Literature

As a very young man, one of the most celebrated English authors of the eighteenth century translated a tome about Ethiopia. This experience permanently marked Samuel Johnson, leaving traces of the African discourse he encountered in that text in his drama Irene;several of his short stories; and his most famous fiction, Rasselas. This book provides a much needed perspective in comparative literature and postcolonial studies on the power of the discourse of the other to infuse European texts. This book illuminates how the Western literary canon is globally produced by developing the powerful metaphor of spirit possession to posit some texts in the European canon as energumens, texts that are spoken through. The model of discursive possession offers a new way of theorizing transcultural intertextuality, in particular how Europe’s others have co-constituted European representations. Through close readings of primary and secondary sources in English, French, Portuguese, and Gəʿəz, the book challenges conventional wisdom on Johnson’s work, from the inspiration for the name Rasselas and the nature of Johnson’s religious beliefs to what makes Rasselas so strange.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, many in Britain believed their nation to be a dominant world power that its former colony, the United States, could only hope to emulate. Yet by the interwar years, the United States seemed to some to embody a different type of global eminence, one based not only on political and economic stature but also on new forms of mass culture like jazz and the Hollywood film. Britain’s fraught transition from formidable empire to victim of Americanization is rarely discussed by literary scholars. However, the dawn of the “American century” is the period of literary modernism and, this book argues, the signs of Americanization—from jazz records to Ford motorcars to Hollywood films—helped to establish the categories of elite and mass culture that still inspire debate in modernist studies. This book thus brings together two major areas of modernist scholarship, the study of nation and empire and the study of mass culture, by suggesting that Britain was reacting to a new type of empire, the American entertainment empire, in its struggles to redefine its national culture between the wars. At the same time, British anxieties about American influence contributed to conceptions of Britain’s imperial scope, and what it meant to have or be an empire. Through its treatment of a wide range of authors and cultural phenomena, the book explores how Britain reinvented itself in relation to its ideas of America, and how Britain’s literary modernism developed and changed through this reinvention.

This book contributes to the study of South African literature, offering readings of writers such as Coetzee, Gordimer, Fugard, Tlali, and Mda. Focusing on the relationship between place, subjectivity, and literary form, the study examines our understanding of apartheid as a geographical form of control, and of its imagined and actual transformation.

This book maintains that the poetic texts examined here constitute an active process of composing history; they are not simply historicized. They give name to the nation and compose of a historical narrative for its denizens. They are literary artifacts, bearing the vestiges of the past while provoking new interpretations. As visionaries and composers of New World history, Frances Harper, Cristina Ayala and Auta de Souza are a part of a larger process of conceptualizing freedom in the New World. Frances Harper’s trans-hemispheric poetic gestures delimit the scope of this project. By exemplifying the kind of readings that can evolve from following one poet’s trans-hemispheric allusions and articulate the fundamentally transnational aspect of African American literature in the United States, and inspire more re-evaluations of trans-hemispheric literary currents across national boundaries in afrodescendente literatures. The spectre of race and its particular performances of gender identities among afrodescendente peoples in the New World, informs these poetics but does not conform them to a monolithic body of national literature. Afrodescendente poetry in the Americas highlights the power of words to imagine new histories and new forms of identity. In their interplay, the poems tell us certain truths about how the concept of freedom can evolve. They say: “Freedom” cannot be understood as a byproduct of slavery’s abolition. They say: Freedom is a poetic process. They say: Freedom cannot just be legislated, it has to be written.

Pairing the two concepts of diaspora and modernism, Allison Schachter formulates a novel approach to modernist studies and diasporic cultural production. Diasporic Modernisms illuminates the formal and historical aspects of displaced Jewish writers—including S. Y. Abramovitsh, Yosef Chaim Brenner, Dovid Bergelson, Leah Goldberg, Gabreil Preil, and Kadia Molodowsky—who grappled with statelessness and the uncertain status of Yiddish and Hebrew. Schachter examines how the relationships between migrant writers and dispersed readers were registered in the innovative practices of modernist prose fiction, capturing the aesthetic conditioned by diaspora, spanning from 1894 to 1974. This literary culture developed in the wake of Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires’ decline, when Jewish writers and readers immigrated to new centers of modern Jewish culture, including Odessa, Jerusalem, Berlin, Tel Aviv, and New York. Offering the first comparative literary history of Hebrew and Yiddish modernist prose, Diasporic Modernisms argues that these two literary histories can no longer be separated by nationalist and monolingual histories. Instead, the book illuminates how these two literary languages continue to animate each other, even after the creation of a Jewish state, with Hebrew as its national language.

This book investigates psychological and ethical thought in 17th-century France, emphasizing both continuities and discontinuities with ancient and medieval thought. The ancient ethical vision that man achieves fulfilment by living his life according to reason — the highest element of his nature — survives even in Descartes’s thought. However, the revival of Augustinian theology, which focuses on the contradictions and disorders of human desires and aspirations, brings that vision into question. Human beings are increasingly seen as motivated by self-love: they are driven by the desire for their own advantage and take a narcissistic delight in their own image. Moral and religious writers emphasize the traditional imperative of self-knowledge, but in such a way as to suggest the difficulties of knowing oneself. Operating with the Cartesian distinction between mind and body, they emphasize the imperceptible influence of bodily processes on our thoughts and attitudes. They analyse human beings’ ignorance (due to self-love) of their own motives and qualities, and the illusions under which they live their lives. Their critique of human behaviour is no less searching than that of writers who have broken with traditional religious morality, such as Hobbes and Spinoza. The abstract and general analyses of philosophers and theologians (Descartes, Jansenius, Malebranche) are studied alongside the less systematic and more concrete investigations of writers like Montaigne and La Rochefoucauld, as well as the theatre of Corneille, Molière, and Racine.

This book studies in English of Flaubert's least well‐known masterpiece, the final version of his Tentation de saint Antoine (1874). Thanks to Foucault, the work has the reputation of being an arcane and erudite ‘fantastic library’ or, thanks to genetic criticism, of being a ‘narrative’ of Flaubert's personal aesthetic (l'oeuvre de toute [s]a vie’). By presuming instead no necessary knowledge to read the text, its versions or its intertexts, this book sets out to offer new readings of the seven tableaux which comprise it, and new ways of interpreting the work as a whole. By arguing that Flaubert was imagining his own epoch through the eyes of a visionary saint in the 4th‐century AD, the dialogues between religion and science that are the dynamic of the work (and the two parts of this study) are elucidated for the first time. Moreover, by also arguing for the meticulous accuracy and imaginative representations of the science of the work, this book proposes in the ‘remapping’ analogy of its title that Flaubert's Tentation is a paradigm of 19th‐century French, and indeed European, ‘literary science’. For 19th‐century French and Flaubert specialists, as well as for curious new readers of the Tentation, this book thus challenges received critical wisdom on a number of fronts. It is through his unlikely protagonist‐visionary, Antoine, that Flaubert's ‘realism’, ‘anti‐clericalism’, and ‘orientalism’ can be given new airings. Through the religious and scientific dialogues of Flaubert's 1874 text this book argues that his ‘temptation’ was to write a vita of his times.

Challenging comparative methodologies based on models of literary influence, Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey argues that the emergence of modern Turkish literature cannot be understood independently of a discourse of phonocentrism that first matured in the mid-nineteenth century, with the unprecedented intensification of print and translational practices in Ottoman Turkey. While mid-nineteenth century proposals to simplify Ottoman Turkish and to reform its orthography were generally propelled by desire to overcome the diglossia of Ottoman Turkish, the discourse of phonocentrism took an explicitly nationalist turn by the turn of the twentieth century, aiming for the establishment of an impossibly self-same or self-identical Turkish identity. Of particular significance are the Turkish alphabet reform of 1928, which replaced Perso-Arabic lettering with Latin phonetic orthography, and the purging during the 1930s of Arabic and Persian loan words. In readings of literary works by Recâizade Ekrem, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Peyami Safa, and Nâzım Hikmet, Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey suggests that the modern literary archive, profoundly self-conscious of its own conditions of possibility, continuously dramatizes and exposes the limits of historically new writing practices. Where Eurocentrist critical discourse idealizes the Turkish language reforms as the culmination of a successful will to rational modernity, the literary texts analyzed in this book offer an alternative critical narrative: one of extreme self-surgery and profound self-alienation. Staging an alternative, non-identarian relation to the Turkish “mother tongue,” these literary works point to the possibility of an open communicability, cognizant of difference.

Ideographic Modernism offers a critical account of the ideograph (Chinese writing as imagined in the West) as a modernist invention. Rather than focusing on the accuracy of this ideograph as a kind of representation of China (a focus that would yield predictable results), Ideographic Modernism reconstructs the specific history of the ideograph in order to explore the question of representation in more fundamental ways, ways that reflect the diversity and complexity of literary modernism itself. On one level, the book makes an argument about the meaning and function of the ideograph during the modernist period, namely that this imagined Chinese writing was a complex response to the various writings of such technological media as the photo-graph, the phono-graph, the cinemato-graph, and the tele-graph. Through analyses of works by Claudel, Pound, Kafka, Benjamin, Segalen, and Valéry, among others, Ideographic Modernism traces the interweavings of Western modernity’s ethnographic and technological imaginaries, in which the cultural effects of technological media assumed “Chinese” forms, even as traditional representations of “the Orient” lived on in modernist-era responses to media. On another level, the book makes a methodological argument, demonstrating new ways of recovering the generally overlooked presence of China in the text of Western modernism. In addition to being its subject matter, then, ideographic modernism is also the book’s method: a polemically “literal” way of reading that calls for reevaluations both of how modernist literature related to its historical contexts and of the ways in which we can understand that relationship today.

Arab immigrants began to arrive in the United States in the late-nineteenth century and in Britain after World War Two. Those immigrants have produced a vast literature that remains relatively unknown outside of specialist circles. Like other ethnic literatures, Arab-American and Arab-British writing treats a variety of themes such as the immigrant experience, the lives of minorities, cultural misconceptions, and stereotypes. In addition to that, Arab immigrant writing also reveals unique perspectives on complex issues that continue to shape our world today, such as inter-faith relations, the tangled politics of the Middle East, the role played first by the British empire then by the United States in the region, the representations of Arabs and Arab culture in British and American societies, and the status of Muslim minorities there. Although those issues have acquired an unprecedented urgency in the post-9/11 period, they have preoccupied Arab-American and Arab-British writers since the early days of the twentieth century. While this book is not a comprehensive literary history, it offers a critical reading of that tradition from its inception to the present. Drawing upon postcolonial, translation, and minority discourse theory, Immigrant Narratives investigates how key novelists and autobiographers have described their immigrant experiences, and in so doing acted as mediators and interpreters between cultures, and how they have forged new identities in their adopted countries.