scholarly journals “thi all vores lærdom er dog mesten halfverk og stumpeviis”: en islandsk litteraturhistorie fra det 18. århundrede

2015 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 32-54
Author(s):  
Guðrún Ingólfsdóttir ◽  
Þórunn Sigurðardóttir
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Precise Information ◽  
Narrative Style ◽  
Interesting Part ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
History Of Literature

Apparatus Literariam Islandicam: An Icelandic History of Literature from the Eighteenth CenturyThis article discusses an Icelandic literary history, compiled in the first half of the eighteenth century. The author was Jón Ólafsson from Grunnavík, who is best known for his work at the Arnamagneana collection in Copenhagen. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European intellectuals began to write literary histories where literature was classified and defined in a novel manner, and which included precise information on various authors and their literary products. Jón Ólafsson’s history is a part of this effort. In his work, he deals with Icelandic poets and literati from the Middle Ages to his own time. The work demonstrates many of the main characteristics of literary histories of this period. The author borrows, for example, the methods of the Danish literary historian Albert Thura, but he is also influenced by Icelandic intellectuals such as Árni Magnússon, Þormóður Torfason and Páll Vídalín. Jón Ólafsson’s narrative style is, however, rather peculiar and his text is partly based on Icelandic oral tradition. An interesting part of Jón Ólafsson’s work is a chapter on female intellectuals and poets, but there he follows Thura’s example. Jón Ólafsson’s history has never been printed; neither has it been widely used by scholars. The authors of this article are preparing an edition of the work.

Corruption and Redemption: The Legend of Valluvar and Tamil Literary History

2000 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 449-482 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stuart Blackburn
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Language Ideologies ◽  
Cultural Identities ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Literary Historiography ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
History Of Literature

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.

Literary Histories

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seth Lerer
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Literary History ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Medieval Literature ◽  
Heinrich Heine ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literary Histories

Literary history has had a mixed history among the readers and the writers of the European traditions. For William Warburton, an eighteenth-century ecclesiast and critic, literary history was “the most agreeable subject in the world.” However, the early nineteenth-century German poet Heinrich Heine describes literary history as a “morgue where each seeks out the friend he most loved.” The complex connotation of literary history stems in part from the modern European understanding of the place of literature in the formation of national identity. This article examines how the history of medieval literature was received during the Renaissance. It first looks at the regulations of late Henrician reading, particularly the 1543 Act for the Advancement of True Religion, before focusing on Miles Hogarde and his poetry. It then discusses Richard Tottel’sMiscellanyin the context of English literature and its past, along with the poetry of love and loss that follows Tottel.

Reading Medieval French Literature from a Global Perspective

PMLA ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 130 (2) ◽  
pp. 367-374 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sahar Amer
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
French Literature ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Global Perspective ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Medieval French Literature ◽  
Revisionist History ◽  
Literary Relations ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Literature

Only in the last decade has the field of medieval french literature recognized the need for a critical gaze that looks outside France and beyond the persistent Eurocentric accounts of medieval French literary history. These accounts long viewed medieval French literary production primarily in relation to the Latin, Celtic, and Provençal traditions. My research over the last twenty years has called for a revisionist history of literature and of empires and has highlighted the fact that throughout the Middle Ages France entertained “inter-imperial” literary relations—not only with European traditions but also with extra-European cultures, specifically with the Islamicate world.

The National, the Transnational, and the Diasporic: Black Canadian Writing and the Logic of Literary History

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-113
Author(s):  
Katja Sarkowsky
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Black Canadian ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
Black Writing

This response takes as its starting point the twofold agenda Winfried Siemerling pursues in The Black Atlantic Reconsidered: his systematic outline of a history of Black writing in Canada from the eighteenth century to the present and his goal to fill a geographical gap in Paul Gilroy’s influential concept of the Black Atlantic, thereby also offering a reconsideration of this concept. I suggest that, although Siemerling is clearly successful with regard to the first aspect, he is only partially so with regard to the second, with the logic of a nation-based literary history to some extent countering the agenda of the constitutive transnationality of the Black Atlantic. This tension between the two agendas, I suggest, results in crucial questions concerning the complex relationship among the national, the transnational, and the diasporic in the specific logic of literary histories.

The Discourse on Economics

2019 ◽  
pp. 88-116
Author(s):  
Cedric J. Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Gender Discrimination ◽  
Gender Relations ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
European History ◽  
Contemporary Philosophy ◽  
Select Group ◽  
History Of ◽  
Oppositional Discourse

Based on the previous chapter’s demonstration of the links between Marxism and German bourgeois thought, Robinson argues in this chapter that Marxism represents neither the interests of the oppressed nor a radical break with contemporary philosophy. Chapter 4 provides an alternative history of oppositional discourse on poverty in European history that Robinson uses to emancipate socialism from the rigid ideological regime of bourgeois intellectuals imposed by Marxism. Robinson demonstrates the importance of Aristotle and Athenian philosophy for the empirical, conceptual, and moral precepts of modern economics. Robinson then traces the persistence of socialist impulses in Europe’s Middle Ages, particularly in the work of Marsilius and the Jesuits and its eventual transformation into the secular socialist utopianism of eighteenth century bourgeois Europeans. In both cases, he shows how radical gender relations are effaced by modern economics and by Marxism. Robinson thus shows how Marx and Engel’s scientific historical economics privileged a select group of bourgeois ideologists, insisting upon individualism and historical materialism and ignoring alternative oppositional discourses built in previous rebellions against oppression, inequality, racism, gender discrimination, and poverty.

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