Specters of Cavafy

Specters of Cavafy PDF Author: Maria Boletsi
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780472222056
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description

Specters of Cavafy

Specters of Cavafy PDF Author: Maria Boletsi
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780472222056
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book

Book Description


Specters of Cavafy

Specters of Cavafy PDF Author: Maria Boletsi
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472904493
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
The Greek Alexandrian poet C. P. Cavafy (1863–1933) has been recognized as a central figure in European modernism and world literature. His poetry explored the conditions for animating the past and making lost worlds or people haunt the present. Yet he also described himself as “a poet of the future generations.” Indeed, his writings address concerns and desires that permeate the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. How does poetry concerned with the past, memory, loss, and death, carry futurity? How does it haunt, and how is it haunted by, future presents? Specters of Cavafy broaches these questions by proposing spectral poetics as a novel approach to Cavafy’s work. Drawing from theorizations of specters and haunting, it develops spectrality as a lens for revisiting Cavafy’s poetry and prose, fiction and nonfiction, as well as his poetry’s bearing on our present. By examining Cavafy’s spectral poetics, the book’s first part shows how conjurations work in his writings, and how the spectral permeates the entanglement of modernity and haunting, and of irony and affect. The second part traces the afterlives of specific poems in the Western imagination since the 1990s, in Egypt’s history of debt and colonization, and in Greece during the country’s recent debt crisis. Beyond its original contribution to Cavafy studies, the book proposes tools and modes of reading that are broadly applicable in literary and cultural studies.

Barbarian: Explorations of a Western Concept in Theory, Literature, and the Arts

Barbarian: Explorations of a Western Concept in Theory, Literature, and the Arts PDF Author: Markus Winkler
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3476046117
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 501

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Book Description
Since Greek antiquity, the ‘barbarian’ captivates the Western imaginary and operates as the antipode against which self-proclaimed civilized groups define themselves. Therefore, the study of the cultural history of barbarism is a simultaneous exploration of the shifting contours of European identity. This two-volume co-authored study explores the history of the concept ‘barbarism’ from the 18th century to the present and illuminates its foundational role in modern European and Western identity. It constitutes an original comparative, interdisciplinary exploration of the concept’s modern European and Western history, with emphasis on the role of literature in the concept’s shifting functions. Critically responding to the contemporary popularity of the term ‘barbarian' in political rhetoric and the media, and its violent, exclusionary workings, the study contributes to a historically grounded understanding of this figure’s past and contemporary uses. It combines overviews with detailed analyses of representative works of literature, art, film, philosophy, political and cultural theory, in which “barbarism” figures prominently.

Complete Poems of C. P. Cavafy

Complete Poems of C. P. Cavafy PDF Author: C.P. Cavafy
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0307959511
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 754

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Book Description
An extraordinary literary event: Daniel Mendelsohn’s acclaimed two-volume translation of the complete poems of C. P. Cavafy—including the first English translation of the poet’s final Unfinished Poems—now published in one handsome edition and featuring the fullest literary commentaries available in English, by the renowned critic, scholar, and international best-selling author of The Lost. No modern poet so vividly brought to life the history and culture of Mediterranean antiquity; no writer dared break, with such taut energy, the early-twentieth-century taboos surrounding homoerotic desire; no poet before or since has so gracefully melded elegy and irony as the Alexandrian Greek poet Constantine Cavafy (1863–1933). Whether advising Odysseus on his return to Ithaca or confronting the poet with the ghosts of his youth, these verses brilliantly make the historical personal—and vice versa. To his profound exploration of longing and loneliness, fate and loss, memory and identity, Cavafy brings the historian’s assessing eye along with the poet’s compassionate heart. After more than a decade of work and study, Mendelsohn—a classicist who alone among Cavafy’s translators shares the poet’s deep intimacy with the ancient world—gives readers full access to the genius of Cavafy’s verse: the sensuous rhymes, rich assonances, and strong rhythms of the original Greek that have eluded previous translators. Complete with the Unfinished Poems that Cavafy left in drafts when he died—a remarkable, hitherto unknown discovery that remained in the Cavafy Archive in Athens for decades—and with an in-depth introduction and a helpful commentary that situates each work in a rich historical, literary, and biographical context, this revelatory translation is a cause for celebration: the definitive presentation of Cavafy in English.

The Forster-Cavafy Letters

The Forster-Cavafy Letters PDF Author: Edward Morgan Forster
Publisher: American Univ in Cairo Press
ISBN: 9789774162572
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
The story they tell involves a number of major twentieth century literary personalities - Arnold Toynbee, T.S. Eliot, T.E. Lawrence, and Leonard Woolf all participated in Forster's early translation project. Forster ultimately succeeded in launching Cavafy's reputation in the English-speaking world, setting an important precedent for his present global literary fame. The volume includes all extant letters, the earliest Cavafy translations by George Valassopoulos (incorporating Cavafy's own authorial emendations), poems by E.M.

Irish Poets and Modern Greece

Irish Poets and Modern Greece PDF Author: Joanna Kruczkowska
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319581694
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
This book explores the perception of modern Greek landscape and poetry in the writings of Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon. Delving into travel writing, ecocriticism, translation and allusion, it offers a fresh comparative link between Greek modernity and Irish poetry that counterbalances the preeminence of Greek antiquity in existing criticism. The first section, devoted to travel and landscape, examines Mahon’s modern perception of the Aegean, inspired by his travels to the Cyclades between 1974 and 1997, as well as Heaney’s philhellenic relationship with mainland Greece between 1995 and 2004. The second section offers a close analysis of their C. P. Cavafy translations, and compares George Seferis’ original texts with their creative rendition in the writings of the Irish poets. The book will appeal to readers of poetry as well as those interested in the interactions between Ireland and Greece, two countries at the extreme points of Europe, in times of crisis.

Reframing Decadence

Reframing Decadence PDF Author: Peter Jeffreys
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501701258
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
During his sojourn in England during the 1870s, a young Cavafy found himself enthralled by the aesthetic movement of cosmopolitan London. It was during these years that he encountered the canvases and personalities of Pre-Raphaelite painters, including Burne-Jones and Whistler, as well as works of aesthetic writers who were effecting a revolution in British literary culture and channeling influences from France that would gradually coalesce into an international decadent movement. In Reframing Decadence, Peter Jeffreys returns us to this critical period of Cavafy’s life, showing the poet’s creative indebtedness to British and French avant-garde aesthetes whose collective impact on his poetry proved to be profound. In the process, Jeffreys offers a critical reappraisal of Cavafy’s relation to Victorian aestheticism and French literary decadence. Foremost among the tropes of decadence that captivated Cavafy were the decline of imperial Rome, the rise of Christianity, and the lingering twilight of Byzantium. The influence of Walter Pater on Cavafy’s view of classical and late-antique history was immense, inflected as it was with an unapologetic homoerotic aesthetic that Cavafy would adopt as his own, making Pater’s imaginary portraits an important touchstone for his own historicizing poetry. Cavafy would move beyond Pater to explore a more openly homoerotic sensuality but he never quite abandoned this rich Victorian legacy, one that contributed greatly to his emergence as a global poet. Jeffreys concludes by considering Cavafy’s current popularity as a gay poet and his curious relation to kitsch as manifest in his ongoing popularity via translation and visual media.

Specters

Specters PDF Author: Radwa Ashour
Publisher: Interlink Books
ISBN: 9781566568326
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Winner of the Cairo International Book Fair Prize. Specters tells the story of Radwa and Shagar, two women born the same day. The narrative alternates between their childhoods, their work lives (one a professor of literature and the other of history), their married and unmarried lives, and their respective books. With her novel’s structure, Ashour pays tribute to the Arab qareen (double or companion, and sometimes demon) and the ancient Egyptian ka (the spirit that is born with and accompanies an individual through life and beyond).

Barbarism Revisited

Barbarism Revisited PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004309276
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
Barbarism revisited revisits well-known and obscure chapters in the genealogy of barbarism from Greek antiquity to the present. Through contemporary interdisciplinary perspectives, it recasts the conceptual history of barbarism as a task for literary scholars, art historians, and cultural analysts.

Collected Poems

Collected Poems PDF Author: Constantine Cavafy
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0375400966
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 625

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Book Description
Presents a complete collection of the modern Greek poet's work, including his unfinished poems, which explores themes of longing and loneliness, fate and loss, memory and identity, throughout the history of Greek civilization.