Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Comparative Literature

Why did Greek tragedy and "the tragic" come to be seen as essential to conceptions of modernity? And how has this belief affected modern understandings of Greek drama? In Genealogy of the Tragic, Joshua Billings answers these and related questions by tracing the emergence of the modern theory of the tragic, which was first developed around 1800 by thinkers associated with German Idealism. The book argues that the idea of the tragic arose in response to a new consciousness of history in the late eighteenth century, which spurred theorists to see Greek tragedy as both a unique,...

By way of a case study of one of the oldest French book agencies, Agence Hoffman, this book analyzes the role played by French literary agents in the importation of US fiction and literature into France in the years following World War II. It sheds light on the material conditions of the circulation of texts across the Atlantic between 1944 and 1955, exploring the fine mechanisms of agents' negotiations which allowed texts, and ideas, to cross borders. While providing comparative insights into the history of publishing in France and in the United States in the immediate aftermath of the...

Sephardic women's writings present invaluable information about the marginalization and silencing of the Jewish experience in France and North Africa. These stories offer testaments of a generally excluded human experience that belongs in the diverse and hybrid collection of post-colonial stories of displaced peoples. Once their narratives are located and appreciated for their literary and historical value, it becomes clear that they need to be incorporated into a larger movement within the Jewish historical and cultural trajectory. These stories by seven different women afford an...

Zwischen Literatur und Naturwissenschaft finden im 18. Jh. vielfaltige Interaktionen statt: Literarische Texte verarbeiten wissenschaftliche Themen; wissenschaftliche Diskurse verwenden literarische Techniken. Der Sammelband widmet sich den Austauschprozessen zwischen den Disziplinen. Wissensgeschichtliche Paradigmen und Ubergange (etwa in den Bereichen der Mechanik, Geographie, Botanik, Chemie/Alchemie, Kosmologie) stehen ebenso im Fokus wie Schreibweisen und Vermittlungsformen (Musenalmanache, Lehrgedichte, Lexika etc.). In exemplarischen Fallstudien werden wissenschaftliche Traktate,...

Acts of Logos examines the 19th-century foundations of St. Petersburg's famous literary heritage, with a focus on the unifying principle of material animation. Ever since Pushkin's 1833 poem The Bronze Horseman, the city has provided a literary space in which inanimate things (noses, playing cards, overcoats) spring to life. Scollins's book addresses this issue of animacy by analyzing the powerful function of language in the city's literature, from its mythic origins--in which the tsar Peter appears as a God-like creator, calling his city forth from nothing--to the...

During his lifetime Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) was among the most widely read German-language writers in the world. Always controversial, he fell into critical disfavor as writers and critics in a devastated postwar Europe attacked the poor literary quality of his works and excoriated his apolitical fiction as naive Habsburg nostalgia. Yet in other parts of the world, Zweig's works have enjoyed continued admiration and popularity, even canonical status.

China's Stefan Zweig unveils the extraordinary success of Zweig's novellas in China, where he has been read in an...