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Literature and the Idea of Luxury in Early Modern England
by Alison V. ScottExploring the idea of luxury in relation to a series of neighboring but distinct concepts including avarice, excess, licentiousness, indulgence, vitality, abundance, and waste, this study combines intellectual and cultural historical methods to trace discontinuities in luxury’s conceptual development in seventeenth-century England. The central argument is that, as ’luxury’ was gradually Englished in seventeenth-century culture, it developed political and aesthetic meanings that connect with eighteenth-century debates even as they oppose their so-called demoralizing thrust. Alison Scott closely examines the meanings of luxury in early modern English culture through literary and rhetorical uses of the idea. She argues that, while ’luxury’ could and often did denote merely ’lust’ or ’licentiousness’ as it tends to be glossed by modern editors of contemporary works, its cultural lexicon was in fact more complex and fluid than that at this time. Moreover, that fuller understanding of its plural and shifting meanings-as they are examined here-has implications for the current intellectual history of the idea in Western thought. The existing narrative of luxury’s conceptual development is one of progressive upward transformation, beginning with the rise of economic liberalism amidst eighteenth-century debates; it is one that assumes essential continuity between the medieval treatment of luxury as the sin of ’luxuria’ and early modern notions of the idea even as social practises of luxury explode in early seventeenth-century culture.
Literature and the Islamic Court: Cultural life under al-Sahib Ibn 'Abbad (Culture and Civilization in the Middle East)
by Erez NaamanCourts were the most important frameworks for the production, performance, and evaluation of literature in medieval Islamic civilization. Patrons vying for prestige attracted to their courts literary people who sought their financial support. The most successful courts assembled outstanding literary people from across the region. The court of the vizier and literary person al-Sahib Ibn ʿAbbad (326-385/938-995) in western Iran is one of the most remarkable examples of a medieval Islamic court, with a sophisticated literary activity in Arabic (and, to a lesser extent, in Persian). Literature and the Islamic Court examines the literary activity at the court of al-Sahib and sheds light on its functional logic. It is an inquiry into the nature of a great medieval court, where various genres of poetry and prose were produced, performed, and evaluated regularly. Major aspects examined in the book are the patterns of patronage, selection, and auditioning; the cultural codes and norms governing performance, production, and criticism; the interaction between the patron and courtiers and among the courtiers themselves; competition; genres as productive molds; the hegemonic literary taste; and the courtly habitus. This book reveals the significance these courts held as institutions that were at the heart of literary production in Arabic. Using primary medieval Arabic sources, this book offers a comprehensive analysis of Islamic courts and as such is of key interest to students and scholars of Arabic literature, Islamic history and medieval studies.
Literature and the Renaissance Garden from Elizabeth I to Charles II: England’s Paradise (Literary And Scientific Cultures Of Early Modernity Ser.)
by Amy L. TignerSpanning the period from Elizabeth I's reign to Charles II's restoration, this study argues the garden is a primary site evincing a progressive narrative of change, a narrative that looks to the Edenic as obtainable ideal in court politics, economic prosperity, and national identity in early modern England. In the first part of the study, Amy L. Tigner traces the conceptual forms that the paradise imaginary takes in works by Gascoigne, Spenser, and Shakespeare, all of whom depict the garden as a space in which to imagine the national body of England and the gendered body of the monarch. In the concluding chapters, she discusses the function of gardens in the literary works by Jonson, an anonymous masque playwright, and Milton, the herbals of John Gerard and John Parkinson, and the tract writing of Ralph Austen, Lawrence Beal, and Walter Blithe. In these texts, the paradise imaginary is less about the body politic of the monarch and more about colonial pursuits and pressing environmental issues. As Tigner identifies, during this period literary representations of gardens become potent discursive models that both inspire constructions of their aesthetic principles and reflect innovations in horticulture and garden technology. Further, the development of the botanical garden ushers in a new world of science and exploration. With the importation of a new world of plants, the garden emerges as a locus of scientific study: hybridization, medical investigation, and the proliferation of new ornamentals and aliments. In this way, the garden functions as a means to understand and possess the rapidly expanding globe.
Literature as Recreation in the Later Middle Ages
by Glending OlsonThis book studies attitudes toward secular literature during the later Middle Ages. Exploring two related medieval justifications of literary pleasure—one finding hygienic or therapeutic value in entertainment, and another stressing the psychological and ethical rewards of taking time out from work in order to refresh oneself—Glending Olson reveals that, contrary to much recent opinion, many medieval writers and thinkers accepted delight and enjoyment as valid goals of literature without always demanding moral profit as well.Drawing on a vast amount of primary material, including contemporary medical manuscripts and printed texts, Olson discusses theatrics, humanist literary criticism, prologues to romances and fabliaux, and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. He offers an extended examination of the framing story of Boccaccio's Decameron. Although intended principally as a contribution to the history of medieval literary theory and criticism, Literature as Recreation in the Later Middle Ages makes use of medical, psychological, and sociological insights that lead to a fuller understanding of late medieval secular culture.
Literature in Dialogue with the Natural Sciences: Competing Claims from the Early Modern Period to the 20th Century
by Christoph StrosetzkiThe thesis of the book is that in the early modern period, literature claimed precedence over the observation of nature. There were shifts through phases of temporary parity, the priority of natural sciences in the 19th century, and their critique by literature in the 20th century. These developments are presented in France and the Spanish-speaking world, while also considering Germany and England: While Montaigne, Pedro Mexía, Pérez de Oliva, Vives, and Gracián prioritize literature, Pascal contrasts the "esprit de finesse" with the "esprit de géométrie," opening a controversy that Linnaeus and Buffon continue. Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire orient themselves toward the English model, where Locke and Hume introduce empirical sciences whose advances Rousseau critiques. In the 19th century, Balzac and Pérez Galdós engage with the natural sciences, with Zola later looking to Darwin and Comte as role models. Finally, the aporias of scientific thinking are highlighted by Ortega y Gasset, Borges, and Sábato.
Literature in Post-Communist Russia and Eastern Europe: The Russian, Czech and Slovak Fiction of the Changes 1988-98 (BASEES/Routledge Series on Russian and East European Studies)
by Rajendra Anand ChitnisThis book considers Russian, Czech and Slovak fiction in the late communist and early post-communist periods. It focuses on the most innovative trend to emerge in this period, on those writers who, during and after the collapse of communism, characterised themselves as 'liberators' of literature. It shows how these writers in their fiction and critical work reacted against the politicisation of literature by Marxist-Leninist and dissident ideologues, rejecting the conventional perception of literature as moral teacher, and redefining the nature and purpose of writing. The book demonstrates how this quest, enacted in the works of these writers, served for many critics and readers as a metaphor for the wider disorientation and crisis precipitated by the collapse of communism.
Literature of Girmitiya: History, Culture and Identity
by Neha Singh Sajaudeen ChapparbanThis book covers various forms of the production of girmitiya culture and literature. One of the main objectives is to conceptualize the idea of girmitya, girmitology, and girmitiya literature, culture, history, and identity in both colonial and postcolonial contexts. This book aims to document the history, experiences, culture, assimilation, and identity of girmitiya community. It also critically analyses the articulation, projection, and production of their experiences of migration and being immigrant, their narratives, tradition, culture, religion, and memory. It also explores how this labour community formulated into a diaspora community and reconnected/created the home (land) and continues to do so in the wake of globalization and Information and Communication Technology (ICT). This book is an attempt to bring the intriguing neglected diverse historical heritage of colonial labour migration and their narratives into the mainstream scholarly debates and discussions in the humanities and the social sciences through the trans- and interdisciplinary perspectives. This book assesses the routes of migration of old diaspora, and it explains the nuances of cultural change among the generations. Although, they have migrated centuries back, absorbed and assimilated, and got citizenships of respective countries of destinations but still their longing for roots, culture, identities, “home”, and the constant struggle is to retain connections with their homeland depicted in their cultural practices, arts, music, songs, folklore and literary manifestations.
Literature of Revolution: Essays on Marxism
by Norman GerasThis influential collection explores the pivotal texts and topics in the Marxist tradition. Ranging over questions of social theory, political theory, moral philosophy and literary criticism, it looks at the thought of Marx and Trotsky, Luxemburg, Lenin and Althusser. Included here are Geras’s influential and widely cited treatment of fetishism in Capital, his comprehensive review of debates on Marxism and justice, discussions on political organization, revolutionary mass action and party pluralism, and a novel analysis of the literary power of Trotsky’s writing.
Literature of the Holocaust
by Alan RosenDuring and in the aftermath of the dark period of the Holocaust, writers across Europe and America sought to express their feelings and experiences through their writings. This book provides a comprehensive account of these writings through essays from expert scholars, covering a wide geographic, linguistic, thematic and generic range of materials. Such an overview is particularly appropriate at a time when the corpus of Holocaust literature has grown to immense proportions and when guidance is needed in determining a canon of essential readings, a context to interpret them, and a paradigm for the evolution of writing on the Holocaust. The expert contributors to this volume, who negotiate the literature in the original languages, provide insight into the influence of national traditions and the importance of language, especially but not exclusively Yiddish and Hebrew, to the literary response arising from the Holocaust.
Literature, American Style: The Originality of Imitation in the Early Republic
by Ezra TawilBetween 1780 and 1800, authors of imaginative literature in the new United States wanted to assert that their works, which bore obvious connections to anglophone literature on the far side of the Atlantic, nevertheless constituted a properly "American" tradition. No one had yet figured out, however, what it would mean to write like an American, what literature with an American origin would look like, nor what literary characteristics the elusive quality of Americanness could generate. Literature, American Style returns to this historical moment—decades before the romantic nationalism of Cooper, the transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau, or the iconoclastic poetics of Whitman—when a fantasy about the unique characteristics of U.S. literature first took shape, and when that notion was linked to literary style.While late eighteenth-century U.S. literature advertised itself as the cultural manifestation of a radically innovative nation, Ezra Tawil argues, it was not primarily marked by invention or disruption. In fact, its authors self-consciously imitated European literary traditions while adapting them to a new cultural environment. These writers gravitated to the realm of style, then, because it provided a way of sidestepping the uncomfortable reality of cultural indebtedness; it was their use of style that provided a way of departing from European literary precedents. Tawil analyzes Noah Webster's plan to reform the American tongue; J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur's fashioning of an extravagantly naïve American style from well-worn topoi; Charles Brockden Brown's adaptations of the British gothic; and the marriage of seduction plots to American "plain style" in works such as Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple and Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette. Each of these works claims to embody something "American" in style yet, according to Tawil, remains legible only in the context of stylistic, generic, and conceptual forms that animated English cultural life through the century.
Literature, Electricity and Politics 1740–1840: ‘Electrick Communication Every Where’ (Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine)
by Mary FaircloughThis book investigates the science of electricity in the long eighteenth century and its textual life in literary and political writings. Electricity was celebrated as a symbol of enlightened progress, but its operation and its utility were unsettlingly obscure. As a result, debates about the nature of electricity dovetailed with discussions of the relation between body and soul, the nature of sexual attraction, the properties of revolutionary communication and the mysteries of vitality. This study explores the complex textual manifestations of electricity between 1740 and 1840, in which commentators describe it both as a material force and as a purely figurative one. The book analyses attempts by both elite and popular practitioners of electricity to elucidate the mysteries of electricity, and traces the figurative uses of electrical language in the works of writers including Mary Robinson, Edmund Burke, Erasmus Darwin, John Thelwall, Mary Shelley and Richard Carlile.
Literature, Ethics, and Aesthetics
by Sabrina AchillesA conceptualization of the literary aesthetic for a concern for the Self. Bringing Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's constructivist thinking into a practical domain, Sabrina Achilles rethinks the ways in which literature is understood and taught.
Literature, Journalism and the Avant-Garde: Intersection in Egypt (Routledge Studies in Middle Eastern Literatures)
by Elisabeth KendallThe author explores the role of journalism in Egypt in effecting and promoting the development of modern Arabic literature from its inception in the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. Remapping the literary scene in Egypt over recent decades, Kendall focuses on the independent, frequently dissident, journals that were the real hotbed of innovative literary activity and which made a lasting impact by propelling Arabic literature into the post-modern era.
Literature, Language, and the Rise of the Intellectual Disciplines in Britain, 1680–1820
by Robin ValenzaThe current divide between the sciences and the humanities, which often seem to speak entirely different languages, has its roots in the way intellectual disciplines developed in the long eighteenth century. As various fields of study became defined and to some degree professionalized, their ways of communicating evolved into an increasingly specialist vocabulary. Chemists, physicists, philosophers, and poets argued about whether their discourses should become more and more specialized, or whether they should aim to remain intelligible to the layperson. In this interdisciplinary study, Robin Valenza shows how Isaac Newton, Samuel Johnson, David Hume, Adam Smith, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth invented new intellectual languages. By offering a much-needed new account of the rise of the modern disciplines, Robin Valenza shows why the sciences and humanities diverged so strongly, and argues that literature has a special role in navigating between the languages of different areas of thought.
Literature, Religion, and the Evolution of Culture, 1660–1780
by Howard D. WeinbrotA distinguished critic traces the growing, but always threatened, trend toward political and religious tolerance from the mid-seventeenth to the late eighteenth century in Britain.Winner of the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title of the Choice ACRLLiterature, Religion, and the Evolution of Culture, 1660–1780 chronicles changes in contentious politics and religion and their varied representations in British letters from the mid-seventeenth to the late eighteenth century. An uncertain trend toward tolerance and away from painful discord significantly influenced authors who reflected on and enhanced germane aspects of British literary and intellectual life. The movement was stymied during the painful Gordon Riots in June 1780, from which Britain needed to repair itself.Howard D. Weinbrot's broad-ranging interdisciplinary study considers sermons, satire, political and religious polemic, Anglo-French relations, biblical and theological commentary, Methodism, legal history, and the novel. Literature, Religion, and the Evolution of Culture, 1660–1780 analyzes the texts and contexts of several major and minor authors, including Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens, Olaudah Equiano, Maria De Fleury, Lord George Gordon, Nathaniel Lancaster, Henry Sacheverell, Tobias Smollett, and Edward Synge.
Literature, the Gothic and the Reconstruction of History: The Past as Nightmare
by Neil Cocks Daniel Renshaw AndIn the Gothic, nothing stays buried for long. Since its inception in the mid-eighteenth century, the Gothic imagination has been concerned with the pasts of the societies from which it emerged. This collection, featuring contributions from archivists, historians and literary critics, examines how horror fiction and the wider Gothic mode have engaged with the constructed conception of "history".From Victorian nightmares of Jurassic jungles to ghost stories on the contemporary stage, the contributors adopt varied and innovative approaches to consider how the Gothic has created, complicated and sometimes subverted historical narratives. In doing so, these works blur the distinctions between the "historical record" and creative endeavour, undermine linear and sequential understandings of the progress of time and dissolve temporal boundaries. The collection explores a variety of Gothic forms including drama, poetry, prose, illustration, film and folklore, and it draws on classic texts such as Wuthering Heights and Dracula, as well as less familiar works, including Reynolds’ The Mysteries of London and Baldini’s Mal’aria.Literature, the Gothic and the Reconstruction of History will be invaluable to students and scholars interested in the confluences of literary and historical endeavour, the creation and depiction of historical constructs in popular culture, and Gothic horror in its myriad forms.
Literature: Timeless Voices, Timeless Themes (The American Experience)
by Prentice HallIf you had been one of the early explorers or settlers of North America, you would have found many things in your new environment unknown to you. The handiest way of filling voids in your vocabulary would have been to ask local Native Americans what words they used. The early colonists began borrowing words from friendly Native Americans almost from the moment of their first contact, and many of those shared words have remained in our everyday language.
Literature: Timeless Voices, Timeless Themes (The American Experience)
by Prentice HallThis book is designed to develop a student's knowledge.
Literature: Timeless Voices, Timeless Themes (The British Tradition)
by Prentice HallTextbook on British literature.
Literatures of Exile in the English Revolution and its Aftermath, 1640-1690 (Transculturalisms, 1400-1700)
by a foreword JardineOriginal and thought-provoking, this collection sheds new light on an important yet understudied feature of seventeenth-century England's political and cultural landscape: exile. Through an essentially literary lens, exile is examined both as physical departure from England-to France, Germany, the Low Countries and America-and as inner, mental withdrawal. In the process, a strikingly wide variety of contemporary sources comes under scrutiny, including letters, diaries, plays, treatises, translations and poetry. The extent to which the richness and disparateness of these modes of writing militates against or constructs a recognisable 'rhetoric' of exile is one of the book's overriding themes. Also under consideration is the degree to which exilic writing in this period is intended for public consumption, a product of private reflection, or characterised by a coalescence of the two. Importantly, this volume extends the chronological range of the English Revolution beyond 1660 by demonstrating that exile during the Restoration formed a meaningful continuum with displacement during the civil wars of the mid-century. This in-depth and overdue study of prominent and hitherto obscure exiles, conspicuously diverse in political and religious allegiance yet inextricably bound by the shared experience of displacement, will be of interest to scholars in a range of disciplines.
Literatures of Liberalization: Global Circulation And The Long Nineteenth Century (New Comparisons In World Literature Series)
by Regenia GagnierThis book traces the global circulation of cultures and ideologies from the technological and democratic revolutions of the long nineteenth century to liberal and neoliberal modernity. Focussing on moments of coerced (colonial and postcolonial) and voluntary contact rather than national boundaries, the author draws attention to the global scope of literatures and geopolitical commodities as actants in world affairs, as in processes of liberalization, democratization, and trade, but also to the distinctiveness of each local environment at its moments of transculturation. Based in extensive experience in collaborative, multilingual, interdisciplinary networks, the book synthesizes existing theoretical scholarship, provides original case studies of world-historical Victorian and modern writers, and articulates a new interdisciplinary methodology for literary studies in a global context. It will be of interest to Victorianists, modernists, comparatists, political theorists, translators, and scholars of world literatures, world ecology, and globalization.
Literatures of Urban Possibility (Literary Urban Studies)
by Lieven Ameel Jason Finch Markku SalmelaThis book demonstrates how city literature addresses questions of possibility. In city literature, ideas of possibility emerge primarily through two perspectives: texts may focus on what is possible for cities, and they may present the urban environment as a site of possibility for individuals or communities. The volume combines reflections on urban possibility from a range of geographical and cultural contexts—in addition to the English-speaking world, individual chapters analyse possible cities and possible urban lives in Turkey, Israel, Finland, Germany, Russia and Sweden. Moreover, by engaging with issues such as city planning, mass housing, gentrification, informal settlements and translocal identities, the book shows imaginative literature at work outlining what possibility means in cities.
Literature’s Elsewheres: On the Necessity of Radical Literary Practices
by Annette GilbertAn examination of a series of diverse, radical, and experimental international works from the 1950s to the present.What is a literary work? In Literature&’s Elsewheres, Annette Gilbert tackles this question by deploying an extended concept of literature, examining a series of diverse, radical, experimental works from the 1950s to the present that occupy the liminal zone between art and literature. These works—by American Artist, Allison Parrish, Natalie Czech, Stephanie Syjuco, Fiona Banner, Elfriede Jelinek, Dan Graham, Robert Barry, George Brecht, and others—represent a pluralized literary practice that imagines a different literature emerging from its elsewheres. Investigating a work&’s coming into being—its transition from &“text&” to &“work&” as a social object and pragmatic category of literary communication—Gilbert probes the assumptions and foundations that underpin literature, including the ideologies and power structures that prop it up. She offers a snapshot from a period of recent literary and art history when such central concepts as originality and authorship were questioned and experimental literary practices ranged from concrete poetry and Oulipo to conceptual writing and appropriation literature. She examines works that are dematerialized, site-specific, unique copies of other works, and institutional critiques. Considering the inequalities, exclusions, and privileges inscribed in literature, she documents the power of experimental literature to attack these norms and challenges the field&’s canonical geographic boundaries by examining artists with roots in North and South America, East Asia, and Western and Eastern Europe. The cross-pollination of literary and art criticism enriches both fields. With Literature&’s Elsewheres, Gilbert explores what art can&’t see about the literary and what literature has overlooked in the arts.
Literature’s Refuge: Rewriting the Mediterranean Borderscape
by William StroebelStories silenced or sequestered by a century of mass displacement between Europe and the Middle East—recovered and retold at lastIn 1923, the Greco-Turkish Population Exchange uprooted and swapped nearly two million Christians and Muslims, &“pacifying&” the so-called Near East through ethnic partition and refugeehood. This imposition of borders not only uprooted peoples from their place in the world; it also displaced many of their stories from a place in world literature. In Literature&’s Refuge, William Stroebel recovers and weaves together work by fugitive writers, oral storytellers, readers, copyists, editors, and translators dispersed by this massive &“unmixing&” of populations and the broader border logic that it set in motion. Stroebel argues that two complementary forces emerged as a template for the Eastern Mediterranean&’s cultural landscape: the modern border, which reshuffled people through a system of filters and checkpoints; and modern philology, which similarly reshuffled their words and works. Philologists and publishers defined modern literature by picking apart, extracting, reformatting, or dispossessing refugee and diasporic texts across a racialized borderscape—a gray zone of semi-inclusion and semi-exclusion, semimobility and immobility.Stroebel reaches into the chinks and crannies of this borderscape to reconstitute the rich textual geography between Greek Orthodoxy and Sunni Islam, between Greek-script, Arabic-script, and Latin-script literary traditions at the edges of Europe and the Middle East. Doing so, he offers a new methodological toolkit for rewriting the modern borderscapes of world literature.