The World as India: Some Models of Literary History

2012 ◽  
pp. 23-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
HARISH TRIVEDI
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
The World

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna-Maria Hartmann
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary History ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Related Material ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The World ◽  
Early English

Mythographies were books that collected, explained, and interpreted myth-related material. Extremely popular during the Renaissance, these works appealed to a wide range of readers. While the European mythographies of the sixteenth century have been utilized by scholars, the short, early English mythographies, written from 1577 to 1647, have puzzled critics. The first generation of English mythographers did not, as has been suggested, try to compete with their Italian predecessors. Instead, they made mythographies into rhetorical instruments designed to intervene in topical debates outside the world of classical learning. Because English mythographers brought mythology to bear on a variety of contemporary issues, they unfold a lively and historically well-defined picture of the roles myth was made to play in early modern England. Exploring these mythographies can contribute to previous insights into myth in the Renaissance offered by studies of iconography, literary history, allegory, and myth theory.

The Center of the World

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
June Howard
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Literary History ◽  
World Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Local Color ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
The World ◽  
Literary Regionalism ◽  
Multiple Media ◽  
The One

The Center of the World: Regional Writing and the Puzzles of Place-Time is a study of literary regionalism. It focuses on but is not limited to fiction in the United States, also considering the place of the genre in world literature. It argues that regional writing shapes ways of imagining not only the neighborhood, the province, and nation, but also the world. It argues that thinking about place always entails imagining time. It demonstrates the importance of the figure of the schoolteacher and the one-room schoolhouse in local color writing and subsequent place-focused writing. These representations embody the contested relation between localities and the knowledge they produce, and books that carry metropolitan and cosmopolitan learning, in modernity. The book undertakes analysis of how concepts work across disciplines and in everyday discourse, coordinating that work with proposals for revising American literary history and close readings of particular authors’ work. Works from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries are discussed, and the book’s analysis of the form is extended into multiple media.

Reflections on Plato's Republic

Philosophy ◽  
1937 ◽  
Vol 12 (48) ◽  
pp. 424-431
Author(s):  
Alfred E. Garvie
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Republic

Inhis greatest work (The Republic) the greatest thinker of his era, if not of all time, Plato, writing in one of the greatest, if not even the greatest epoch in the intellectual, artistic, and literary history of mankind, held up a mirror not only to his own age but to every age, not least our own, in the glowing radiance of his unsurpassed genius. This essay is an attempt to look on the world around us with his searchlight. Addressing on this subject a select company of educated and intelligent men and women, I discovered that several of them had attempted but had failed to read throughThe Republic. They could not see the wood for the trees, lost their way, and gave up the guest.

Dante's New Life of the Book

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Eisner
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Poetic Form ◽  
Archival Research ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
Printed Books ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Over Time

This study uses the material transmission history of Dante’s innovative first book, the Vita nuova (New Life), to intervene in recent debates about literary history, reconceiving the relationship between the work and its reception, and investigating how different material manifestations and transformations in manuscripts, printed books, translations, and adaptations participate in the work. Just as Dante frames his collection of thirty-one poems surrounded by prose narrative and commentary as an attempt to understand his own experiences through the experimental form of the book, so later scribes, editors, and translators use different material forms to embody their own interpretations of it. Traveling from Boccaccio’s Florence to contemporary Hollywood with stops in Emerson’s Cambridge, Rossetti’s London, Nerval’s Paris, Mandelstam’s Russia, De Campos’s Brazil, and Pamuk’s Istanbul, this study builds on extensive archival research to show how Dante’s strange poetic forms continue to challenge readers. In contrast to a conventional reception history’s chronological march, each chapter analyzes how one of these distinctive features has been treated over time, offering new perspectives on topics such as Dante’s love of Beatrice, his relationship with Guido Cavalcanti, and his attraction to another woman, while highlighting Dante’s concern with the future, as he experiments with new ways to keep Beatrice alive for later readers. Deploying numerous illustrations to show the entanglement of the work’s poetic form and its material survival, Dante’s New Life of the Book offers a fresh reading of Dante’s innovations, demonstrating the value of this philological analysis of the work’s survival in the world.

‘How Much of Nothing There Was’: Trying (Not) to Understand Elizabeth Bowen

2019 ◽  
pp. 113-126
Author(s):  
Damian Tarnopolsky
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
World History ◽  
Elizabeth Bowen ◽  
High Modernism ◽  
The World ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
As If

This chapter notes that one of the strangest aspects of Bowen’s novels of the 1930s and 1940s is the prevalence of nothing in these texts. Examples range from sentences including double or triple negatives and words that cancel themselves out, to descriptions of parts of London destroyed by the Blitz, to scenes built around something missing. Her characters complain that they know nothing about each other or their own motives; her plots often resist final explanation, as if the novels are in some sense about nothing. On every page, in sentences, in her characters’ lives, in her sense of the world, Bowen’s novels pursue a paradoxical task: charting the presence of lack, absence and negativity. The chapter argues that Bowen’s obsessive dealing with nothingness is a clue to her sense of her place and time. Exploring Bowen’s ‘nothings’ is a way of understanding the fractured historical moment in which she wrote, and her response to it; it is also a way of placing her responses to late and high modernism, to world history and literary history.

Tsvetaeva, Marina (ЦВЕТАЕВА, Марина) (1892–1941)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sibelan Forrester
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
History And Criticism ◽  
Narrative Poetry ◽  
Marina Tsvetaeva ◽  
The World ◽  
Crowd Out ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Revolution

One of the best-known and influential Russian modernist poets, Marina Tsvetaeva (1892–1941) wrote lyric and narrative poetry, plays, autobiographical and memoir prose, and essays in literary history and criticism. Her biography is so full of incident that it can tend to crowd out her poetry in studies of her life. Born in Moscow, she began her poetic career among the Moscow Symbolists but never joined a poetic school. She wrote all through the revolution and made a splash when she was able to publish again in the early 1920s. After emigrating in 1922 she wrote and published a great deal of poetry, but later she switched largely to prose, at least in part because it was easier to publish. Her culminating book of poetry is After Russia (Paris, 1928). Tsvetaeva returned to the USSR for family reasons in June of 1939. There she worked as a translator; she committed suicide in August 1941. Since her work began appearing more widely in the 1960s, Tsvetaeva has been recognized as a ground-breaking poet, impacting writers and poets all over the world, and she is of particular interest to feminist critics and scholars.

Some problems of titulature in Roman literary history

2020 ◽  
pp. 137-152
Author(s):  
Nicholas Horsfall
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Physical Object ◽  
Latin Literature ◽  
The World

To consider the evidence for the titles of works of Latin literature is at once depressing and rewarding: depressing in that Latinists are revealed repeatedly as the slaves of erroneous convention, rewarding on account of the fresh light shed upon the world of books at Rome and upon literary terminology. It should be stressed that Roman books did in general have titles, and that those titles were often demonstrably the author’s own. Authors emerge in this study as sharply and frequently aware of the titulus as a physical object and of the importance to be attached to thoughtful and significant titulature.

The Place of Imagination

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Gatta
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
The World ◽  
Contemporary Writers

“Imagination,” a word evidently central to the vocation and sensibility of English Romantic poets, is likewise invoked often as a defining term in American literary history. But what are the theological implications of this crucial category, beginning with Coleridge’s seminal statements about it? How might the human faculty of imagination—often but doubtfully associated with an abstractly ethereal quality of mind—bear upon concrete facts of the world humans experience? And how, in the light of philosophic perspectives, together with Wendell Berry’s provocative reflections on “imagination in place,” might Imagination be understood as integral with the phenomenology of place? Such questions are addressed here by means of themes bearing on the Earthiness of Imagination, the Contemplative Reach of Imagination, and Numinous Layers of Place as Palimpsest. Literary texts analyzed to develop these themes include Whitman’s verse and works by two contemporary writers—poet Marilyn Nelson and novelist Alfred Véa.

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