Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages

Le présent ouvrage, composé de deux volumes, réunit la documentation la plus complète et variée qui existe à ce jour dans la matière. Conçu comme un authentique travail collectif, il examine les mouvements littéraires d’avant-garde de 1905–1910 à 1975 successivement sous les angles diachronique (histoire et typologie: vol. I) et synchronique (tendances esthétiques, genres et procédés, relation avec les beaux-arts, la science et la technique, perspectives sociologiques, réception critique: vol. II). Plus de cinquante auteurs, originaires d’une zone s'étendant de la Suède et de la Roumanie à l’Argentine et aux États-Unis, ont collaboré ici, axant leurs enquêtes sur des objectifs analogues, confrontant leurs résultats, résolvant nombre de problèmes, en soulevant d’autres, prospectant non seulement tous les pays d’Europe et d’Amérique, mais jusqu’à l’Afrique du Nord, le Proche-Orient et les Antilles. L’ensemble, complexe et fouillé, offre néanmoins une image cohérente du sujet, non point dogmatique, mais nuancée.



Comme l’exigeait la matière, l’analyse des textes va de pair avec celle des idées, d’intentions et de comportements qui constituent, au même titre que poèmes, romans ou pièces de théâtre, la spécificité des avant-gardes et qui sont parfois devenus monnaie courante, aujourd’hui, dans les beaux-arts et, même, dans la vie quotidienne. Complément des volumes publiés par Ulrich Weisstein (Expressionism as an International Literary Phenomenon) et Ana Balakian (The Symbolist Movement in the Literature of European Languages), l’ouvrage retrace l’une des aventures les plus passionnantes du siècle.

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

The first volume of A Comparative Literary History of Modern Slavery explores literary representations of enslavement with a focus on the emotions. The contributors consider how the diverse emotions generated by slavery have been represented over a historical period stretching from the 16th century to the present and across regions, languages, media and genres. The seventeen chapters explore different framings of emotional life in terms of ‘sentiments’ and ‘affects’ and consider how emotions intersect with literary registers and movements such as melodrama and realism. They also examine how writers, including some formerly enslaved people, sought to activate the feelings of readers, notably in the context of abolitionism. In addition to obvious psychological responses to slavery such as fear, sorrow and anger, they explore minor-key affects such as shame, disgust and nostalgia and address the complexity of depicting love and intimacy in situations of domination. Two forthcoming volumes explore the literary history of slavery in relation to memory and to practices of authorship.

Ulrich Weisstein’s collection of 21 essays offers a comparative study of Expressionism as a Modernist movement whose dynamic core lay in Germany and Austria-Hungary, but which transformed artistic practices in other European countries. The focus, Weisstein argues, “must be strictly and sharply aimed at a specific body of works and opinions—a relatively dense core surrounded by a less clearly defined fringe zone—indigenous to the German speaking countries.” The volume spans an “Expressionist” period extending from roughly 1910 to 1925. Weisstein himself contributes two introductory chapters on problems of definition and a thoughtful analysis of English Vorticism. An ample context is set by comparative essays concerned with international movements such as Futurism that had an impact on German Expressionist drama, prose, and poetry, together with essays on the adaptation of Expressionist forms in countries such as Poland, Russia, Hungary, South Slavic nations and the United States. These essays call attention to representative authors and artists, as well as to periodicals and artistic circles. Reviewers have praised not only the presentation of “literary links and interaction” among national cultures, but especially the “most rewarding” interdisciplinary essays on Dada and on Expressionist painting, music, and film.

Cross-Cultural Studies is the culminating effort of a distinguished team of international scholars who have worked since the mid-1980s to create the most complete analysis of Caribbean literature ever undertaken. Conceived as a major contribution to postcolonial studies, cultural studies, cultural anthropology, and regional studies of the Caribbean and the Americas, Cross-Cultural Studies illuminates the interrelations between and among Europe, the Caribbean islands, Africa, and the American continents from the late fifteenth century to the present. Scholars from five continents bring to bear on the most salient issues of Caribbean literature theoretical and critical positions that are currently in the forefront of discussion in literature, the arts, and public policy.

Among the major issues treated at length in Cross-Cultural Studies are: The history and construction of racial inequality in Caribbean colonization; The origins and formation of literatures in various Creoles; The gendered literary representation of the Caribbean region; The political and ideological appropriation of Caribbean history in creating the idea of national culture in North and South America, Europe, and Africa; The role of the Caribbean in contemporary theories of Modernism and the Postmodern; The decentering of such canonical authors as Shakespeare; The vexed but inevitable connectedness of Caribbean literature with both its former colonial metropoles and its geographical neighbors.

Contributions to Cross-Cultural Studies give a concrete cultural and historical analysis of such contemporary critical terms as hybridity, transculturation, and the carnivalesque, which have so often been taken out of context and employed in narrowly ideological contexts.

Two important theories of the simultaneous unity and diversity of Caribbean literature and culture, propounded by Antonio Benítez-Rojo and +douard Glissant, receive extended treatment that places them strategically in the debate over multiculturalism in postcolonial societies and in the context of chaos theory. A contribution by Benítez-Rojo permits the reader to test the theory through his critical practice.

Divided into nine thematic and methodological sections followed by a complete index to the names and dates of authors and significant historical figures discussed, Cross-Cultural Studies will be an indispensable resource for every library and a necessary handbook for scholars, teachers, and advanced students of the Caribbean region. 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_history_of_literature_in_the_caribbean.pdf

Types and stereotypes is the fourth and last volume of a path-breaking multinational literary history that incorporates innovative features relevant to the writing of literary history in general. Instead of offering a traditional chronological narrative of the period 1800-1989, the History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe approaches the region’s literatures from five complementary angles, focusing on literature’s participation in and reaction to key political events, literary periods and genres, the literatures of cities and sub-regions, literary institutions, and figures of representation. The main objective of the project is to challenge the self-enclosure of national literatures in traditional literary histories, to contextualize them in a regional perspective, and to recover individual works, writers, and minority literatures that national histories have marginalized or ignored.

Types and stereotypes brings together articles that rethink the figures of National Poets, figurations of the Family, Women, Outlaws, and Others, as well as figures of Trauma and Mediation. As in the previous three volumes, the historical and imaginary figures discussed here constantly change and readjust to new political and social conditions. An Epilogue complements the basic history, focusing on the contradictory transformations of East-Central European literary cultures after 1989. This volume will be of interest to the region’s literary historians, to students and teachers of comparative literature, to cultural historians, and to the general public interested in exploring the literatures of a rich and resourceful cultural region.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.literarycultures.pdf

Continuing the work undertaken in Vol. 1 of the History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe, Vol. 2 considers various topographic sites—multicultural cities, border areas, cross-cultural corridors, multiethnic regions—that cut across national boundaries, rendering them permeable to the flow of hybrid cultural messages. By focusing on the literary cultures of specific geographical locations, this volume intends to put into practice a new type of comparative study. Traditional comparative literary studies establish transnational comparisons and contrasts, but thereby reconfirm, however inadvertently, the very national borders they play down. This volume inverts the expansive momentum of comparative studies towards ever-broader regional, European, and world literary histories. While the theater of this volume is still the literary culture of East-Central Europe, the contributors focus on pinpointed local traditions and geographic nodal points. Their histories of Riga, Plovdiv, Timişoara or Budapest, of Transylvania or the Danube corridor – to take a few examples – reveal how each of these sites was during the last two-hundred years a home for a variety of foreign or ethnic literary traditions next to the one now dominant within the national borders. By foregrounding such non-national or hybrid traditions, this volume pleads for a diversification and pluralization of local and national histories. A genuine comparatist revival of literary history should involve the recognition that “treading on native grounds” means actually treading on grounds cultivated by diverse people.

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.literarycultures.pdf

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.

Few literary phenomena are as elusive and yet as persistent as realism. While it responds to the perennial impulse to use literature to reflect on experience, it also designates a specific set of literary and artistic practices that emerged in response to Western modernity. Landscapes of Realism is a two-volume collaborative interdisciplinary exploration of this vast territory, bringing together leading-edge new criticism on the realist paradigms that were first articulated in nineteenth-century Europe but have since gone on globally to transform the literary landscape. Tracing the manifold ways in which these paradigms are developed, discussed and contested across time, space, cultures and media, this first volume tackles in its five core essays and twenty-five case studies such questions as why realism emerged when it did, why and how it developed such a transformative dynamic across languages, to what extent realist poetics remain central to art and popular culture after 1900, and how generally to reassess realism from a twenty-first-century comparative perspective.