A Thematic Exploration of Twentieth-Century Western Literature

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jiang Chengyong
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Western Literature

scholarly journals Popular Medicine and Empirics in Greece, 1900–1950: An Oral History Approach

2016 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
pp. 492-513
Author(s):  
Violetta Hionidou
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Oral History ◽  
The State ◽  
Oral Histories ◽  
Focal Points ◽  
The West ◽  
Western Literature ◽  
Popular Medicine ◽  
Folklore Studies ◽  
History Approach

Western literature has focused on medical plurality but also on the pervasive existence of quacks who managed to survive from at least the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Focal points of their practices have been their efforts at enrichment and their extensive advertising. In Greece, empirical, untrained healers in the first half of the twentieth century do not fit in with this picture. They did not ask for payment, although they did accept ‘gifts’; they did not advertise their practice; and they had fixed places of residence. Licensed physicians did not undertake a concerted attack against them, as happened in the West against the quacks, and neither did the state. In this paper, it is argued that both the protection offered by their localities to resident popular healers and the healers’ lack of demand for monetary payment were jointly responsible for the lack of prosecutions of popular healers. Moreover, the linking of popular medicine with ancient traditions, as put forward by influential folklore studies, also reduced the likelihood of an aggressive discourse against the popular healers. Although the Greek situation in the early twentieth century contrasts with the historiography on quacks, it is much more in line with that on wise women and cunning-folk. It is thus the identification of these groups of healers in Greece and elsewhere, mostly through the use of oral histories but also through folklore studies, that reveals a different story from that of the aggressive discourse of medical men against quacks.

scholarly journals Avatars de Raphaël Hythlodée, ou l'influence de l'Utopie de Thomas More dans le roman portugais contemporain

Moreana ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 55 (Number 209) (1) ◽  
pp. 61-78
Author(s):  
José Eduardo Reis
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Complex Traits ◽  
First Century ◽  
Thomas More ◽  
Western Literature ◽  
Cultural System ◽  
History Of ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Representative Work ◽  
The Ideal

The history of the literary reception of Thomas More's Utopia in Portugal has been a tale of omissions, censorships and deferred translations that highlight a flaw within the Portuguese cultural system. Indeed, it is somewhat ironic that such a representative work of both Western literature and thought, historically associated with the opening of the world's geographical horizons, and which ascribed to a Portuguese sailor, Raphael Hythloday, the discovery of an ideal place, was first translated into Portuguese only in the second half of the twentieth century. However, the first decade of the twenty-first century seems to bode a more auspicious literary fortune for More's Utopia within the Portuguese literary idiom: not only has an edition of More's work finally been translated from the original Latin, but also two novels were published in 2004, A lenda de Martim Regos, by Pedro Canais, and Rafael, by Manuel Alegre. In the context of both books' plots, they rewrite the complex traits of the character of the Portuguese sailor and discoverer of the ideal island. The same reinvention of the character of Raphael had already been attempted, in 1998, by José V. de Pina Martins in his long dialogic Morean narrative, Utopia III. In this essay, I will focus both on the documental sources related to Portuguese culture that are at the root of More's Utopia and on some relevant aspects of the reception of the character of Raphael Hythloday within the aforementioned novels.

scholarly journals Fragmented Selves, Healing Visions

2021 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
pp. 164-174
Author(s):  
Catrinel Popa ◽  
◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Western Literature ◽  
Fragmented Self ◽  
The World

The purpose of this paper is to analyse two experimental “novels of the self”, written by two of the most innovative Jewish-Romanian writers of the ’30s: Max Blecher and H. Bonciu, stressing on those aspects they have in common with the mainstream of the twentieth-century Western literature. In both authors, inward disquietude is experienced as outward atmosphere, submerging the world in indefinable strangeness and mystery. In this context, the concept of “inner exile” and “fragmented self” may prove useful in defining the particular status of the narrators’perspective, as well as their relationship with the world (objects, settings, invisible traps, “sickly” or “healing” spaces).

The Sickness Unto Death In The Underworld: A Study of Nihilism

1958 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 135-167 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Clive
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Leisure Time ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Major Work ◽  
Western Literature ◽  
Know How ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Growing Pains ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Modes Of Thought

Since the Enlightenment ennui and despair have been among the most dominant themes in western literature. In the twentieth century there scarcely exists a single major work of fiction which views man's nature and destiny under the aspect of hope or fulfillment. Why this should be so is the subject of interminable discussion which, generally speaking, locates the deeper cause in the breakdown of virtually all genuine religiousness with an attendant rise of meaninglessness and emptiness. This development in turn is linked to the various revolutions, particularly the Industrial, that have combined to undermine traditional occidental modes of thought and living. While some critics hold that it is merely a question of modern society becoming gradually accustomed to the blessings so precipitously conferred upon it by technology, thus comparing its present growing pains to those of an adolescent, few seem to disagree on the prevailing exhaustion and anxiety. In addition to the note of doom struck by the best intellectuals of our day — and its fashionableness is no argument against its truth — it would appear that the unreflecting masses independently of being exposed to this literature do not know how to redeem their leisure time, have lost a great deal of capacity for spontaneous participation, and seek despairingly if not eagerly for something vital to which they can relate themselves and through which find renewed structure in their lives.

scholarly journals Unconventional And Nonclassical Stylistics In Modernism

2021 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 01-03
Author(s):  
N. B. Mukhitdinova ◽  
◽  
M. A. Mamarasulova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
World Literature ◽  
General Description ◽  
Western Literature ◽  
Literary Process ◽  
History Of ◽  
Western European

This article examines the history of the entry of modernism into world literature and the stories which based on a literary-theoretical process that took place in Western European and American literature. The article first analyzes how fiction and the international literary process developed in the twentieth century, as well as which currents took the lead in this direction. It is stated that the main goal is that this movement, which changed the socio-political and artistic views in the twentieth century, was opposed by critics and developed and has maintained its original place to this day. This article summarizes the existence of the direction of modernism as the style of the general description of Western literature and art in several dimensions in the twentieth century and the meaning of it.

Free verse (al-shi'r al-ḥurr) in modern Arabic literature: Abū Shādī and his school, 1926–46

1968 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-51
Author(s):  
S. Moreh
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
Free Verse ◽  
Western Literature ◽  
Arabic Poetry ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Arabic ◽  
Official Recognition

The beginning of the twentieth century marked a new and revolutionary stage in the history of Arabic poetry. Through the increasing influence of Western literature, some new genres which show only preliminary signs of emergence in the nineteenth century found official recognition, as in the case of the strophic verse, or experimenting with them was resumed, as in the case of the blank verse (shi'r mursal), which was first practisd by Rizq Allāh Ḥassūn in 1869 and which was revived in 1905, probably unconsciously, by Jamīl Ṣidqī al-Zahāwī (1863–1936), under the name of shi'r mursal.

scholarly journals Leading topics and ideas of new Korean poetry of the XX century

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (S1) ◽  
pp. 969-977
Author(s):  
Umida Turakhanovna Saydazimova
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Significant Influence ◽  
Russian Literature ◽  
Korean Literature ◽  
Western Literature ◽  
Western European

This article discusses the leading themes and ideas of new Korean poetry of the twentieth century. Many Korean youths went to Japan to study. Here they studied in the faculties of literature and were able to get acquainted with Western European, English, and Russian literature. Western literature had a significant influence on the formation of modern Korean literature.

Afterword

2003 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 421-426
Author(s):  
Elliott West
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Generation X ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Genre Fiction ◽  
Western Literature ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Mystery Genre

This comment considers the essays by David Wrobel, Krista Comer, and Blake Allmendinger in relationship to each other. Far from being merely regional, late twentieth-century Western literature has produced "conversations" about the American experience and is valuable in its own right. Wrobel emphasizes the overlapping, rather than segmented, versions of the frontier of the Western literary tradition, while Comer focuses on the distinctive perspective of Generation X through genre fiction about modern Los Angeles; similar insights can be gained through close readings of the mystery genre. Finally, Allmendinger provides hints of what historians and literary critics can offer to, and learn from, each other in studying twentieth-century Western literature.

Lin, Yutang (林语堂) (1895–1976)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Wang
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Comparative Literature ◽  
Chinese Literature ◽  
The West ◽  
Doctoral Studies ◽  
Western Literature ◽  
Chinese Modernity ◽  
Peking University ◽  
Major Figure ◽  
Lin Yutang

Lin Yutang (林语堂) was a major figure in the development of twentieth-century Chinese modernity. He was a scholar, inventor, educator and translator, as well as a writer who explored themes of anti-imperialism and anti-feudalism in books disseminated widely in China and the West. Born into a Chinese Presbyterian minister’s family in the province of Fujian, Lin Yutang was educated in comparative literature and philology (including doctoral studies) at universities in Shanghai, Boston (Harvard) and Leipzig. As a professor at Peking University (1923–1926) and university administrator in China (1926), Lin became renowned for promoting Western literature, thought and technology, whilst also working to disseminate classic Chinese literature in the West.

The guns that ‘won the Western’: firearm iconography in Western literature and film

2018 ◽  
pp. 89-127
Author(s):  
Justin A. Joyce
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Gun Violence ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Western Literature ◽  
Literature And Film

This chapter traces the changing iconography of guns within an array of literary texts from the nineteenth century and cinematic texts of the twentieth century. This chapter outlines the shifting emphases within the Western; for though the gun has always been important to the Western, the genre’s representations of gun violence have varied through its history. This chapter argues that the Western's changing iconographic emphases, from aim to speed, codes violence morally upright and justifiable at different moments within the genre’s long history.

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