Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> European - General

"This book is about the obsessive strategies people use to keep the arbitrary out of their lives; it is about the fanaticism and intolerance linked to their ideas of perfection and permanence. . . . Those readers who have brushed against the dangers of the idee fixe, who have come close to surrendering to something or someone diabolically seductive or coercive, will recognize in these characters their own encounter with a dangerously systematized world." From the introduction.

Monomania explores the cultural prominence of the idee fixe in Western Europe during the nineteenth and...

Includes the first complete English translation of Jacques Derrida's book-length essay, -Shibboleth for Paul Celan.-

From Odysseus to Aeneas, from Beowulf to King Arthur, from the Mahabharata to the Ossetian -Nart- tales, epic heroes and their stories have symbolized the power of the human imagination. Drawing on diverse disciplines including classics, anthropology, psychology, and literary studies, this product of twenty years' scholarship provides a detailed typology of the hero in Western myth: birth, parentage, familial ties, sexuality, character, deeds, death, and afterlife. Dean A. Miller examines the place of the hero in the physical world (wilderness, castle, prison cell) and in society...

Thomas Pfau reinterprets the evolution of British and German Romanticism as a progress through three successive dominant moods, each manifested in the "voice" of an historical moment. Drawing on a multifaceted philosophical tradition ranging from Kant to Hegel to Heidegger--incorporating as well the psychosocial analyses of Freud, Benjamin, and Adorno--Pfau develops a new understanding of the Romantic writer's voice as the formal encryption of a complex cultural condition.

Pfau focuses on three specific paradigms of emotive experience: paranoia, trauma, and melancholy. Along the...

Aesthetic experience was problematic for Enlightenment authors. Arguing against the commonly held view that aesthetics in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was defined by the professionalization of criticism and the disinterested contemplation and evaluation of the work of art in isolation, David Marshall seeks to understand how and why aesthetic experience in fact often generated tremendous emotion and tension. Focusing on stories about art told in literary, critical, and philosophical writings, in which art is represented as both powerful and disconcerting, he demonstrates...

As an academic discipline built upon Enlightenment thought and a cosmopolitan worldview--not grounded in the literary tradition of any single language or nation--comparative literature has benefited from regular reexamination of its basic principles and practices. The American Comparative Literature Association 1993 report on the state of the discipline, prepared under the leadership of Charles Bernheimer, focused on the influence of multiculturalism as a concept transforming literary and cultural studies. That report and the vigorous responses it generated, published together as...

Between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, Venice transformed itself from a struggling merchant commune to a powerful maritime empire that would shape events in the Mediterranean for the next four hundred years. In this magisterial new book on medieval Venice, Thomas F. Madden traces the city-state's extraordinary rise through the life of Enrico Dandolo (c. 1107-1205), who ruled Venice as doge from 1192 until his death. The scion of a prosperous merchant family deeply involved in politics, religion, and diplomacy, Dandolo led Venice's forces during the disastrous Fourth Crusade...

Body has been one of the main preoccupations of current Renaissance historiography and current critical theory. Both the literary representation of the body and the construction of the material body in Renaissance anatomical and medical discourses have been used to explore the dynamics of early modern sexuality, gender, and society. Yet the influence of Ovid's texts on the construction of the Renaissance discourses of gender, sexuality, and subjectivity has not been fully explored.

This collection of original essays uses contemporary theory to examine Renaissance writers' reworking...

The cultural forms often referred to as 'baroque' are the most spectacular expressions of early modern Europe's effort to mediate between knowledge and power at a time when political authority was being centralized, the authority of religion undermined by the division of Christianity, and science and poetry were seen increasingly as rival forms of intellectual authority. Culture and Authority in the Baroque explores the baroque across a wide range of disciplines, from poetics to politics, to the rituals of musical, dramatic, and religious performance.

The essays in this collection...

Authorial studies, or 'career criticism' is a new and distinctive branch of interpretive methodology that explores various paths of European careers, particularly literary careers. In this first book-length study in the field various specialists from Italian, French, English, and Spanish studies collectively discuss literary careers spanning from classical antiquity through the Renaissance. They argue that the idea of a literary career evolves slowly, derives centrally from Virgil, and that the periodization from classical, medieval and Renaissance culture helps to elucidate the details of...

Prevalent but long-neglected genres such as dialogue have recently been attracting attention in Renaissance studies. In view of the pervasive and varied nature of this genre's use in the European Renaissance, it has become crucial to widen the perspective so as to take into account more diverse approaches to this hybrid form. For this reason, Dorothea Heitsch and Jean-Fran?ois Vall?e have assembled a broad collection of essays by international scholars that presents comparative, interdisciplinary, and theoretical inquiry into this neglected area.

The contributors - who bring with...

The religious context of Northrop Frye's criticism is virtually inexhaustible in its reach and implication. Frye and the Word draws together leading scholars in the fields of literary studies and hermeneutics, religious studies, and philosophy to construe and debate the late thought and writings of Northrop Frye in their spiritual dimension. The volume provides the first full account and evaluation of the legacy of Frye's works on the Bible and literature, in relation to Frye's work as a whole and to current trends in literary criticism and religious studies.

Frye's trilogy,...