A History of European Literature

A History of European Literature PDF Author: Walter Cohen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191078913
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 625

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Book Description
Walter Cohen argues that the history of European literature and each of its standard periods can be illuminated by comparative consideration of the different literary languages within Europe and by the ties of European literature to world literature. World literature is marked by recurrent, systematic features, outcomes of the way that language and literature are at once the products of major change and its agents. Cohen tracks these features from ancient times to the present, distinguishing five main overlapping stages. Within that framework, he shows that European literatures ongoing internal and external relationships are most visible at the level of form rather than of thematic statement or mimetic representation. European literature emerges from world literature before the birth of Europe -- during antiquity, whose Classical languages are the heirs to the complex heritage of Afro-Eurasia. This legacy is later transmitted by Latin to the various vernaculars. The uniqueness of the process lies in the gradual displacement of the learned language by the vernacular, long dominated by Romance literatures. That development subsequently informs the second crucial differentiating dimension of European literature: the multicontinental expansion of its languages and characteristic genres, especially the novel, beginning in the Renaissance. This expansion ultimately results in the reintegration of European literature into world literature and thus in the creation of todays global literary system. The distinctiveness of European literature is to be found in these interrelated trajectories.

A History of European Literature

A History of European Literature PDF Author: Walter Cohen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191078913
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 625

Get Book Here

Book Description
Walter Cohen argues that the history of European literature and each of its standard periods can be illuminated by comparative consideration of the different literary languages within Europe and by the ties of European literature to world literature. World literature is marked by recurrent, systematic features, outcomes of the way that language and literature are at once the products of major change and its agents. Cohen tracks these features from ancient times to the present, distinguishing five main overlapping stages. Within that framework, he shows that European literatures ongoing internal and external relationships are most visible at the level of form rather than of thematic statement or mimetic representation. European literature emerges from world literature before the birth of Europe -- during antiquity, whose Classical languages are the heirs to the complex heritage of Afro-Eurasia. This legacy is later transmitted by Latin to the various vernaculars. The uniqueness of the process lies in the gradual displacement of the learned language by the vernacular, long dominated by Romance literatures. That development subsequently informs the second crucial differentiating dimension of European literature: the multicontinental expansion of its languages and characteristic genres, especially the novel, beginning in the Renaissance. This expansion ultimately results in the reintegration of European literature into world literature and thus in the creation of todays global literary system. The distinctiveness of European literature is to be found in these interrelated trajectories.

Trafika Europe

Trafika Europe PDF Author: Andrew Singer
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271077301
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
In volume 1 of Trafika Europe, Andrew Singer gathers choice offerings from the first year of the quarterly journal of the same name. These fourteen selections—from seven women and seven men, seven poets and seven fiction writers—represent languages across the Continent, from Shetland Scots and Occitan, Latvian and Polish, Armenian, Italian, Hungarian, German, and Slovenian to Faroese and Icelandic. With some of the most accomplished writing in new translation from Europe today, this volume opens a window onto some emerging contours of European identity. Former ASCAP director of photography Mark Chester complements the writing with sumptuous black-and-white photos. The contributors are Vincenzo Bagnoli, Ewa Chrusciel, Christine DeLuca, Mandy Haggith, Stefanie Kremser, Aurélia Lassaque, Wiesław Myśliwski, Jóanes Nielsen, Edvīns Raups, László Sárközi, Marko Sosič, Jón Kalman Stefánsson, Nara Vardanyan, and Māra Zālīte.

The Story Smuggler

The Story Smuggler PDF Author: Georgi Gospodinov
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
ISBN: 9781399623117
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
'Some smuggle cigarettes, others alcohol - or weapons. Our contraband, being invisible, is more dangerous. Our contraband is undetectable by scanners. What we carry as concealed excess baggage is stories.' In this exquisite literary gem, Georgi Gospodinov, winner of the International Booker Prize, invites the reader on a winding journey through his own memories. He shows us a childhood under Communism, a particularly Bulgarian variety of melancholy, the freedom and thrills found in reading and writing, and the coming of age of one extraordinary writer. Ultimately, this profound, playful and deeply moving autobiographical text offers resounding proof of the power and importance of storytelling. TRANSLATED FROM THE BULGARIAN BY KRISTINA KOVACHEVA AND DAN GUNN

Beat Literature in a Divided Europe

Beat Literature in a Divided Europe PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004364129
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
Beat Literature in Europe offers twelve in-depth analyses of how European authors and intellectuals on both sides of the Iron Curtain read, translated and appropriated American Beat literature. The chapters combine textual analysis with discussions on the role Beat had in popular music, art, and different subcultures. The book participates in the transnational turn that has gained in importance during the past years in literary studies, looking at transatlantic connections through the eyes of European authors, artists and intellectuals, and showing how Beat became a cluster of texts, images, and discussions with global scope. At the same time, it provides vivid examples of how national literary fields in Europe evolved during the cold war era. Contributors are: Thomas Antonic, Franca Bellarsi, Frida Forsgren, Santiago Rodriguez Guerrero-Strachan, József Havasréti, Tiit Hennoste, Benedikt Hjartarson, Petra James, Nuno Neves, Maria Nikopoulou, Harri Veivo, Dorota Walczak-Delanois, Gregory Watson.

European Others

European Others PDF Author: Fatima El-Tayeb
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452932921
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
Considers the complications of race, religion, sexuality, and gender in Europeanizing from below

Asia in the Making of Europe, Volume I

Asia in the Making of Europe, Volume I PDF Author: Donald F. Lach
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226467090
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 511

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Book Description
Praised for its scope and depth, Asia in the Making of Europe is the first comprehensive study of Asian influences on Western culture. For volumes I and II, the author has sifted through virtually every European reference to Asia published in the sixteenth-century; he surveys a vast array of writings describing Asian life and society, the images of Asia that emerge from those writings, and, in turn, the reflections of those images in European literature and art. This monumental achievement reveals profound and pervasive influences of Asian societies on developing Western culture; in doing so, it provides a perspective necessary for a balanced view of world history. Volume I: The Century of Discovery brings together "everything that a European could know of India, Southeast Asia, China, and Japan, from printed books, missionary reports, traders' accounts and maps" (The New York Review of Books). Volume II: A Century of Wonder examines the influence of that vast new body of information about Asia on the arts, institutions, literatures, and ideas of sixteenth-century Europe.

Roxolana in European Literature, History and Culture

Roxolana in European Literature, History and Culture PDF Author: Galina I. Yermolenko
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317061179
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
This collection is the first book-length scholarly study of the pervasiveness and significance of Roxolana in the European imagination. Roxolana, or "Hurrem Sultan," was a sixteenth-century Ukrainian woman who made an unprecedented career from harem slave and concubine to legal wife and advisor of the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent (1520-1566). Her influence on Ottoman affairs generated legends in many a European country. The essays gathered here represent an interdisciplinary survey of her legacy; the contributors view Roxolana as a transnational figure that reflected the shifting European attitudes towards "the Other," and they investigate her image in a wide variety of sources, ranging from early modern historical chronicles, dramas and travel writings, to twentieth-century historical novels and plays. Also included are six European source texts featuring Roxolana, here translated into modern English for the first time. Importantly, this collection examines Roxolana from both Western and Eastern European perspectives; source material is taken from England, Italy, France, Spain, Germany, Turkey, Poland, and Ukraine. The volume is an important contribution to the study of early modern transnationalism, cross-cultural exchange, and notions of identity, the Self, and the Other.

“Gypsies” in European Literature and Culture

“Gypsies” in European Literature and Culture PDF Author: V. Glajar
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 023061163X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
This book traces representations of "Gypsies" that have become prevalent in the European imagination and culture and influenced the perceptions of Roma in Eastern and Western European societies.

Early Modernism

Early Modernism PDF Author: Christopher Butler
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780198182528
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
Early Modernism is a uniquely integrated introduction to the great avant-garde movements in European literature, music, and painting at the beginning of this century, from the advent of Fauvism to the development of Dada. In contrast to the overly literary focus of previous studies of modernism, this book highlights the interaction between the arts in this period. It traces the fundamental and interlinked re-examination of the languages of the arts brought about by Matisse, Picasso, Schoenberg, Eliot, Apollinaire, Marinetti, Ben, and many others, which led to radically new techniques, such as atonality, cubism, and collage. These changes are set in the context both of the art that preceded them and of a new and profound shift in ideas. Theories of the unconscious, the association of ideas, primitivism, and reliance upon an expressionist intuition led to a reshaped conception of personal identity, and Butler examines the representation of the modernist self in the work of figures including Mann, Joyce, Conrad, and Stravinsky. Accessible and wide-ranging, the book is lavishly illustrated with over sixty illustrations, many in color. It provides an elegant and incisive guide to a momentous period in the history of European art.

Imagining World Order

Imagining World Order PDF Author: Chenxi Tang
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501716921
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 455

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Book Description
In early modern Europe, international law emerged as a means of governing relations between rapidly consolidating sovereign states, purporting to establish a normative order for the perilous international world. However, it was intrinsically fragile and uncertain, for sovereign states had no acknowledged common authority that would create, change, apply, and enforce legal norms. In Imagining World Order, Chenxi Tang shows that international world order was as much a literary as a legal matter. To begin with, the poetic imagination contributed to the making of international law. As the discourse of international law coalesced, literary works from romances and tragedies to novels responded to its unfulfilled ambitions and inexorable failures, occasionally affirming it, often contesting it, always uncovering its problems and rehearsing imaginary solutions. Tang highlights the various modes in which literary texts—some highly canonical (Camões, Shakespeare, Corneille, Lohenstein, and Defoe, among many others), some largely forgotten yet worth rediscovering—engaged with legal thinking in the period from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. In tracing such engagements, he offers a dual history of international law and European literature. As legal history, the book approaches the development of international law in this period—its so-called classical age—in terms of literary imagination. As literary history, Tang recounts how literature confronted the question of international world order and how, in the process, a set of literary forms common to major European languages (epic, tragedy, romance, novel) evolved.