‘The Sultan’s self shan’t carry me’: Negotiations of harem fantasies in Byron’s Don Juan

2011 ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Jennifer Sarha
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Don Juan ◽  
Sexual Fluidity ◽  
Literary Traditions

Lord Byron’s Don Juan is a poem which depends on gendered literary traditions for both its originality and its intelligibility. In the harem episode of cantos V and VI, we can recognise a libertine fantasy, an Orientalist premise, and a picaresque adventure, but also some traces of epic, the gothic and literature of sensibility. Yet, these tropes are consistently complicated in the poem and used to undermine the gendered foundations of their traditions. This essay considers the formulation of such subversions through explicitly literary paradigms: what signs of gender are referred to, and how are they made intelligible as fictional constructs? By interrogating the use of gendered tropes, their formation as intelligible concepts within literary history, and their negotiations with sexualised conventions of narrative, I intend to highlight the discrepancies in the heteronormative construction of these literary paradigms and Byron’s use of them to suggest sexual fluidity.

The Subaltern Critique of Dominant Historiography and a Case for Retrieving a Historiography of Dalit Literary Traditions in India

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-15
Author(s):  
Vandana
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Literary Historiography ◽  
History Of ◽  
Longue Duree ◽  
Longue Durée ◽  
And Shifts ◽  
The Third World

In order to retrieve literary history in India, teleology operates on three levels: ancient, medieval and modern. As per the longue duree approach to the study of history, history is not an event or an object, but like the concept of time, is a configuration and a process. The history of the longue duree gives priority to long-term monumental historic patterns, moments and shifts in society, that is, the slow-paced structural processes which tend to have strong historical consequences. Similarly, languages and literatures, too, marked by historical catastrophes, undergo a process of sedimentation. For this reason, instead of a single literary history of South Asia, Sheldon Pollock proposes the concept of ‘literary cultures’ which allows room for ‘historical individuation’ of each culture rather than homogenising them merely for the sake of historical analysis. The basic questions that I have tried to look into through this study include: Why is it problematic to retrieve literary history in India? Why is it essential to have an alternative literary historiography of Dalit literature? How does Dalit subalternity differ from colonial subalternity? How the Dalit voice is disintegrated from within because of the prevalence of graded inequality? What constitutes the politics of history writing and canon formation in the third world countries like India where retrieving subaltern literary trends remain a problematic discourse?

scholarly journals Maori Writing: Speaking with Two Mouths

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tina Makereti
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Literary Traditions

Drawing on her own experiences as a novelist and anthologist, Tina Makereti explores the situation of the Māori writer as someone “speaking with two mouths,” addressing and drawing from both Māori and Pākehā literary traditions and ways of expressing creativity. Considering some examples from her own fiction and the work of other notable writers such as Patricia Grace, Makereti argues for a richer, more expansive conception of Māori and New Zealand literary history, one drawing on, and acknowledging, Māori ways of imagining literature.  

Emigration and 19th-Century British Colonial Settler Narratives

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamara S. Wagner
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Information Industry ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Mass Migration ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Global Movements ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Trading Routes

Colonial settler narratives comprise chiefly fictional as well as autobiographically inspired or anecdotal writing about emigration and settler life. The 19th century saw an increasingly systematic mass migration across the globe that proceeded on an unprecedented scale. Global movements, including emigration and return, were facilitated by improved transport technology, new trading routes, and burgeoning emigration societies. A new market for writing about migration and the settler world emerged. The settler narratives of British colonizers present a valuable record of growing public interest in the experience of emigrants and settlers at the time. Whereas accounts of first-hand experience at first simply formed a central part of an expanding information industry and were promptly harnessed by pro-emigration propaganda, settler narratives quickly evolved into a diverse set of writing that consisted of (1) prescriptive and cautionary accounts, presented in narrative form, (2) tales of exploration and adventure, including bush yarns and mateship narratives, as well as (3) detailed descriptions of everyday settler life in domestic and increasingly also New Woman fiction. Equally important, writing produced within the settler colonies had a twofold relationship with British-authored literature, written at the imperial center, and hence participated in the formation of literary traditions on several levels. Exploring Victorian narratives of the colonial settler world helps map how genre travels and becomes transformed, shaping the literature of a global 19th century. These narratives provide a rich source of material for a much-needed reassessment of the diverse experiences and representations of emigration and settlement in the 19th century, while demanding renewed attention as an important part of literary history.

“The Figure in the Carpet”

PMLA ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 132 (3) ◽  
pp. 613-619 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Armstrong ◽  
Warren Montag
Keyword(s):  
Interpersonal Communication ◽  
Literary History ◽  
World Literature ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
University Administrators ◽  
Distant Reading ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Quantum Leap ◽  
Canonical Texts

Of Franco Moretti's masterworks of literary history and theory, why is it the loosely assembled collection of occasional pieces Distant Reading that has captured the literary critical spotlight? Why now, just when enrollments in the humanities are plummeting, new technologies for storing and distributing information are revolutionizing interpersonal communication and scientific methods, and global is well on its way to replacing interdisciplinary as the descriptor favored by university administrators? Moretti is not alone in attempting to reconfigure a discipline that tends to favor the singular text and national literary traditions for a generation of students who apparently could not care less about either. In his effort to adapt literary history and form to the conditions of globalization that make them seem irrelevant, he asks us to abandon our obsessive focus on canonical texts—to start instead considering how certain forms of literature made the quantum leap from nation to world and what formal changes they underwent in doing so. This project he warns, will require us to “unlearn” how to read a literary text and to question the assumption that “world literature” is an object to be known: “We must think of it as a problem that asks for a new critical method” (46). He famously exposes this problem by staging various encounters between literary form and quantitative analysis.

TRANSLATING SICILY

2003 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 140-163 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karla Mallette
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Linguistic Complexity ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Single Text ◽  
History Of ◽  
Multiple Languages ◽  
Literary Coherence

AbstractThis article sketches a theoretical strategy for approaching the literary history of Norman Sicily (centuries XI-XII). Because of its linguistic complexity—during the Norman era, Sicilians wrote in Arabic, Greek, and Latin—literary historians have resisted treating Siculo-Norman literature as a literary-historical category. Rather, the literature has been divided into three discrete, linguistically defined traditions, understood as colonial extensions of mainland literary traditions. Using a reading of Sicilian coins with multilingual inscriptions in order to examine the parallel use of multiple languages in a single "text," this article argues for a reconsideration of Sicilian literature of the era, one that looks at multilingualism not as a challenge to literary coherence but as constitutive of a literary culture.

Grounds of Engagement

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stéphane Robolin
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Gwendolyn Brooks ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Black South African ◽  
Black Cross ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Solidarity

Part literary history, part cultural study, this book examines the relationships and exchanges between black South African and African American writers who sought to create common ground throughout the antiapartheid era. The book argues that the authors' geographic imaginations crucially defined their individual interactions and, ultimately, the literary traditions on both sides of the Atlantic. Subject to the tyranny of segregation, authors such as Richard Wright, Bessie Head, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Keorapetse Kgositsile, Michelle Cliff, and Richard Rive charted their racialized landscapes and invented freer alternative geographies. They crafted rich representations of place to challenge the stark social and spatial arrangements that framed their lives. Those representations, the book contends, also articulated their desires for black transnational belonging and political solidarity. The first book to examine U.S. and South African literary exchanges in spatial terms, it identifies key moments in this understudied history of black cross-cultural exchange, exposing how geography serves as an indispensable means of shaping and reshaping modern racial meaning.

Vernacular Cosmopolitanism in Anglophone World Literatures: Comparative Histories of Literary Worlding

2018 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 239-257 ◽  
Author(s):  
Birgit Neumann
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Central Element ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Anglophone Literature ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
Anglophone World

Abstract The article explores the concept and practice of world literature from the perspective of postcolonial Anglophone literature. To account for the agency of literature and to move beyond the old centre/periphery model, the contribution focuses on literary acts of worldmaking rather than on the circulation of literature across the globe. It is argued that Anglophone world literature thrives on a poetics that bind diverse literary histories, languages, and distinct creative practices into patterns of exchange and thus exposes the constitutive exteriority within European (literary) histories. The use of the vernacular is identified as a central element of world literature’s poetics, staging a conflictual interplay between transcultural relationality and the formative impact of locality. As the vernacular binds the global and the local into loops of relation, it also offers an opportunity to consider the classification of “language as a language” (Young 1209). A reading of Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956) provides insights into literary ways of worldmaking, showing how the poetics of Anglophone world literature shuttles among several places to create a vernacular cosmopolitanism (Bhabha). Finally, the article examines how an understanding of world literature as a polycentric network emerging from different literary traditions changes our practice of comparative literary history.

The Story and the Myth of the Igor’ Tale

2018 ◽  
Vol 52 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 193-216
Author(s):  
Harvey Goldblatt
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Popular Song ◽  
Verbal Art ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
The People ◽  
Invented Tradition ◽  
History Of ◽  
European Thought ◽  
Editio Princeps ◽  
Literary Reception

Abstract Since its discovery in the 1790s and the publication of the editio princeps in 1800, the Igor’ Tale has been defined and examined in many different ways. The aim of the present study is to focus on the beginnings of literary reception (1800–1850) for this masterpiece of Old Rus’ verbal art. This study commences with the assertion that the history of the work’s interpretation serves a double purpose. This dual interpretive vision (1) is grounded in the twofold nature of literary history (i.e., in the distinction between literary history proper and literary reception), (2) obliges us to view the Igor’ Tale against a variety of cultural backdrops (including both medieval Western literary traditions and contemporary European thought), and (3) requires us to reflect on the importance of an emerging nationalist orientation and, in particular, of Herder’s underlying ideas of “national individuality” and “spirit of the people.” The present study treats the following interpretive motifs and their relevance for the analysis of the Igor’ Tale in the first half of the nineteenth century: (1) The Igor’ Tale as a Popular Song and Native Artistic Masterpiece; (2) Publication of the Igor’ Tale and its Reception by the Cultural Elite; (3) Interpretive Legacies of the Editio Princeps and the Place of N.M. Karamzin; and (4) From the Invented Tradition of Ossian to the National Spirit and Veneration of the Igor’ Tale.

Bengali Literature of Arakan

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thibaut d'Hubert
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Bay Of Bengal ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Literary History ◽  
North India ◽  
Territorial Expansion ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Bengali Literature ◽  
Cultural Domain ◽  
Urban And Rural Areas

Between the 16th and the 18th centuries, Middle Bengali became a major idiom of literary expression in the kingdom of Arakan. It is within the domain of this coastal kingdom, which then comprised the region of Chittagong in today’s Bangladesh, that Muslim subjects of the Buddhist kings started using the courtly vernacular that was previously cultivated by Hindu dignitaries of the Ḥusayn Shāhī sultans of Bengal. By the mid-17th century, which constituted a moment of economic prosperity and maximum territorial expansion, all genres of Middle Bengali poetry were represented in the corpus of texts written by authors living in the urban and rural areas of the kingdom. The many treatises on Muslim beliefs and meditative practices, the hagiographic literature, and the courtly romances testify to the formation of a local Islamic cultural ethos. After the Mughal conquest of Chittagong in 1666, local literacy was still cultivating standards set by authors of the Arakanese period such as Saiẏad Sultān and Ālāol. In Arakan itself, Bengali Muslim literature continued to be produced and transmitted until at least the first half of the twentieth century. A large number of manuscripts was collected in the first decades of the twentieth century and these are preserved in various institutions in Bangladesh. The Bengali literature of Arakan is characterized by its Indic religious idiom and Sanskritized poetics, but also by its complex intertextuality that reflects the region’s connections with north India and the Persianate trading networks of the Bay of Bengal. Up to the 2000s, the Bengali literature of Arakan has mostly been discussed within the framework of the national literary history of Bangladesh, but subsequently scholars have relocated this corpus within the cultural domain of the Bay of Bengal and the Islamicate literary traditions of South and Southeast Asia.

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