Timothy Mathews examines work by a range of writers and painters working in France in the twentieth century. This book engages with canonical figures--Guillaume Apollinaire, Marguerite Duras and Jean Genet, Roland Barthes, Pablo Picasso and Rene Magritte--as well as more neglected individuals including Robert Desnos and Jean Fautrier. Integrating theoretical and material approaches to reading and viewing, Mathews engages with the distinctive features of different literary genres and different types of painting to develop an original history of artistic ambition in twentieth-century France.

Timothy Mathews examines work by a range of writers and painters working in France in the twentieth century. This book engages with canonical figures--Guillaume Apollinaire, Marguerite Duras and Jean Genet, Roland Barthes, Pablo Picasso and Rene Magritte--as well as more neglected individuals including Robert Desnos and Jean Fautrier. Integrating theoretical and material approaches to reading and viewing, Mathews engages with the distinctive features of different literary genres and different types of painting to develop an original history of artistic ambition in twentieth-century France.

Tradition, Trauma, Translation is concerned with how Classic texts - mainly Greek and Latin but also Arabic and Portuguese - become present in later cultures and how they resonate in the modern. A distinguished international team of contributors and responders examine the topic in different ways. Some discuss singular encounters with the Classic - those of Heaney, Pope, Fellini, Freud, Ibn Qutayba, Cavafy and others - and show how translations engage with the affective impact of texts over time and space. Poet-translator contributors draw on their own experience here. Others offer images of...

This collection of essays takes on two of the most pressing questions that face the discipline of Comparative Literature today: "Why compare?" and "Where do we go from here?." At a difficult economic time, when universities all over the world once again have to justify the social as well as academic value of their work, it is crucial that we consider the function of comparison itself in reaching across disciplinary and cultural boundaries. The essays written for this book are by researchers from all over the world, and range in topic from the problem of translating biblical Hebrew to modern...