Building a National Literature boldly takes issue with traditional literary criticism for its failure to explain how literature as a body is created and shaped by institutional forces. Peter Uwe Hohendahl approaches literary history by focusing on the material and ideological structures that determine the canonical status of writers and works. He examines important elements in the making of a national literature, including the political and literary public sphere, the theory and practice of literary criticism, and the emergence of academic criticism as literary history. Hohendahl considers such key aspects of the process in Germany as the rise of liberalism and nationalism, the delineation of the borders of German literature, the idea of its history, the understanding of its cultural function, and the notion of a canon of major and minor authors.
The relationship between literature & the state is examined in this discussion of Francophone African literature. Dominic Thomas considers the case of the Congo, where the recent transition to democracy was in part inspired by the works of Sony Labou Tansi, Henri Lopes, & Emmanuel Dongala among others.
In Stepbrothers Janneke Weijermars offers a history of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands (1815-1830) – today comprising Belgium, The Netherlands and Luxembourg, from a literary perspective.
In the mid-1880s, the Realist author and Anglophile Theodor Fontane observed:nowhere is so much translation done as in Germany. Characterizing Germany as a special locus of literary translation and reception, Fontane contests a prejudice which has since become a significant problem for nineteenth-century German studies, namely the frequent assessment of the epoch as narrowly national. The present collection of essays by thirteen eminent literary scholars and historians is intended to correct this prejudice: it demonstrates that literary life and production in the nineteenth century were governed by complex networks of intercultural exchange, influence and translation, and it does justice to this complexity through its range of complementary critical approaches, focussing on Fontane, Anglo-German relations, translation, and European reception. In so doing, this book not only offers a nuanced appreciation of literary production and reception in the nineteenth century, but also demonstrates the continued relevance of that period for Germanists today.
Apples and Ashes offers the first literary history of the Civil War South. The product of extensive archival research, it tells an expansive story about a nation struggling to write itself into existence. Confederate literature was in intimate conversation with other contemporary literary cultures, especially those of the United States and Britain. Thus, Coleman Hutchison argues, it has profound implications for our understanding of American literary nationalism and the relationship between literature and nationalism more broadly. Apples and Ashes is organized by genre, with each chapter using a single text or a small set of texts to limn a broader aspect of Confederate literary culture. Hutchison discusses an understudied and diverse archive of literary texts including the literary criticism of Edgar Allan Poe; southern responses to Uncle Tom's Cabin; the novels of Augusta Jane Evans; Confederate popular poetry; the de facto Confederate national anthem, “Dixie”; and several postwar southern memoirs. In addition to emphasizing the centrality of slavery to the Confederate literary imagination, the book also considers a series of novel topics: the reprinting of European novels in the Confederate South, including Charles Dickens's Great Expectations and Victor Hugo's Les Misérables; Confederate propaganda in Europe; and postwar Confederate emigration to Latin America. In discussing literary criticism, fiction, poetry, popular song, and memoir, Apples and Ashes reminds us of Confederate literature's once-great expectations. Before their defeat and abjection—before apples turned to ashes in their mouths—many Confederates thought they were in the process of creating a nation and a national literature that would endure.
This book attempts for the first time a comparative literary history of Germany and the USA in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its material does not come from the familiar overlaps of individual German and American writers, but from the work of the literary historians of the two countries after 1815, when American intellectuals took Germany as a model for their project to create an American national literature. The first part of the book examines fundamental structural affinities between the two literary histories and the common problems these caused, especially in questions of canon, realism, aesthetics and in the marginalization of popular and women's writing. In the second part, significant figures whose work straddle the two literatures – from Sealsfield and Melville, Whitman and Thomas Mann to Nietzsche, Emerson and Bellow – are discussed in detail, and the arguments of the first part are shown in their relevance to understanding major writers. This book is not merely comparative in scope: it shows that only international comparison can explain the course of American literary history in the nineteenth and twentieth century. As recent developments in American Studies explore the multi-cultural and 'hybrid' nature of the American tradition, this book offers evidence of the dependencies which linked American and German national literary history.
For the last several decades, many types of important discoveries, innovations, and debates in the field of Korean literature have appeared in our pages, along with the writings of representative literary critics and scholars, both in Korea and abroad. This volume, Korean Literature: Its Classical Heritage and Modern Breakthroughs, consists of 24 contributions that are still considered valuable in the field as academic articles or critical essays, all having appeared in the Korea Journal over the past 40 years
The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Politics presents the first comprehensive, state of the art overview of the multiple ways in which ‘politics’ and ‘translation’ interact. Divided into four sections with thirty-three chapters written by a roster of international scholars, this handbook covers the translation of political ideas, the effects of political structures on translation and interpreting, the politics of translation and an array of case studies that range from the Classical Mediterranean to contemporary China. Considering established topics such as censorship, gender, translation under fascism, translators and interpreters at war, as well as emerging topics such as translation and development, the politics of localization, translation and interpreting in democratic movements, and the politics of translating popular music, the handbook offers a global and interdisciplinary introduction to the intersections between translation and interpreting studies and politics. With a substantial introduction and extensive bibliographies, this handbook is an indispensable resource for students and researchers of translation theory, politics and related areas.
