The Indulekha Moment and the Malayalam Literary Canon: On the Literary History of the Early Twentieth-century Novels in Kerala, South India

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sruthi Vinayan ◽  
◽  
Merin Simi Raj ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Colonial Modernity ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Point Of Departure

This article analyses the politics of the literary canon of the early twentieth century Malayalam novels with particular focus on the impact of the novel Indulekha (1889) in literary history. The inception of novel as a literary genre is widely regarded as a point of departure for Malayalam literature leading to the development of modern Malayalam, thereby shaping a distinct Malayali identity. Interestingly, the literary histories which established the legacy of Malayalam prose tend to trace a linear history of Malayalam novels which favoured the ‘Kerala Renaissance’ narrative, especially while discussing its initial phase. This calls for a perusal of the literary critical tradition in which the overarching presence of Indulekha has led to the eclipsing of several other works written during the turn of the twentieth-century, resulting in a skewed understanding of the evolution of the genre. This article would explicate in detail, on what gets compromised in canon formation when aesthetic criteria overshadow the extraliterary features. It also examines how the literary history of early Malayalam novels shaped the cultural memory of colonial modernity in Kerala.

Invader Fictions: National Literature after Translation

2021 ◽  
pp. 204-208
Author(s):  
Rebecca C. Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
National Literature ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
National Conversation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Modern Arabic

This chapter discusses how translation has affected literature. When we assess criticism of translated literature as part of the larger national conversation about the novel's purpose, the formation of the national literary canon comes to resemble a process of negotiating the foreignness that lies within it and not solely a process of casting the foreign out. In doing so, we ascribe historicity to the formation of national literary history itself, reformulating not just the position of Arabic in an imagined world literary canon but also the modern Arabic literary canon. Translation helped to shape a category of national literature that belonged in turn to a comparative process. Reading the history of the novel in translation forces us to recast national literary histories, to read the nation in translation. To locate foreign literature within national literary history at the moment of its formation is only possible if one uncovers the impact that translations had on “original” writing, discourses and institutions of modernity, and reading practices. Understanding that history challenges us to read novels' depiction of even national environments or characters in the comparative critical context in which they were written and to see “national realism” as a mode that was canonized through comparative and translational methodologies and as perhaps the culmination of a history of translation.

For an Eco-Archive

2019 ◽  
pp. 29-68
Author(s):  
John Patrick Walsh
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Literary Representations ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Haitian Literature ◽  
Boat People ◽  
History Of ◽  
Selection Of

This chapter continues to build the conceptual and historical frame of the eco-archive. It argues that contemporary Haitian literature records the transformation of the environment and accumulates and inscribes overlapping temporalities of past and present, like an archive. The first part reviews a range of Caribbean and Haitian thought on the environment, broadly understood, and considers key moments of Haitian literary history of the twentieth century. Earlier forms and paths of migration and refuge, from the sugar migration up to the journeys of “boat people,” inform and historicize literary representations of the earthquake and its aftermath. The chapter then carries out close readings of a selection of René Philoctète’s poetry and his novel, Le peuple des terres mêlées, a text that depicts the “Parsley Massacre” of 1937. It draws out Philoctète’s eco-archival writing and contends that the novel foregrounds the environmental ethos of the border in opposition to Trujillo’s genocidal nationalism.

scholarly journals Samuel Richardsons brevromaner

2007 ◽  
Vol 35 (103) ◽  
pp. 174-187
Author(s):  
Martin Hultén
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Samuel Richardson ◽  
Historical Understanding ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
History Of ◽  
Epistolary Novels ◽  
The Many ◽  
Professional Critics

En litteraturhistorisk placering The Epistolary Novels of Samuel Richardson: Reconsidering the Historical PerspectiveThe epistolary novels of Samuel Richardson were received with enthusiasm throughout Britain and Europe upon their publication in the 1740s and 50s, and they have had their unquestioned place in the literary canon and the literary history of the 18th century, as well as in the many rivalling Rise of the Novel narratives, ever since. The qualities of Richardson’s novels praised by contemporary reading audiences and professional critics were to some extent the qualities we still acknowledge in the the works. And yet I propose to reconsider and modify our ‘historical’ understanding of Richardson’s novels. Richardson scholars from the 1970s onward have deepened our understanding of the contexts of Richardson’s life and writing, and they have shown to what extent both the style, the form, the motifs, and the themes of his novels must be placed alongside the works of rival authors, today much less known, and the comedies and tragedies of the restoration period, just to mention two important fields of inspiration for Richardson. On the basis of their findings we must conclude that the novels we read today when considering Richardson’s works as part of a formal literary history are not quite the same as the novels contemporary readers cherished. There are important differences as well as correspondences between the contemporary reception of Richardson’s works and the reception of professional scholars in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

“It Is Difficult to Disengage a Single Thread from the Living Web of a Nation’s Literature”

2018 ◽  
pp. 27-55
Author(s):  
Karin L. Hooks
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Women Writers ◽  
Literary Politics ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literary Anthologies ◽  
Literary Histories

Arguing that the changing and more consolidated literary politics of the century’s turn helped make possible the canon wars of the twentieth century, this paper investigates the history of literary histories. Twentieth-century constructs of the field overlook an awareness that late-nineteenth century female literary historians envisioned in terms of a more inclusive and democratic American literary canon. Recovering a literary history largely erased by the turn into the twentieth century through a case study of Sarah Piatt’s career, this chapter focuses on two female literary historians of the 1890s: Ellen Mackay Hutchinson and Jeanette Gilder, whose literary anthologies include Piatt’s writing, unlike those of the following century. Hutchinson, who (with Edmund Clarence Stedman) edited a sizeable collection of American texts, the eleven-volume Library of American Literature, and Jeanette Gilder, co-editor of The Critic, who hosted a popular election to identify the top 125 American women writers of 1890, made arguments for the inclusion of Piatt in the canon that are worth revisiting in light of turn-of-the-century mechanisms for erasing the literary history of which Piatt was a part.

“Spectacles in Color”: The Primitive Drag of Langston Hughes

PMLA ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 124 (3) ◽  
pp. 798-816 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sam See
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Down Low ◽  
Gender Differentiation ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Universe

The chapter “Spectacles in Color” in Langston Hughes's first autobiography, The Big Sea (1940), envisions modernist Harlem culture as a drag performance and offers a useful rubric for understanding Hughes's The Weary Blues (1926), a lyric history of that culture whose poems characteristically cross gender, sexual, racial, and even formal lines. The Weary Blues employs a low-down, or nature-based, and down-low, or queer, aesthetic of racial and gender crossing that I term “primitive drag,” an aesthetic that ironically coincides with the stereotypes of African Americans and queers that were propagated by early-twentieth-century sexological science and degeneration theory: namely, that blacks and queers were unnatural and degenerate because they, unlike whites and heterosexuals, exhibited a lack of racial and gender differentiation. Disidentifying with those stereotypes, the primitive drag in The Weary Blues depicts queer feeling as natural and nature as queer, thus offering a productive paradox for rethinking literary histories of modernism and theories of sexuality by the rather Darwinian notion that “the nature of the universe,” as Hughes calls it, is always subject to change, or queering.

scholarly journals La historia de la historiografía literaria española. La "Historia Literaria" de Gerardo Diego

2011 ◽  
pp. 448 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonio Martín Ezpeleta
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Literary Historiography ◽  
Modest Contribution ◽  
Literary Thought ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
Gerardo Diego ◽  
Siglo Xx

Dentro de la reflexión sobre el pensamiento literario español del siglo XX, el estudio de las Historias literarias españolas ocupa un lugar muy relevante. De ahí que propongamos a continuación una reflexión sobre la importancia de la disciplina de la Historiografía literaria española e insistamos en la necesidad de activar la redacción de una Historia de la historiografía literaria española. En este caso, nuestra modesta contribución a esta deseable obra nos lleva a contextualizar y caracterizar brevemente la poco conocida Historia literaria de Gerardo Diego1. Inside the reflection about Spanish literary thought in the twentieth century, the analysis of the Spanish Literary Histories plays a very important role. For this reason, we suggest a reflection about the importance of the discipline of the Spanish Literary Historiography and we propose the necessity of activating the writing of a History of the Spanish Literary Historiography. In this case, our modest contribution to this desirable work takes us to introduce and to characterize Gerardo Diego’s not very well- known Literary History.

Towards a Multilingual Literary History: Lessons from a conflict environment

2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (06) ◽  
pp. 1816-1848
Author(s):  
ANNEMARI DE SILVA
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Institutional Changes ◽  
Future Directions ◽  
Naturally Occurring ◽  
History Of ◽  
Research Questions ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
Multilingual Research ◽  
Policy Shifts

AbstractThis article presents methodologies towards a multilingual literary history of Sri Lanka in the twentieth century by examining multilingual encounters or cultures through places, people, and institutions. Massey's concept of plural space underpins the study and gives rise to various strategies to build a multilingual literary history. The guiding research questions are: How do we construct multilingual literary histories in the context of language-based conflict? What can conflict environments teach us about approaches to multilingual literary histories and spheres? In addition to discovering future directions for intra-national comparative literary studies and documenting multilingual cultures and sites, I also focus on the changing geography of multilingualism in the twentieth century. As ideological separation of language spheres turned to real-world segregation through a series of policy shifts and institutional changes, we see that the pursuit of multilingual research takes us from organic, or naturally occurring, sites of multilingualism to orchestrated, or purposefully created, sites. Orchestrated sites work to counterbalance the decreasing opportunity for organic multilingual encounters in the context of ethnolinguistic conflict.

scholarly journals Sara Jeannette Duncan’s “Canadian Editions”:

Authorship ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Bridgette Brown
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Global Mobility ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Female Authorship ◽  
History Of ◽  
Gendered Expectations

This article examines the publishing conditions and reception history of Sara Jeannette Duncan’s satirical novel Cousin Cinderella: A Canadian Girl in London (1908). It contends that Duncan’s understanding of her reading audiences, and the gendered expectations of a woman writing in the early twentieth century, allowed her to advance the novel genre in an English imperial literary market. Cousin Cinderella foregrounds the circulation of people and printed material and is interested in their reading and interpretation through the networked connections that empire engenders. Indeed, Duncan’s global mobility and her perspective on Canada as a rejuvenating racial and economic presence in an enlarged world led her to the type of generic experimentation discerned in Cousin Cinderella and to a lesser extent The Imperialist of 1904. In Cousin Cinderella, Duncan extends both novelistic romance and realism through the trope of female authorship and the novel’s allegorised character Mary Trent. Through Mary, Duncan features women in race-making and nation-making projects, where sentimental marriage functions allegorically for practical political and economic ends. And like Mary, Duncan considered herself attached to Canada, as she established success in a market dominated by male authors and metropolitan markets. This article on an understudied novel in Duncan’s oeuvre brings together a study of authorship, literary analysis, and cultural history to contextualise and elucidate Duncan’s path-breaking career.

Formalism over Function: Compulsion, Courts, and the Rise of Educational Formalism in America, 1870–1930

2012 ◽  
Vol 114 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ethan L. Hutt
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Compulsory Education ◽  
State Courts ◽  
Compulsory Schooling ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Before And After ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Impact

Background/Context Though the impact of the legal system in shaping public education over the last sixty years is unquestioned, scholars have largely overlooked the impact of the legal system on the early development and trajectory of public schools in America. Scholars have given particularly little attention to the period in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, when states began passing laws requiring that children attend school for some portion of the year. These laws brought an end to the era of voluntary schooling in America while posing a difficult set of legal and educational questions for judges who had to interpret and apply them. The evolving logic of these decisions subsequently shaped the role, purpose, and form of education in America. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study This article offers a legal history of compulsory education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In doing so, it seeks to understand the role that courts played in shaping the character and development of the modern school system by examining court cases that stemmed from the passage of compulsory schooling laws. By examining decisions from both before and after the passage of these laws, it is possible to trace shifts in judicial thinking about the role and purpose of these laws and to recognize the role that these rulings played in developing a specific vision—and particular grammar—of schooling. Research Design This article is a historical analysis that focuses exclusively on cases brought in state courts relating to the rights of parents to control the education of their child before and after the passage of compulsory schooling laws. Though the rulings examined were issued by individual state courts and state supreme courts, attention is paid to the sharing of ideas between courts from different states and the collective vision of the purpose of compulsory school laws that resulted. Conclusions/Recommendations The shift from voluntary to compulsory schooling that occurred at the turn of the century was attended by an equally dramatic shift in the educational vision articulated by judges. The courts began the period with a view of the aims of education as being synonymous with learning, only to end the period with a view of education as being synonymous with attendance at school—a change that represents a shift from educational substance to educational formalism. Thus, this article argues, the history of compulsory education is also the history of the rise of educational formalism, and the courts played an important, and as yet unrecognized, role in legitimating and facilitating a vision of schooling that privileged certainty and order over substance and complexity.

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