scholarly journals Problems of Tradition on Literature, Prose and Literary History in Korean Modern Literature

2011 ◽  
Vol null (43) ◽  
pp. 7-33
Author(s):  
Jaemoon Hwang
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Modern Literature

Echohistoricism: Aristotle, Dryden, Montgomery, Conrad

Romanticism ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 278-293
Author(s):  
Thomas H. Ford
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
John Dryden ◽  
Modern Literature ◽  
Critical Dialogue ◽  
Lecture Series ◽  
Narrative Frame ◽  
Definition Of

The contingencies of military decisions and their outcomes have always shaped the course of literary history, determining even the languages in which it has been conducted. But modern literature takes a new bearing on its determinant military contingencies. This paper describes a modern literary scene that self-reflexively attributes to literature the potential to suspend these determining military events, and so to communicate the unactualised possibilities contained in past contingencies, even those that have been violently foreclosed. It is a scene of interested observers, adrift in a boat, who listen for the sounds of a distant naval battle. Having first located this scene's classical antecedents in Aristotle, I then track it through three pivotal and distinctively modern moments of literary self-periodization. In each instance, the scene is differently configured, articulating a specific conjuncture of war, textuality and literary self-definition. It appears in John Dryden as the setting of a modern critical dialogue on theatre, with James Montgomery as a Romantic definition of the poetry of sound in a lecture series on literature, and with Joseph Conrad as the narrative frame of a modernist tale within a tale. But the same scene re-echoes in all three – the scene of literary inscription as one in which, contingently, a war neither did nor did not take place, a battle was and was not fought.

The Greatest Living Man of Letters

2019 ◽  
pp. 46-76
Author(s):  
Tobias Boes
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Literary History ◽  
New World ◽  
The United States ◽  
Thomas Mann ◽  
Modern Literature ◽  
Cultural Formation

This chapter argues that the process by which Thomas Mann was canonized as the “greatest living man of letters” in the New World certainly had many similarities to his staging as a representative writer in the Old. But there were enormous differences as well, and these would turn out to be consequential for literary history, including literary history back in Germany. The chapter explains how Mann's rise to literary prominence in the United States took place within the larger context of a newly emerging and distinctively American cultural formation, the “middlebrow.” At first, this seems antithetical to Mann's associations with “serious” modern literature. However, the chapter reveals that modernism and the middlebrow have never truly stood in opposition to one another.

François-René de Chateaubriand

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean-Marie Roulin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Modern Literature ◽  
The Future ◽  
Benjamin Constant ◽  
New Literature ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

Chateaubriand’s seminal debate with de Staël at the dawn of the nineteenth century around perceptions of literary history and the orientations of modern literature was largely focused on what aspects of this Enlightenment legacy should be retained or rejected. A contemporary of Germaine de Staël and Benjamin Constant, Chateaubriand was marked, like them, by the experience of the French Revolution. This sets him apart from the Romantics of the ‘battle ofHernani’ (1830), for whom the Revolution was a pre-existing narrative. For Chateaubriand’s generation the Revolution was crucial, posing ontological, political, and metaphysical questions—how could that ‘river of blood’ be crossed, to borrow one of his recurrent metaphors? What should the new literature be like, and for what type of society in revolutionized France? Chateaubriand’s Romanticism was first of all an answer to these questions, an elegiac adieu to a past forever lost and an uneasy questioning of the future.

Zwischen Literaturgeschichte und Zeitgenossenschaft

2019 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-22
Author(s):  
Henrike Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Modern Literature ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
German Research Foundation ◽  
German Research ◽  
Humboldt University ◽  
History Of

Summary The article serves as an introduction to the thematic cluster of papers devoted to the work of Bulgarian poet and literary theoretician Pencho Slaveykov (1866–1912), which present the outcomes of a workshop dedicated to the 150th anniversary of the poet at the Department of Slavic and Hungarian Studies, Humboldt University (Berlin 2016; supported by the German Research Foundation DFG). As Slaveykov, while a leading representative of Bulgarian modern literature, is not an established figure in comparative literary studies, the paper sketches briefly the biography of the author, or rather the “biographemes” out of which he constructs his self-representation. In summarizing the main findings of the cluster contributions, it outlines the ways in which Slaveykov and his work—as a phenomenon ‘untimely’ to his era—have been embedded into the narratives of Bulgarian literary history of the 20th and early 21st century, which reach from postmodernism and postcolonialism to new engagement, or to entangled histories.

“Reality” in Early Twentieth-century German Literature

1983 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 41-57
Author(s):  
J. P. Stern
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
German Literature ◽  
Modern Literature ◽  
Philosophical Question ◽  
History And Criticism ◽  
Present Purpose ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
German Speaking

Among the most striking aspects of modern literature—expecially of modern German literature—are its frequent references to a notion called ‘reality’. The philosophical question this raises, ‘What is reality?’, is to one side of this enquiry, and so is the question whether or not this is a sensible question: this essay is intended as a contribution not to philosophy but to its connections with literary history and criticism. My present purpose, which determines my procedure, is (I) to outline the various closely related meanings of the word ‘Wirklichkeit’ throughout its very long history; (2) to describe the polarization of meanings which occurred in the course of the nineteenth century, and Nietzsche's part in making the new polarity available to his literary heirs; (3) to illustrate the way German literature became involved in this process in the first decade of our century; and, finally, (4) to point to some of its political implications. My argument is part of a much larger topic, one that is not confined either to the German-speaking countries or indeed to literature. The topic, the ideologizing of ‘reality’, is relevant to all modern cultures. The present paper offers no more than a sketch of this development in one cultural area of our world.

“Reality” in Early Twentieth-century German Literature

1983 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 41-57
Author(s):  
J. P. Stern
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
German Literature ◽  
Modern Literature ◽  
Philosophical Question ◽  
History And Criticism ◽  
Present Purpose ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
German Speaking

Among the most striking aspects of modern literature—expecially of modern German literature—are its frequent references to a notion called ‘reality’. The philosophical question this raises, ‘What is reality?’, is to one side of this enquiry, and so is the question whether or not this is a sensible question: this essay is intended as a contribution not to philosophy but to its connections with literary history and criticism. My present purpose, which determines my procedure, is (I) to outline the various closely related meanings of the word ‘Wirklichkeit’ throughout its very long history; (2) to describe the polarization of meanings which occurred in the course of the nineteenth century, and Nietzsche's part in making the new polarity available to his literary heirs; (3) to illustrate the way German literature became involved in this process in the first decade of our century; and, finally, (4) to point to some of its political implications. My argument is part of a much larger topic, one that is not confined either to the German-speaking countries or indeed to literature. The topic, the ideologizing of ‘reality’, is relevant to all modern cultures. The present paper offers no more than a sketch of this development in one cultural area of our world.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 246-260
Author(s):  
G. O. Hutchinson
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Important Change ◽  
Modern Literature ◽  
Basic Question ◽  
War And Peace ◽  
Basic Variable ◽  
Ancient Literature ◽  
The Individual

Passages and works are now confronted. Works can be viewed along the axes of genre and of time (literary history). A particularly important change is the development of philosophy; but genre affects its impact on works. The worlds which structure motion differ drastically in Metamorphoses, NQ, and Annals, over little more than a century. Worlds can be akin, language divergent—so Iliad and Sophocles—or language akin, worlds divergent—so Iliad and Parmenides. A basic question is whether someone or something is moved or moves, and if moves, whether willingly. A basic variable is speed; speed can also mark hierarchy: gods and heavenly bodies outdo humans. A subtler variable is shape of motion, twisting, circular, straight; straight, purposeful motion is set against planless wandering. An important opposition is between the motion of a group and of an individual. Contrasts of scale matter too. Particularly significant is the opposition between moving and not moving. Literature, still more than art, is interested in levels of motion beyond the immediate: images, possibilities, pondered choices, refuted theories. Motion is important to meaning and to religious and political structuring. Whether or not motion is distinctively important in ancient literature, it has a bearing on modern literature; Tolstoy’s War and Peace illustrates. On the level of narrative, motion is expressive (Natasha’s running); but narrated motion is related to historical motion and the movement of peoples, made up from the individual movements of participants. Imagistic motion abounds, not least the haunting and transcendent comet of 1812.

The Undoing of a Man: Cuckoldry in Heywood's Edward IV

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 246-267
Author(s):  
Jonathan Wright
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Literature ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Self Control ◽  
Modern Literature ◽  
Spiritual Needs ◽  
Critical Reading ◽  
Social Construct

Manhood was a complex social construct in early modern England. Males could not simply mature or grow from boys to men. Instead, they had to assert or prove they were men in multiple ways, such as growing a beard, behaving courageously in battle, exercising self-control in walking, talking, weeping, eating, and drinking, pursuing manly interests, exhibiting manly behaviors, avoiding interests or behaviors typically ascribed to women, marrying a woman and providing for her physical, sexual, and spiritual needs, and living and dying as a faithful Christian. Once a male became a “man” in the eyes of others, his efforts shifted from “making” himself manly to maintaining or defending his reputation as a “true man.” All men could undermine their manhood through their own actions or inactions, but the married man could also lose his reputation through his wife's infidelity. Numerous literary husbands in early modern literature live anxiously with the knowledge they might suffer a cuckold's humiliation and shame. Matthew Shore, who “treasures” his wife to a fault in Thomas Heywood's two-part play Edward IV, is an exceptional example of such a husband. This critical reading of Edward IV explores the complexity of manhood in Heywood's day by showing various males trying to assert or defend their manhood; explaining why husbands had reasons to fear cuckoldry; analyzing how Jane Shore's infidelity affects her husband; following Matthew Shore's journey from trusting husband to distrusting, bitter cuckold, to forgiving husband; and examining his seemingly inexplicable death at the end of the play.

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