motif through several literatures; developing innovative models of transnational influence; studying the role of Romantic poetry in socio-political developments; or focusing on an issue that appears most prominently in one national literature yet is illuminated by the international context. This collaborative volume provides an invaluable resource for students of comparative literature and Romanticism.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.romanticism.pdf

This volume is the twelfth to date in a series of works in French or English presenting the epochs and movements of a Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages (Histoire Comparée des Littératures de Langues Européennes). The original intention of the editors was to publish a four-volume history of European literature from 1760-1820, and the first of these volumes, Des Lumières au Romantisme. Genres en Vers, appeared as long ago as 1982. The volumes Genres en Prose and Théâtre are still awaited. In their absence the present volume, Epoche im _berblick, attempts a more comprehensive and rigorous treatment of the period and its historiographical problems than was initially planned, providing the reader with an overview of sixty eventful years of European literary history — years in which German Classicism coincided with the birth, initially in Germany and England, of Romanticism. And at the centre of this turbulent period of European intellectual and literary history stands the French Revolution.

For the first time the Dutch-speaking regions of the Caribbean and Suriname are brought into fruitful dialogue with another major American literature, that of the anglophone Caribbean. The results are as stimulating as they are unexpected. The editors have coordinated the work of a distinguished international team of specialists.

Read separately or as a set of three volumes, the History of Literature in the Caribbean is designed to serve as the primary reference book in this area. The reader can follow the comparative evolution of a literary genre or plot the development of a set of historical problems under the appropriate heading for the English- or Dutch-speaking region. An extensive index to names and dates of authors and significant historical figures completes the volume.

The subeditors bring to their respective specialty areas a wealth of Caribbeanist experience. Vera M. Kutzinski is Professor of English, American, and Afro-American Literature at Yale University. Her book Sugar’s Secrets: Race and The Erotics of Cuban Nationalism, 1993, treated a crucial subject in the romance of the Caribbean nation. Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger has been very active in Latin American and Caribbean literary criticism for two decades, first at the Free University in Berlin and later at the University of Maryland. The editor of A History of Literature in the Caribbean, A. James Arnold, is Professor of French at the University of Virginia, where he founded the New World Studies graduate program. Over the past twenty years he has been a pioneer in the historical study of the Négritude movement and its successors in the francophone Caribbean.

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

This book offers foundations for a literary criticism which seeks to mediate between writers and readers belonging to different historical periods or social groupings. This makes it, among other things, a timely intervention in the postmodern “culture wars”, though the theory put forward will be of interest not only to students of literature and culture, but also to linguists.

Sell describes communication in general as strongly interactive, as very much affected by the disparate situationalities of “sending” and “receiving”, yet as by no means completely determined by them. Seen this way, men and women are both social beings and individuals, capable of empathizing with sociohistorical formations which are alien to them, sometimes even to the extent of changing their own life-world. By treating literary activity as communicational in this same dynamic sense, Sell radically modifies the main paradigms of twentieth-century literary theory, casting much new light on questions of genre, interpretation, affect and ethics.

The idea that reading literature changes the reader seems as old as literature itself. Through the ages philosophers, writers, and literary scholars have suggested it affects norms, empathic ability, self-concept, beliefs, etc. This book examines what we actually know about these effects. And it finds strong evidence for the old claims. However, it remains unclear what aspects of the reading experience are responsible for these effects. Applying methods of the social sciences to this particular problem of literary theory, this book presents a psychological explanation based upon the conception of literature as a moral laboratory. A series of experiments examines whether imagining oneself in the shoes of characters affects beliefs about what it must be like to be someone else, and whether it affects beliefs about consequences of behavior. The results have implications for the role literature could play in society, for instance, in an alternative for traditional moral education.

The authors present a new perspective on a wide range of issues in the study of literature and culture. Some of the topics discussed, such as interpretation, canon formation, and literary historiography, belong to the traditional domain of literary studies. Others — cultural identity, convention, systems theory, and empirical methods — originate in the social sciences and are now being integrated into the humanities. By referring to the work of authors as widely apart as Hayden White, Edward Said, Fredric Jameson, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Reinhart Koselleck, Pierre Bourdieu, Niklas Luhmann, Siegfried Schmidt, Norbert Groeben, and many others, the full complexity of the field of literary studies becomes apparent.The authors argue for a distinction between analysis of literary systems on the one hand and critical intervention on the other. By distinguishing between research and criticism, between knowledge and commitment, they offer new ways for literary studies as well as for cultural critique.

Dealing with the most translated work of German literature, the Tales of the brothers Grimm (1812-1815), this book discusses their history, notably in relation to Denmark and subsequently other nations from 1816 to 1986. The Danish intelligentsia responded enthusiastically to the tales and some were immediately translated into Danish by a nobleman and by the foremost Romantic poet. Their renditions remained in print for a century and embued the tales with high prestige. This book discusses translators, approaches, and other parameters such as copyright, and changes in target audiences. The tales’ social acceptability inspired Hans Christian Andersen to write his celebrated fairytales. Combined, the Grimm and Andersen tales came to constitute the ‘international fairytale’.This genre was born in processes of translation and, today, it is rooted more firmly in the world of translation than in national literatures. This book thus addresses issues of interest to literary, cross-cultural studies and translation.

This selection of papers from the ITI’s landmark First International Colloquium on Literary Translation includes provocative perspectives on the teaching, research and status of literary education in universities. By way of introduction Peter Bush looks at strategies for raising the profile of the theory and practice of literary translation, its professionalisation and role in the development of national and international cultures. Nicholas Round and Edwin Gentzler explore undergraduate teaching of translation in the UK and the US while Douglas Robinson gives a Woody Allenish frame to an experience of pedagogy. Susan Bassnett sets out an overview of the development of research in Translation Studies that is complemented by case studies of translations of Shakespeare’s Letter-Puns by Dirk Delabastita and of Molly Bloom’s Soliloquy by Maria Angeles Code Parrilla. Kirsten Malmkjær and Masako Taira respectively review translating Hans Christian Andersen and the Japanese particle ne as examples of the relationship between linguistics and literary translation. Ian Craig examines the impact of censorship on the translation of children’s fiction in Francoist Spain. Developing the international perspective, Else Vieira considers paradigms for translation in Latin America from concretist poetics to post-modernism.

In the late Qing period, from the Opium War to the 1911 revolution, China absorbed the initial impact of Western arms, manufactures, science and culture, in that order. This volume of essays deals with the reception of Western literature, on the evidence of translations made. Having to overcome Chinese assumptions of cultural superiority, the perception that the West had a literature worth notice grew only gradually. It was not until the very end of the 19th century that a translation of a Western novel (La dame aux camélias) achieved popular acclaim. But this opened the floodgates: in the first decade of the 20th century, more translated fiction was published than original fiction.

The core essays in this collection deal with aspects of this influx according to division of territory. Some take key works (e.g. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Byron’s “The Isles of Greece”), some sample genres (science fiction, detective fiction, fables, political novels), the common attention being to the adjustments made by translators to suit the prevailing aesthetic, cultural and social norms, and/or the current needs and preoccupations of the receiving public. A broad overview of translation activities is given in the introduction.

To present the subject in its true guise, that of a major cultural shift, supporting papers are included to fill in the background and to describe some of the effects of this foreign invasion on native literature. A rounded picture emerges that will be intelligible to readers who have no specialized knowledge of China.

Conversational narratives provide valuable resources for the discursive construction and invoking of personal and sociocultural identities. As such, their sociolinguistic and cultural analysis constitute a high priority in the agenda of discourse studies. This book contributes to the growing line of discourse-analytic research on the dynamic relations between narrative forms and functions and their immediate and wider communicative contexts. The volume draws on a large corpus of spontaneous, conversational stories recorded in Greece, where everyday stortytelling is a central mode of communication in the community’s interactional contexts and thus a rich site for a meaningful enactment of social stances, roles, and relations. The study brings to the fore the stories’ text-constitutive mechanisms and explores the ways in which they situate the narrated experiences globally, by invoking sociocultural knowledge and expectations, and locally, by making them sequentially and interactionally relevant to the specific conversational contexts. The stories’ micro- and macro-level analysis, richly illustrated with narrative transcripts throughout, leads to the uncovery of a global mode of narrative performance which is based on a closed set of recurrent devices. It is argued that the choice or avoidance of this mode is at the heart of the stories’ (re)constitution of a self, an other and a sociocultural world. The numerous cases of intergenerational narrative communication (adults-children) shed additional light on the performance’s contextualization aspects and contribute to the cross-cultural understanding of the dynamics of oral performances.

Besides students and researchers of discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, anthropological linguistics, narrative analysis and Greek studies, this book will also appeal to all those interested in communication and cultural studies.

Containing more than fifty essays by major literary scholars, International Postmodernism divides into four main sections. The volume starts off with a section of eight introductory studies dealing with the subject from different points of view followed by a section that deals with postmodernism in other arts than literature, while a third section discusses renovations of narrative genres and other strategies and devices in postmodernist writing. The final and fourth section deals with the reception and processing of postmodernism in different parts of the world.

Three important aspects add to the special character of International Postmodernism: The consistent distinction between postmodernity and postmodernism; equal attention to the making and diffusion of postmodernism and the workings of literature in general; and the focus on the text and the reader (i.e., the reader's knowledge, experience, interests, and competence) as crucial factors in text interpretation.

This comprehensive study does not expressly focus on American postmodernism, although American interpretations of postmodernism are a major point of reference. The recognition that varying literary and cultural conditions in this world are bound to produce endless varieties of postmodernism made the editors, Hans Bertens and Douwe Fokkema, opt for the title International Postmodernism.

This volume contains ten papers selected from among those presented at the annual Free University Stemmatological Colloquia 1990-93. Current issues in (automated) stemmatology, paleography and codicology are addressed from contemporary theoretical perspectives. All papers focus on new directions in textuology and manuscript affiliation, and especially on the use of computer science in this field.The theoretical implications of computer-assisted stemma construction are explored. In combination with achievements in codicology and paleography, these investigations allow for dealing with the major problems in textuology: extreme complex and entangled manuscript traditions.

Following an introductory chapter, part 1 presents six theoretical contributions on stemmatology, and part 2 deals with auxiliary fields in textuology, such as codicology and paleography. In part 3 applications of the previously developed fields are presented.