scholarly journals Grundtvigs forfatterskab i dansk litteraturhistorieskrivning

2010 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-63
Author(s):  
Per Dahl

Grundtvigs forfatterskab i dansk litteraturhistorieskrivning[Grundtvig’s works in Danish historiography]By Per DahlThe essay discusses the most important Danish literary histories written between 1881 and 2008 and their representation of the writings of N. F. S. Grundtvig (1783-1872). In 1881 Frederik Winkel Horn wrote the first updated history of Danish literature including the 19th century. The extensive chapter on Grundtvig deals with his conception of Nordic and Christian education and culture. From an aesthetic point of view, says Horn, Grundtvig’s poetry does not meet academic criteria. Nevertheless his best poems and prose writings are profoundly thrilling by virtue of strength of mind and poignancy. Five years later an evaluation by Peter Hansen was more reserved, but he appreciated Grundtvig’s hymns. Vilhelm Andersen’s chapter on Grundtvig in Illustreret Dansk Litteraturhistorie (1924) is evaluated as the most complex study in Grundtvig and his collected writings. This lengthy chapter (of some 75 pages) expresses an exclusively literary point of view.The structural unity of Grundtvig’s works, says Andersen, is based on the basic dichotomy between life and death and Grundtvig’s inner experience, resulting in a decisive turning point where he sees life bom out of darkness.To Andersen the most important texts are the long poem Nyaars-Morgen (The Morning of New Year’s Day) and the hymn De Levendes Land (The Land o f the Living), both written in 1824 - a climax and a turning point in Grundtvig’s poetry. Up to 1824 Andersen’s biographical approach and view of the phases and motives for Grundtvig’s writings are in accordance with his inner development. The period after 1824 is evaluated as a phase of realization of his ideas. Andersen’s exposition in Illustreret Dansk Litteraturhistorie inaugurated a process of canonization of the above-mentioned texts. In 1958 F. J. Billeskov Jansen (Danmarks Digtekunst) stiffened the literary demands in keeping with his comparative point of view. Martin Zerlang’s chapter on Grundtvig in Dansk litteraturhistorie (vol. 5, 1984) as well as Johnny Kondrup’s chapter in Hovedsporet. Dansk litteraturs historie (2005) and Sune Auken’s in Dansk litteraturs historie (vol. 2, 2008) confirm the canonical status of Nyaars-Morgen. Finally the essay discusses problems concerning canonization and representation of works when writing literary history.

Slovo ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol How to think of literary... ◽  
Author(s):  
Marko Juvan

International audience The article interprets literary history as a discourse involved in the identity policies of nations. From this point of view, the author presents the relations between national and comparative literary history in Slovenia. The paper outlines the origin and development of both disciplines, especially with regard to their implicit or explicit ideological underpinnings–cultural nationalism and cosmopolitanism. Until the end of the 20th century, national literary history as a “great genre” has interiorized the 19th century thrust of cultural nationalism, which also marked the institutionalization of literary historiography as a university discipline after 1919. Even though comparative literature has countered the apparently autarkic national conceptions of literary and cultural development, it produced another kind of “master narratives” through which it affirmed national identity–by providing records on the participation of Slovene literature in the “general European” currents and developmental stages. In this context, the article draws attention to the problem of belatedness of so‑called small literatures, especially in relation to the world literary system. In conclusion, the article addresses current dilemmas of literary historiography in Slovenia, which are partly specific (reticence to attempts to “reform” the discipline) and partly connected with the changes of literature and literary studies in the era of postmodern and globalization. Cet article interprète l’histoire littéraire comme un discours impliqué dans les politiques identitaires des nations. De ce point de vue, l’auteur présente les relations entre l’histoire littéraire nationale et l’histoire littéraire comparée en Slovénie. Sont ainsi mis en lumière l’origine et le développement de ces deux disciplines, en particulier en ce qui concerne leurs fondements idéologiques implicites ou explicites : le nationalisme culturel et le cosmopolitisme. Jusqu’à la fin du xxe siècle, l’histoire littéraire nationale en tant que « grand genre » a intériorisé l’élan du nationalisme culturel du xixe siècle, qui a également marqué l’institutionnalisation de l’historiographie littéraire comme discipline universitaire après 1919. Bien que la littérature comparée ait contré les conceptions nationales apparemment autarciques du développement littéraire et culturel, elle a produit un autre type de « récits maîtres » à travers lesquels elle a affirmé l’identité nationale – en fournissant des documents sur la participation de la littérature slovène aux courants et aux stades de développement « européens généraux ». Dans ce contexte, l’article attire l’attention sur le problème de la tardiveté de ce que l’on appelle les petites littératures, en particulier par rapport au système littéraire mondial. En conclusion, l’article aborde les dilemmes actuels de l’historiographie littéraire en Slovénie, qui sont en partie spécifiques (réticence aux tentatives de « réforme » de la discipline) et en partie liés aux changements de la littérature et des études littéraires à l’ère postmoderne et de la mondialisation. Literarna zgodovina je v tem članku obravnavana kot diskurz, vpleten v identitetne politike narodov. S tega vidika so predstavljena razmerja med nacionalno in primerjalno literarno zgodovino na Slovenskem. Orisan je nastanek in razvoj obeh disciplin, zlasti glede na njuni implicitni ali eksplicitni ideološki podlagi – kulturni nacionalizem in kozmopolitizem. Nacionalne literarne zgodovine kot »veliki žanr« so vse do konca 20. stol. ohranile izvorno podlago kulturnega nacionalizma, značilno za 19. stol. in začetno fazo univerzitetne institucionalizacije te discipline. Toda tudi primerjalna književnost, ki je vsaj od srede 30. let 20. stol. polemizirala z avtarkičnimi pojmovanji slovenskega literarnega in kulturnega razvoja, je oblikovala svoje velike pripovedi, ki pa nacionalno identiteto afirmirajo drugače – prek evidenc o udeleženosti slovenske literature v »splošnoevropskih« tokovih in razvojnih stopnjah. V tem kontekstu članek opozarja na problem zamudništva t. i. malih literatur, zlasti v razmerju do svetovnega literarnega sistema. Na koncu so nakazane aktualne dileme literarnega zgodovinopisja na Slovenskem, ki so deloma specifične (zadržanost do poskusov »reformiranja« stroke), deloma pa povezane s spremembami, ki zadevajo literaturo in vedo o njej v dobi postmoderne in globalizacije.


2012 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 199-217
Author(s):  
Vanja Radakovic

In the history of philosophy, Jean-Jacques Rousseau is mainly considered as an atypical philosopher of the Enlightenment, as a pioneer of the revolutionary idea of a free civilian state and natural law; in literary history, he is considered the forerunner of Romanticism, the writer who perfected the form of an epistolary novel, as well as a sentimentalist. However, this paper focuses on the biographical approach, which was mostly excluded in observation of those works revealing Rousseau as the originator of the autobiographical novelistic genre. The subject of this paper is the issue of credibility of self-portraits, and through this problem it highlights the facts from the author?s life. This paper relies on a biographical approach, not in the positivistic sense but in the phenomenological key. This paper is mainly inspired by the works of the Geneva School theorists - Starobinski, Poulet and Rousset.


Literary Fact ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 131-145
Author(s):  
Vassili E. Molodiakov

Russian Modernism scholar Leonid Konstantinovich Dolgolopov (1928 –1995), known for his studies on Alexander Blok and Andrei Bely, completed his PhD thesis on Blok’s narrative poems “Retribution” and “The Twelve” in 1960, received his degree in 1962, but never published the text (now in the author’s possession). Its major parts were published as papers, its principal propositions and conclusions were developed in Dolgopolov’s later research works, but the thesis was never printed as a whole, and, from the author’s point of view, is worth being published as a valuable source for history of literary studies on Russian Symbolism as well as an original work useful and readable even now. The article presents Dolgopolov’s unpublished PhD thesis. Chapter One deals with “Retribution” and presents a comprehensive study of the poem’s plan, plot, and literary history, its genre peculiarities and historical scenes. Chapter Two analyzes evolution of Blok’s political views during the First World War and the Russian Revolution of 1917 and also its reflection in Blok’s lyric poems of this period. Chapter Three is the first of Dolgopolov’s numerous studies on “The Twelve”, the work he considered to be Blok’s highest literary achievement. Dolgopolov analyzed the poem’s ideas and images (especially Jesus Christ), its formal and rythmic novelty, its place among other contempopary poetical works on Russian revolution.


Author(s):  
Moshe Mishkinsky

This chapter describes a turning point in the history of Polish Socialism and its attitude towards the Jewish Question. In dealing with the concept of the Jewish Question, the intention is not, as is often the case, to dwell solely upon the legal status of Jews (emancipation) but to view the problems of Jewish existence in their diversity. According to one view, the dependence upon non Jewish society represents an integral element or, even a determinant, in these problems. In the context of Polish–Jewish relations from the historical perspective of the last hundred years, one may discern six aspects of the subject. These include the development of Socialist thought in its different versions as regards the Jews; the influence of the gradual growth and development of the emerging working class in Polish society; the influence of the relatively large involvement of Jews within the Socialist Labour Movement; the impact of the new processes which matured in the last quarter of the 19th century on the life of Eastern European Jewry in general, and on the Polish–Jewish area in particular; the growth alongside each other, but also in conflict, of two political and ideological movements — Polish Socialism and Jewish labour Socialism; and the tension between the Socialist and the national elements which was common to both yet different in its concrete content.


Author(s):  
Paul Johnston

The terms “Fireside Poets” or “Schoolroom Poets” are used to designate a group of five poets—William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell—who were popular in America in the latter half of the 19th century. Their poetry was read both around household firesides, often aloud by a mother or father to the gathered family, and in schoolrooms, where they inculcated wisdom and morals and patriotic feeling in America’s young. While they continued to be taught in K-12 classrooms well into the 20th century, they lost their standing first with critics and then with college and university professors with the coming of modernism in the early decades of the 20th century. Despite scattered attempts to restore both their critical reputations and their place in the curriculum, they continue to have only a marginal place in the minds of those most familiar with poetry. The Postmodern/New Historicist challenges to modernism find little of interest in them—Belknap’s A New Literary History of America (2009), for instance barely mentions them—while the neo-Victorian turn toward socially conscious literature, which might be expected to retrieve them, has so far paid them little mind, though some attention has recently been given to their environmental and Native American themes. But this marginalization may more reflect the marginalization of poetry as a whole in American society at large than a true estimate of their worth to common readers. While young students no longer read Longfellow’s Evangeline or Bryant’s “The Chambered Nautilus,” these poets may yet form the vanguard of a restoration of the enjoyment of poetry in America.


Author(s):  
Thibaut d'Hubert

The literary history of Bengal is characterized by a multilingual ecology that nurtured the development of Middle Bengali literature. It is around the turn of the second millennium, during the Pāla period (c. 8th–12th century), that eastern South Asia became a major region for the production of literary texts in Sanskrit and Apabhramsha. Early on, Bengal developed a distinct literary identity within the Sanskrit tradition and, despite abrupt political transitions and the fragmentation of the landscape of literary patronage, fundamental aspects of the literary culture of Pāla Bengal were transmitted during later periods. It was during the Sultanate period, from the 14th century onward that courtly milieus began to cultivate Middle Bengali. This patronage was mostly provided by upper-caste Hindu dignitaries and (in the case of lyric poetry at least) by the Sultans themselves. During the period ranging from the 15th to the early 19th centuries, vernacular literature can be divided into two broad categories: short narrative forms called padas or gītas (songs), which were often composed in an idiom derived from songs by the Old Maithili poet Vidyāpati (c. 1370–1460); and long narrative forms in Middle Bengali called pā̃cālīs, which are characterized by the alternation of the prosodic forms called paẏār and tripadī and the occasional insertion of songs. These poetic forms are the principal markers of the literary identity of Bengal and eastern South Asia (including Assam, Orissa, and Arakan). The Ḥusayn Shāhī period (1433–1486) contributed to the consolidation and expansion eastward of vernacular literary practices. Then, the political landscape became fragmented, and the multiplication of centers of literary production occurred. This fragmentation fostered the formation of new, locally grounded literary trends. These could involve the cultivation of specific genres, the propounding of various religious doctrines and ritual practices, the fashioning of new idioms fostered by either dialectal resources, classical idioms such as Sanskrit or Persian, and other vernacular poetic traditions (Maithili, Avadhi, Hindustani). The late Mughal and early colonial periods witnessed the making of new trends, characterized by a radical modification of the lexical component of the Middle Bengali idiom (i.e., Dobhāṣī), or the recourse to scripts other than Bengali (e.g., Sylhet Nagari/Kaithi, Arabic). The making of such new trends often implied changes in the way that authors interacted with Sanskrit, Persian, and other vernacular traditions. For instance, Persian played as crucial a role as Sanskrit in the various trajectories that Middle Bengali poetry took. On the one hand, Persian in Bengal had a history distinct from that of Bengali; on the other hand, it constituted a major traditional model for Bengali authors and, at times, Persianate education replaced the one based on Sanskrit as the default way to access literacy. Even if Middle Bengali poetic forms continued to be used in the context of various traditional performances, the making of a new literary language in the 19th century, the adoption of Western genres, and the development of prose and Western prosodic forms occasioned a radical break with premodern literary practices. From the second half of the 19th century, with the notable exception of some ritual and sectarian texts, access to the ancient literature of Bengal began to be mediated by philological analysis and textual criticism.


2000 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 449-482 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stuart Blackburn

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.


PMLA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 131 (5) ◽  
pp. 1444-1451
Author(s):  
Ronit Ricci

Literary Histories Have All Too Often Been Written with the Borders of Nation-States in Mind, Projecting Back in Time a political unity and standard use of language that only gradually, and sometimes recently, emerged. This approach has been criticized and increasingly replaced by an acknowledgment that literary histories must consider many variables that do not neatly map onto the story of single, powerful, and supposedly unified political entities and that these histories' artificial boundaries of inquiry must expand to encompass the movement of people, ideas, and texts. Although potentially more representative of the plurality of particular societies or cultures, a literary history that does not depend on the illusion of a stable state structure and the state's prioritized language is challenging to write, especially when basic questions regarding the location, religious affiliation, and linguistic preferences of the community producing a literature loom large. I present some thoughts and questions on one such challenging example—writing a literary history of the Sri Lankan Malays—in the hope that these reflections will resonate with those exploring other places, languages, and periods as we critically engage with old and new ways of understanding the diverse nature and roles of literature.


2013 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 699-709 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zekâi Şen

Although water resources have been developed throughout the centuries for the service of different civilizations, at different scales and in different regions, their use in automation has been conceived only recently. Research into the history of water from an automation point of view has led to some unknown or hidden facts. Starting from the ancient Greek period before the prophet Christ and after about the 12th century, many researchers tried to make use of water power for working some simple but effective devices for the service of mankind. Among these are the haulage of water from a lower level to a higher elevation by water wheels in order to irrigate agricultural land. Hero during the Hellenistic period and Vitruvius of the Roman Empire were among the first who tried to make use of water power for use in different human activities, such as water haulage, watermills, water clocks, etc. The highlights of these works were achieved by a 12th century Muslim researcher, Abou-l Iz Al-Jazari, who lived in the southeastern part of modern day Turkey. He reviewed all the previous work from different civilizations and then suggested his own designs and devices for the use of water power in automation of excellent types. He even combined animals and water power through early designs of valves, pistons, cylinders and crank mills, as will be explained in this paper. His works were revealed by German historians and engineers in the first quarter of the 19th century. Later, an English engineer translated his book from Arabic into English, revealing the guidelines for modern automation and robotic designs originating from the 12th century. This paper gives a brief summary of the early workers' devices and Abou-l Iz Al-Jazari's much more developed designs with his original hand-drawn pictures.


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