The National, the Transnational, and the Diasporic: Black Canadian Writing and the Logic of Literary History

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-113
Author(s):  
Katja Sarkowsky
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Black Canadian ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
Black Writing

This response takes as its starting point the twofold agenda Winfried Siemerling pursues in The Black Atlantic Reconsidered: his systematic outline of a history of Black writing in Canada from the eighteenth century to the present and his goal to fill a geographical gap in Paul Gilroy’s influential concept of the Black Atlantic, thereby also offering a reconsideration of this concept. I suggest that, although Siemerling is clearly successful with regard to the first aspect, he is only partially so with regard to the second, with the logic of a nation-based literary history to some extent countering the agenda of the constitutive transnationality of the Black Atlantic. This tension between the two agendas, I suggest, results in crucial questions concerning the complex relationship among the national, the transnational, and the diasporic in the specific logic of literary histories.

Literary Histories

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seth Lerer
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Literary History ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Medieval Literature ◽  
Heinrich Heine ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literary Histories

Literary history has had a mixed history among the readers and the writers of the European traditions. For William Warburton, an eighteenth-century ecclesiast and critic, literary history was “the most agreeable subject in the world.” However, the early nineteenth-century German poet Heinrich Heine describes literary history as a “morgue where each seeks out the friend he most loved.” The complex connotation of literary history stems in part from the modern European understanding of the place of literature in the formation of national identity. This article examines how the history of medieval literature was received during the Renaissance. It first looks at the regulations of late Henrician reading, particularly the 1543 Act for the Advancement of True Religion, before focusing on Miles Hogarde and his poetry. It then discusses Richard Tottel’sMiscellanyin the context of English literature and its past, along with the poetry of love and loss that follows Tottel.

scholarly journals “thi all vores lærdom er dog mesten halfverk og stumpeviis”: en islandsk litteraturhistorie fra det 18. århundrede

2015 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 32-54
Author(s):  
Guðrún Ingólfsdóttir ◽  
Þórunn Sigurðardóttir
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Precise Information ◽  
Narrative Style ◽  
Interesting Part ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
History Of Literature

Apparatus Literariam Islandicam: An Icelandic History of Literature from the Eighteenth CenturyThis article discusses an Icelandic literary history, compiled in the first half of the eighteenth century. The author was Jón Ólafsson from Grunnavík, who is best known for his work at the Arnamagneana collection in Copenhagen. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European intellectuals began to write literary histories where literature was classified and defined in a novel manner, and which included precise information on various authors and their literary products. Jón Ólafsson’s history is a part of this effort. In his work, he deals with Icelandic poets and literati from the Middle Ages to his own time. The work demonstrates many of the main characteristics of literary histories of this period. The author borrows, for example, the methods of the Danish literary historian Albert Thura, but he is also influenced by Icelandic intellectuals such as Árni Magnússon, Þormóður Torfason and Páll Vídalín. Jón Ólafsson’s narrative style is, however, rather peculiar and his text is partly based on Icelandic oral tradition. An interesting part of Jón Ólafsson’s work is a chapter on female intellectuals and poets, but there he follows Thura’s example. Jón Ólafsson’s history has never been printed; neither has it been widely used by scholars. The authors of this article are preparing an edition of the work.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Lowney
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
Double Consciousness ◽  
Black Music ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
Jazz History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Long Civil Rights Movement

There have been a number of outstanding studies that articulate the importance of black music for “Afro-modernist” literary production since Paul Gilroy’s seminal The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993). Through inquiry into influential Marxist, Black Atlantic, and African diasporic studies of jazz literature and jazz history, the introduction explains how Jazz Internationalism is distinguished by its historical scope and attention to multiple genres of jazz literature. This introduction outlines not only a history of Afro-modernist jazz literature that corresponds with the Long Civil Rights Movement, it also underscores the intertextuality of jazz literature as it evolves through several generations of black music and writing. While the primary purpose of Jazz Internationalism is not one of recovering obscure writers or texts, it does make the case for a more expansive understanding of jazz writing for both African American literary history and African diasporic studies more generally.

Tarjama as Debt: The Making of a Secular History of Arabic Literature

2019 ◽  
pp. 155-209
Author(s):  
Maya I. Kesrouany
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
Translation Theory ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Andre Gide ◽  
History Of ◽  
Muhammad Husayn Haykal ◽  
André Gide

Chapter four investigates tarjama’s dual meaning in Arabic as biography and translation in the works of Ṭāhā Ḥusayn and Muḥammad Ḥusayn Haykal. Following up on the secular prophecy of chapter three, it studies the complex relationship between Islam and literature in the two modernists’ mappings of Arabic literary history and in relation to their approach to translation. It examines specifically Haykal’s two-volume biography of Jean Jacques Rousseau in 1921 and 1923, his biography of the Prophet and literary essays, exploring political and spiritual temporalities in his unfolding critique of colonialism. It then considers Ṭāhā Ḥusayn’s controversial claims about the historicity of Jahili poetry as post-Islamic in On Jahili Poetry (1926) and argues that it prefigures his translations of André Gide ((1946) and Voltaire (1947), resituating his “heretic” claims within his translation theory. It concludes on the failed narrative subjectivities that emerge from the translations’ critique of European Enlightenment thought, contextualizing the importance of these adaptations to the study of the Arabic novel.

Corruption and Redemption: The Legend of Valluvar and Tamil Literary History

2000 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 449-482 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stuart Blackburn
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Language Ideologies ◽  
Cultural Identities ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Literary Historiography ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
History Of Literature

This [the Valluvar legend] is one of the traditions which are so repugnant to inveterate popular prejudice that they appear too strange for fiction, and are probably founded on fact. (Robert Caldwell 1875:132).If we now recognize that literary history is more than a history of literature, it is perhaps less widely accepted that the writing of literary history is an important subject for literary historiography. Yet literary histories are a rich source for understanding local conceptions of both history and literature. More accessible than archaeology, more tangible than ethnology, literary histories are culturally constructed narratives in which the past is reimagined in the light of contemporary concerns. Certainly in nineteenth-century India, the focus of this essay, literary history was seized upon as evidence to be advanced in the major debates of the time; cultural identities, language ideologies, civilization hierarchies and nationalism were all asserted and challenged through literary histories in colonial India. Asserted and challenged by Europeans, as well as Indians.

Thoughts on Writing Literary History: The Case of the Sri Lankan Malays

PMLA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 131 (5) ◽  
pp. 1444-1451
Author(s):  
Ronit Ricci
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Religious Affiliation ◽  
Stable State ◽  
Sri Lankan ◽  
State Structure ◽  
Political Unity ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Artificial Boundaries ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literary Histories

Literary Histories Have All Too Often Been Written with the Borders of Nation-States in Mind, Projecting Back in Time a political unity and standard use of language that only gradually, and sometimes recently, emerged. This approach has been criticized and increasingly replaced by an acknowledgment that literary histories must consider many variables that do not neatly map onto the story of single, powerful, and supposedly unified political entities and that these histories' artificial boundaries of inquiry must expand to encompass the movement of people, ideas, and texts. Although potentially more representative of the plurality of particular societies or cultures, a literary history that does not depend on the illusion of a stable state structure and the state's prioritized language is challenging to write, especially when basic questions regarding the location, religious affiliation, and linguistic preferences of the community producing a literature loom large. I present some thoughts and questions on one such challenging example—writing a literary history of the Sri Lankan Malays—in the hope that these reflections will resonate with those exploring other places, languages, and periods as we critically engage with old and new ways of understanding the diverse nature and roles of literature.

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