“Metempsychosis” and “Marvelous Affinities”: Re-Imagining the Past in the Ilyāḏah by Sulaymān al-Bustānī (1904) and in the Divano di ʿOmar ben al-Fared by Pietro Valerga (1874)

This article focuses on the image of the past in two translations produced in the contexts of the Arab Nahḍah and of the Italian Risorgimento. The first translation is the Italian rendering of ʿOmar ibn al-Fāriḍ’s mystical poems, published in 1872 by Pietro Valerga (1821-1903). The second is the Arabic translation of the Iliad, published in 1902 by Sulaymān al-Bustānī (1856-1925). Both translators refer to the past as a translation strategy: Pietro Valerga reads Ibn al-Fāriḍ through the verses of Petrarch and, in his work’s introduction, emphasizes the transmission of medieval Arab poetry to Italy; Sulaymān al-Bustānī reconstructs the world of the Iliad through Arabic poetic tradition and compares Greece to the ǧāhiliyyah (pre-Islamic age). The article sheds light on the potential of translation as a space of re-imagination of the past and invites us to read the works as two distinct, yet akin, attempts to express original interpretations of Italian and Arabic literary histories based on syncretism and cross-cultural translatability.

From Distant to Public Reading The (Hebrew) Novel in the Eyes of Many

From its very beginning, the term “distant reading” (Moretti 2000) was controversial, displacing ‘close reading’ by relying on literary histories and thereby reflecting on the entire global literary system. One of the weaknesses of this approach lies in its exclusive reliance on canonical and authoritative historiographies, one or two for each national literature, something which is bound to over-simplify the complexities of national literatures. As is known, Moretti’s proposal became a ‘slogan’ for Digital Humanities while algorithmic manipulation of texts has taken the place of reading literary (human) histories. Yet the problem of over-simplification remains, albeit differently. As an alternative, we offer a fusion approach, radicalising Moretti’s idea. In this article, we demonstrate how computer-based analysis of different readings carried out by many readers – not necessarily professionals – produces a relatively minute picture. Our case study will be the Hebrew novel, from its emergence in 1853 to the present day; a manageable corpus on which we gather information using questionnaires we have carefully created in our lab. Alongside the presentation of our approach, the actual research, and its initial findings, we will reflect theoretically on the conceptual benefits, as well as the limits, of public distance reading.

Predicting the Past

Drawing from the social theories of Niklas Luhmann and Mary Douglas, Predicting the Past advocates a reflexive understanding of the paradoxical institutional dynamic of American literary history as a professional discipline and field of study. Contrary to most disciplinary accounts, Michael Boyden resists the utopian impulse to offer supposedly definitive solutions for the legitimation crises besetting American literature studies by “going beyond” its inherited racist, classist, and sexist underpinnings. Approaching the existence of the American literary tradition as a typically modern problem generating diverse but functionally equivalent solutions, Boyden argues how its peculiarity does not, as is often supposed, reside in its restrictive exclusivity but rather in its massive inclusivity which drives it to constantly revert to a self-negating “beyond” perspective. Predicting the Past covers a broad range of both well-known and lesser known literary histories and reference works, from Rufus Griswold’s 1847 Prose Writers of America to Sacvan Bercovitch’s monumental Cambridge History of American Literature. Throughout, Boyden focuses on particular themes and topics illustrating the selfinduced complexity of American literary history such as the early “Anglocentric” roots theories of American literature; the debate on contemporary authors in the age of naturalism; the plurilingual ethnocentrism of the pioneer Americanists of the mid-twentieth century; and the genealogical misrepresentation of founding figures such as Jonathan Edwards, Emily Dickinson, and Robert Lowell.

A History of Chilean Literature

This book covers the full range and diversity of Chilean literature from the times of the Spanish conquest to the present. By emphasizing transnational, hemispheric, and global approaches to Chilean literature, it reflects the relevance of themes such as neoliberalism, migration and exile, as well as subfields like ethnic studies, and gender and sexuality studies. It showcases the diversity of Chilean literature throughout all periods, regions, ethnocultural groups and social classes, all the while foregrounding its regional variations. Unlike previous literary histories, it maps a rich heterogeneity by including works by Chileans of indigenous, African, Jewish, Arab, Asian, and Croatian ancestries, as well as studies of literature by LGTBQ authors and Chilean Americans. Ambitious and authoritative, this book is essential reading for scholars of Chilean Literature, Latin American Literature, the Global South, and World Literature.

Literaire dynamiek, anders bekeken. De heropstanding van de poëzie in Vlaanderen na de Tweede Wereldoorlog

This article discusses the ongoing crisis in the field of literary studies, relating these problems and challenges to the problem of writing literary histories. It advocates a functionalist approach to literary phenomena, taking into account institutional frames and discursive strategies which are developed in order to structure and legitimize literary practices and literary evolution. These theoretical and methodological premises are applied to the very complex years immediately after the Second World War in Flanders (the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium). In particular, it is demonstrated how the very notion of ‘classicist poetry’ as a defensive practice clearly reveals an intricate variety of conceptions aimed at tackling the problems poets are confronted with in a new era.

Primul mythos de stânga al literaturii române contemporane

Mihai Iovănel’s History of Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1990-2020 is the first leftist major narrative of Romanian literature – and the shockwaves it generated were due even more to this firm ideological option (the first such one in the history of major Romanian literary histories) than to its literary content proper. The present article aims at asserting the main three accomplishments and shortcomings generated by this ideological option – namely that: i) it succeeds in coalescing the first coherent narrative of the last three decades of Romanian literature; ii) it sometimes turns from an ideological option into an ideological bias – and modifies the factuality of Romanian literature, eliminating important writers, exaggerating the qualities of some other ones, searching to distribute merits (to leftist writers) and punishments (to right-wing ones) according with their political option, and not with their literary qualifications; iii) it is an impressive stylistic achievement in itself, even though quite ironically its author disregards the virtues of aestheticism.

Tabloul prozei contemporane și valențele realismului în Istoria literaturii române contemporane: 1990-2020 de Mihai Iovănel

In an era in which literary histories are written by collective of academics trying to transcend the national paradigm in which these works were once wrote, The History of Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1990-2020 by Mihai Iovănel is an intellectual effort that may seem obsolete. Nevertheless, Mihai Iovănel’s book proposes new ways of understanding the contemporary Romanian literary field that were not taken into consideration by previous similar critical endeavours. This paper aims to investigate how The History of Contemporary Romanian Literature constructs an overview of the Romanian fiction wrote in the last three decades and the critical approaches deployed for this purpose. The main interest of this article will be how does Mihai Iovănel discusses Romanian contemporary fiction and how does he instrumentalizes the concept of realism. We will look more closely at the third part of the book, “The Evolution of Fiction,” but the discussion will not omit the relation of this chapter with others. The paper will concentrate on the concepts put forward by Mihai Iovănel to systematize the complex subfield of contemporary Romanian fiction, like capitalist realism, the famous term coined by Mark Fisher. Also, we will try to see how The History of Contemporary Romanian Literature relate to previous literary histories or books of literary criticism that resembles Mihai Iovănel’s work in some respects or that have similar goals but different methods.

Operaționalizarea experimentului în critica literară românească

This study has a two-fold structure, in its first part exploring various models of experimental literature, proposed by researchers such as Gerald Prince and Warren Motte, as well as theoretical attempts to define and analyze experimental literature in Romania. The second part focuses on the quantitative analysis of keywords related to “the experimental” found in literary histories of Romanian literature authored by E. Lovinescu, G. Călinescu, Nicolae Manolescu, and Mihai Iovănel, as well as The General Dictionary of Romanian Literature and The Chronological Dictionary of the Romanian Novel. By simply searching several pointedly chosen terms in the corpus, a cartography of what is considered to be experimental emerges clearly, alongside its relation to the canon, to the dynamics of literary genres, and to the temporal evolution of Romanian literature.

The Publishing of Popular Social History Books

Chapters 1 and 2 make up Part I of this book, which explains how the ‘history of everyday life’ developed and why it had such purchase in mid-twentieth-century British society. This chapter uses the publishing of popular history books to investigate the emergence of the ‘history of everyday life’ as a new genre of popular social history in the inter-war period. Between the wars, publishers competed to capture burgeoning educational markets as the market for ‘traditional’ narrative and literary histories declined. As a result, they began to repackage illustrated source books, memoirs, and diaries as history books after 1918. This fed the appetites of an altered, post-war reading public, including women and juvenile workers.