Connecting the Dots. Italian Literature in a Global History of Literature

2013 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 300-308
Author(s):  
Bart Van Den Bossche
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Italian Literature ◽  
Global Perspective ◽  
Global History ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Literary Historiography ◽  
History Of ◽  
Connecting The Dots ◽  
History Of Literature ◽  
Looking Glass

The goals and methods of a global history of literature may not always be easily reconcilable with those pertinent to local (‘national’ or ‘regional’) literary traditions; however, behind the, at times, lengthy or painstaking discussions on the criteria of selection, emphasis, and on more or less necessary nuances, there are also a number of deeper and more fundamental issues at stake in a global history of literature that can be fruitfully approached through the looking-glass of a local literary tradition. Even characteristics of a particular tradition of literature that may seem specific, even highly specific, can give rise to intriguing questions bearing on some of the wide-ranging issues tied to a global perspective on literature. More in particular, with regard to Italian literature, three issues come to the fore: the way literary history deals with the question of agency, the connections between literary history and cultural repertoires, and the question of canonicity and ideology in literary historiography.

The Subaltern Critique of Dominant Historiography and a Case for Retrieving a Historiography of Dalit Literary Traditions in India

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-15
Author(s):  
Vandana
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Literary Historiography ◽  
History Of ◽  
Longue Duree ◽  
Longue Durée ◽  
And Shifts ◽  
The Third World

In order to retrieve literary history in India, teleology operates on three levels: ancient, medieval and modern. As per the longue duree approach to the study of history, history is not an event or an object, but like the concept of time, is a configuration and a process. The history of the longue duree gives priority to long-term monumental historic patterns, moments and shifts in society, that is, the slow-paced structural processes which tend to have strong historical consequences. Similarly, languages and literatures, too, marked by historical catastrophes, undergo a process of sedimentation. For this reason, instead of a single literary history of South Asia, Sheldon Pollock proposes the concept of ‘literary cultures’ which allows room for ‘historical individuation’ of each culture rather than homogenising them merely for the sake of historical analysis. The basic questions that I have tried to look into through this study include: Why is it problematic to retrieve literary history in India? Why is it essential to have an alternative literary historiography of Dalit literature? How does Dalit subalternity differ from colonial subalternity? How the Dalit voice is disintegrated from within because of the prevalence of graded inequality? What constitutes the politics of history writing and canon formation in the third world countries like India where retrieving subaltern literary trends remain a problematic discourse?

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.

Reading Medieval French Literature from a Global Perspective

PMLA ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 130 (2) ◽  
pp. 367-374 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sahar Amer
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
French Literature ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Global Perspective ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Medieval French Literature ◽  
Revisionist History ◽  
Literary Relations ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Literature

Only in the last decade has the field of medieval french literature recognized the need for a critical gaze that looks outside France and beyond the persistent Eurocentric accounts of medieval French literary history. These accounts long viewed medieval French literary production primarily in relation to the Latin, Celtic, and Provençal traditions. My research over the last twenty years has called for a revisionist history of literature and of empires and has highlighted the fact that throughout the Middle Ages France entertained “inter-imperial” literary relations—not only with European traditions but also with extra-European cultures, specifically with the Islamicate world.

The Politics and Poetics of Cicero's Brutus

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher S. van den Berg
Keyword(s):  
Roman Republic ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Political History ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Literary Historiography ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
History Of

Cicero's Brutus (46 BCE), a tour-de-force of intellectual and political history, was written amidst political crisis: Caesar's defeat of the republican resistance at the battle of Thapsus. This magisterial example of the dialogue genre capaciously documents the intellectual vibrancy of the Roman Republic and its Greco-Roman traditions. This book is the first study of the work from several distinct yet interrelated perspectives: Cicero's account of oratorical history, the confrontation with Caesar, and the exploration of what it means to write a history of an artistic practice. Close readings of this dialogue-including its apparent contradictions and tendentious fabrications-reveal a crucial and crucially productive moment in Greco-Roman thought. Cicero, this book argues, created the first nuanced, sophisticated, and ultimately 'modern' literary history, crafting both a compelling justification of Rome's oratorical traditions and also laying a foundation for literary historiography that abides to this day.

Toward a Global History of Young Israel

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 259-292
Author(s):  
Oded Heilbronner
Keyword(s):  
Reference Point ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
State Building ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Global Perspective ◽  
Global History ◽  
Western History ◽  
Building Process ◽  
History Of ◽  
Western European

Abstract This article argues that the first two decades of Israeli state-building can be compared structurally to some main processes in postwar Western-European societies, and that this approach productively situates Israel within a global perspective, uncovering new relationships between the local and the global. In addition, it proposes a methodological reading of the young Israeli society before the Six-Day War and a theoretical framework in which to place it. It provides an analysis of this young society from the perspective of Western history, constituting a new reference point that does not strive to negate other common approaches. If, until now, the history of the first two decades of Israel has been examined from a local and particular point of view – whether the state-building process or political, social, and national controversies – I propose to view the Israel of the 1950s–1960s as a postwar society that underwent the same structural processes as other Western European societies during those years, despite domestic differences.

Iuwers zornes unmâze / missevellet uns sêre – Legitimität von Maßlosigkeit im mittelalterlichen Erzählkosmos

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-28
Author(s):  
Amelie Bendheim
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
The Other ◽  
Epic Hero ◽  
Heroic Epic ◽  
History Of ◽  
Flore Und Blanscheflur ◽  
The One ◽  
History Of Literature ◽  
Historical Epoch ◽  
Flexible Model

AbstractStarting from the deficiencies of current approaches regarding the description of the hero in medieval narratives, this article aims to functionalise exorbitance (unmâze) as a new category of literary history. Unlike the conceptual and binary typing of the protagonist as ‘hero’ resp. ‘knight’, this category promotes a flexible model that operates relationally and hence enables gradual differentiations between the texts.Examples of medieval (heroic) epic (‘Nibelungenlied’) and (chivalric) romance (‘Flore und Blanscheflur’, ‘Wigalois’) will show the narrative treatment and stylisation of the exorbitant hero. The focus will be on the varying assessments of his acts: If the epic hero is able to defy social norms and current laws (cf. Siegfried’s courtship, Hagen’s murdering of Siegfried) without being penalised, the exorbitance in the romance falls within the scope of ‘ratio’. Thus, exorbitance is on the one hand confined and ‘assessed’, on the other hand excessive acts are rigorously sanctioned and inhibited. Referring to the current manifestations of exorbitance in the socio-political context, the concept of exorbitance emerges as an unchanged productive pattern. Its socio-political relevance encourages a literary-historical, epoch-spanning use of this concept, whose scope is a re-assessment of the history of literature as the history of exorbitance.

scholarly journals Looted Art and Restitution in the Twentieth Century – Towards a Global Perspective

2017 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 491-518
Author(s):  
Bianca Gaudenzi ◽  
Astrid Swenson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Global Perspective ◽  
Contemporary History ◽  
Global History ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
World War ◽  
Global Networks ◽  
History Of ◽  
Second World

Introducing the Journal of Contemporary History Special Issue ‘The Restitution of Looted Art in the 20th Century’, this article proposes a framework for writing the history of looting and restitution in transnational and global perspective. By comparing and contextualizing instances of looting and restitution in different geographical and temporal contexts, it aims to overcome existing historiographical fragmentations and move past the overwhelming focus on the specificities of Nazi looting through an extended timeframe that inserts the Second World War into a longer perspective from the nineteenth century up to present day restitution practices. Particular emphasis is put on the interlinked histories of denazification and decolonization. Problematizing existing analytical, chronological and geographical frameworks, the article suggests how a combination of comparative, entangled and global history approaches can open up promising new avenues of research. It draws out similarities, differences and connections between processes of looting and restitution in order to discuss the extent to which looting and restitution were shaped by – and shaped – changing global networks.

scholarly journals Komparatystyka i (inna) Historia Literatury / Comparative Literature Studies and (an Alternative ) History of Literature

2012 ◽  
Vol 53 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 401-422
Author(s):  
Andrzej Hejmej
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Comparative Studies ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Early 19Th Century ◽  
Critical Thought ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
National Model ◽  
David Damrosch ◽  
History Of Literature

Summary This article examines the relationship between comparative studies and history of literature. While paying special attention to the present-day condition of these two disciplines, the author surveys various approaches, formulated since the early 19th century, which sought to break with the traditional, national model of the history of literature and the ethnocentric model of traditional comparative studies, driven by an impatience with both nationalism and crypto-nationalism. In this context he focuses on the most recent projects of literary history like ‘comparative history of literature’, ‘international history of literature’, ‘transcultural history of literature’, or ‘world literature’ - all of which are oriented towards the international dimension of literary history. The article explores the possible reasons for the late 20th and early 21st- century revival of Goethe’s idea of Weltliteratur (in the critical thought of Pascal Casanova, David Damrosch, and Franco Moretti) and the recent vogue for ‘alternative’ histories of literature produced under the auspices of comparative cultural studies. At the same time it voices some skepticism about the radical reinvention of comparative studies (along the lines of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Death of a Discipline).

scholarly journals Suvremena strujanja u komparatistici

2008 ◽  
Vol 3 (1.) ◽  
Author(s):  
Katarina Ivon
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Literary History ◽  
European Studies ◽  
Research Paradigms ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Literature ◽  
Focus Point

This paper is a preview of contemporary trends in comparative literature. The starting point of this research is the fact that change of research paradigms is a key feature of contemporary comparative literature. Change of research paradigms refers to imagery research, a new focus point of comparative literature that deals with images of certain country and its culture in another cultural surrounding, and to the notion of intercultural history of literature, which also includes the concept of interliterary community. The author also presents two new tendencies in contemporary comparative literature: cultural studies and European studies. The paper analyzes the responses of these new trends in Croatian literary history, but it also focuses on their impact on further researches in Croatian literature.

scholarly journals Procesos da historiografía literaria galega Para un debate crítico

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arturo Casas
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Political Development ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
Methodological Innovation ◽  
Literary Historiography ◽  
History Of ◽  
Galician Literature ◽  
The 19Th Century

Galician literary historiography shows links and ruptures that refer to the cultural history of Galicia itself and to the sequence of historical events that have delineated the social, economic and political development of the country since the 19th century. These coordinates comprise a series of processes, including the elaboration and propagation of ideologies aimed at achieving a way out of political subalternity and oriented towards the horizon of national emancipation. Those events and these processes also marked the connection of Galicia with modernity and the dynamics of historical change. As a result of the above, this book analyses critically the institutionalization processes of the history of Galician literature – with special emphasis on historiographic models such as that of Said Armesto, Carvalho Calero, Méndez Ferrín and others – and indicates the need to undertake a productive methodological innovation of the discipline in heuristic, organic and discursive terms. It further argues that this update should pay attention to substantive theoretical debates, not exclusively of specific cultural coordinates, such as Galician ones or any others that could be considered. Among these, the cooperation between history and sociology, the intellection of literary facts as historical facts, the review of the link between literary history and nation, the public uses of literary history, and the inquiry of discursive choices that promote a less self-indulgent and predictable historiography. This essentially involved a challenge, that of permanent dialogue with some of the most powerful critical reinterpretations of the Galician historiographic tradition and with alternative models constituted from feminist thought, postcolonial theories, the sociology of the literary field or the systemic theories of culture, as well as with the contributions made from a post-national understanding of the literary phenomenon.

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