Richly illustrated study drawing on art, literature and science to explore Victorian attitudes towards sight.

Examines interrelated topics in Medieval and Renaissance Latin literature: the status of women as writers, the status of women as rhetorical figures, and the status of women in society from the fifth to the early seventeenth century.

This volume brings together modernity as a Western project. From the early, via the classic and high to the late modern period, each chapter reveals a marked interdisciplinary approach to the various aspects of this century-old process.

Das Heilige hat Konjunktur: Im Zuge des religious turn der Kulturwissenschaften erscheint es nicht mehr als Gegensatz zu einer säkularisierten Moderne, sondern als eines ihrer konstitutiven Momente. Die Beiträge dieses Bandes untersuchen Denkfiguren des Sakralen im 20. Jahrhundert - von Nietzsches Diagnose des ”Todes Gottes“ über geschichtsphilosophische Aneignungen jüdisch-christlicher Glaubensinhalte bis hin zu sprachphilosophischen Reflexionen über das Heilige. Sie arbeiten heraus, wie sich die ästhetische Moderne in Auseinandersetzung mit dem Traditionsbestand sakraler Erfahrungen bildet.

In Literature, Life, and Modernity Richard Eldridge focuses on the question of a reader's or a viewer's response to a literary or dramatic work in a specific historical epoch ("modernity"). That is, in contrast with many other philosophical approaches to literature, he avoids fixing attention on any putative doctrinal (moral or political or diagnostic) claims in a literary work. Thereby, and in many other admirable ways, he avoids the danger of treating literature as philosophy manqué, concedes the distinctness of literary (...) experience, and only then asks about the significance of this experience. (In this way his approach is reminiscent to some extent of Schiller's; not bad company to be keeping.) This all amounts to a philosophy of literature of sorts,[1] but avoids a forced "philosophy in literature" or "literature as philosophy" treatment. There are themes and ideas at stake of course, but for distinct historical reasons, Eldridge also thinks of what he generally calls "modern" literature as characterized precisely by the absence of any thematic resolution, and so by a kind of play of possibilities, unsettledness, even homelessness. But, he argues, this is a play of ambiguity that. (shrink)

Art versus nature, the literary work and the author, the literary work and the reader, structure and style, and the purpose of literature are the main subjects treated in a study of eight leading writers of modern Japan.

Modern literature has always been obsessed by music. It cannot seem to think about itself without obsessing about music. And music has returned the favour. The Routledge Companion to Music and Modern Literature addresses this relationship as a significant contribution to the burgeoning field of word and music studies. The 37 chapters within consider the partnership through four lenses-the universal, opera and literature, musical and literary forms, and popular music and literature-and touch upon diverse and pertinent themes for (...) our modern times, ranging from misogyny to queerness, racial inequality to the claimed universality of whiteness. This Companion therefore offers an essential resource for all who try to decode the musico-literary exchange. (shrink)

Presents an original theoretical system to explain and contrast modernism and postmodernism.

A single, fairly simple proposition lies at the heart of the present contribution, viz. that the development of early-modern literature on international law should be regarded as a specific form of the early usus modernus during the second half of the sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth century.In Section 1 that general proposition and some of its ramifications will receive some further explanation. First, the main characteristics of usus modernus will be set out, and, subsequently, their (...) applicability to early-modern literature on international law will be outlined. In addition, the question should be raised, what purpose the characterisation of that literature as part of the more general usus modernus may serve. These considerations may inevitably appear somewhat abstract. Section 2 will therefore aim to provide a particular illustration, based on two contemporary works on the law of naval warfare, viz. A. Gentili's Hispanicae Advocationis Libri Duo and H. Grotius' De jure praedae. (shrink)

Introduction -- The muse of paralysis -- Horizon of conquest: Eugene Fromentin's Algerian narratives -- Slow progress: Jean Paulhan and Madagascar -- Frustration: Michel Leiris -- Atopia: Roland Barthes -- The wake of Ulysses.

Focusing on the sixteenth-century Oriya Lakshmi Purana by Balaram Das, this essay shows how distinctly “modern” values are being explored and elaborated in this religious poem. Das’s narrative develops the notion of a self-critical individuality that is distinct from—rather than merely embedded in—the dominant social structure and its patriarchal and caste-based value system. The LP provides a feminist and anticaste critique of patriarchal behavior and defends the value of the work done by women and others who are socially marginalized. (...) This literary-critical analysis is a contribution to contemporary scholarship on “alternative” or “precolonial” modernities, especially in the Indian context. (shrink)

How does modern writing in French grapple with the present absence and absent presence of lost loved ones? How might it challenge and critique the relegation of certain deaths to the realm of the unmournable? What might this reveal about the role of the literary in the French and francophone world and shifting conceptions of the nation state? Essays from the Revolution to the present day explore these questions from a variety of perspectives, bringing out the ways in which (...) mourning blurs the boundaries between the personal and the historical, the aesthetic and the ethical, the self and the other, and ultimately reasserting its truly critical resonance as a concept. (shrink)

When Giambattista Vico wrote and rewrote the Scienza Nuova between 1725 and 1744, he all but completely occluded his own discipline – rhetoric. Professor of Latin Eloquence at the University of Nap...

On the Horizon of World Literature compares literary texts from asynchronous periods of incipient literary modernity in different parts of the world: Romantic England and Republican China. These moments were oriented alike by "world literature" as a discursive framework of classifications that connected and re-organized local articulations of literary histories and literary modernities. World literature thus provided-and continues to provide-a condition of possibility for conversation between cultures as well as for their mutual provincialization. The book offers readings of a selection (...) of literary forms that serve also as textual sites for the enactment of new socio-political forms of life. The literary manifesto, the tale collection, the familiar essay, and the domestic novel function as testing grounds for questions of both literary-aesthetic and socio-political importance: What does it mean to attain a voice? What is a common reader? How does one dwell in the ordinary? What is a woman? In different languages and activating heterogeneous literary and philosophical traditions, works by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lu Xun, Charles and Mary Lamb, Lin Shu, Zhou Zuoren, Jane Austen, and Eileen Chang explore the far-from-settled problem of what it means to be modern in different lifeworlds. Sun's book brings to light the disciplinary-historical impact world literature has had in shaping literary traditions and practices around the world. The book renews the practice of close reading by offering the model of a deprovincialized close reading loosened from confinement within monocultural hermeneutic circles. By means of its own focus on England and China, the book provides methods useful for comparatists working between other Western and non-Western languages. It establishes the critical significance of Romanticism for the discipline of literary studies and opens up new paths of research in global Romanticism and global nineteenth-century studies. And it offers a new approach to analyzing the cosmopolitan character of the literary and cultural transformations of early twentieth-century China. (shrink)

Figuren des Akrobatischen sind in der Literatur der Moderne omnipräsent. Zwischen 1850 und 1925 werden sie zum Träger poetischer, philosophischer und politischer Visionen der Zeit. Um die lange Jahrhundertwende bricht sich in Europa eine überwältigende Faszination für Zirkus und Varieté Bahn: Das Artistenmilieu wird motivischer Stichwortgeber der Künste, Projektionsfläche antibürgerlicher Imaginationen und gesellschaftsutopischer Gegenerzählungen. Im Kontext dieses Popularitätshochs gerät das akrobatische Vermögen den literarischen Taktgebern der Zeit zum Träger einer vielgestaltigen Semantik der Überschreitung: Flaubert erklärt sich zum Artisten, Kafka zum (...) Kunstreiter, Baudelaire fordert akrobatische Disziplin, Nietzsche seiltänzerische Kühnheit. Als Grenzgänger, der scheinbar mühelos die Schwerkraft überwindet und unter Einsatz des Lebens über dem Abgrund balanciert, gilt der Akrobat noch den Avantgarden als programmatisches Symbol für ein neues Subjektverständnis im Spannungsfeld von spielerischer Leichtigkeit und tödlichem Ernst, von Disziplin und Überwältigung, von Möglichkeit und Unmöglichkeit. Anna Luhn untersucht die Konzeptualisierungen des Akrobatischen im literarischen Diskursraum der Moderne erstmals in ihren historischen Voraussetzungen, ästhetischen Effekten und utopischen Fluchtpunkten. (shrink)

Nach Euklid: Raumgeschichten in Philosophie, Wissenschaft und Literatur der Moderne. Dieser Band rekonstruiert Raumentwürfe aus der Philosophie Husserls und Cassirers, der Gestaltpsychologie, der Kunstgeschichte Riegls und Einsteins, schließlich Rilkes und Musils literarische Räume. Um 1900 verliert die Geometrie ihre Anschaulichkeit: Mehrdimensionale und nicht-euklidische Räume lassen sich nicht mehr vor Augen führen. Welchen Effekt hat dieser epistemologische Bruch auf jene Disziplinen, für die bis dahin Euklids Geometrie als Modell eines exakten und zugleich anschaulichen Wissens galt? Wie verändern sich die Raumkonzepte in (...) Philosophie, Wissenschaft und Literatur, wenn sich ihre Weltbilder nicht mehr in einem dreidimensionalen, kartesischen Gehäuse unterbringen lassen? (shrink)