On Adam Mickiewicz's theory of romanticism

Phantom Time: Literary History at the Edge of the Nation

II WANT TO CONSIDER THE IDEA OF THE CULTURAL ENCOUNTER between English and other languages, languages of others, but at same time also to think about English as a language of cultural encounter, an idea which connects to Ngugi wa Thiong'o's argument that translation is the language of languages.1 Related to this are ways in which English literature has for some time been marked even in categories used to define it by other cultures: world literatures in English, anglophone, postcolonial, Commonwealth literature(s). All these ways of describing literatures in English written outside Britain have particular implications, but general assumption, as with 'English literature', is that they are written, or read, in English.A simple example of how this cashes out in practice would be Conference of Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (ACLALS). English is official language of Commonwealth, which hosts, in addition to ACLALS, organizations such as English Speaking Union, whose formation pre-dates Commonwealth itself. Any country that wishes to be a member of Commonwealth - even those members such as Mozambique, which have no historical links to British Empire - is required to accept rule that English language is means of Commonwealth communication. ACLALS conferences rarely infringe this rule: in my experience, even in India, all papers are given in English. It is noticeable, on other hand, that name of organization 'the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies' deliberately avoids specifying English as official language which ACLALS studies. I cannot find any information on any of many Commonwealth websites about how many languages are spoken in its fifty-three countries by its nearly two billion citizens, about thirty percent of world's population. However, website 'ethnologue' claims that there are 6,909 living languages in world, so with thirty percent of world's population, we might guess that on a proportional basis Commonwealth hosts around two thousand languages.2The Commonwealth Writer's Prize, by contrast, considers books in only one of them: i.e. books written in English, official language of Commonwealth. To get a prize, you have to write in English, to be a producer of 'English' literature in some sense. But what exactly, aspiring writers might ask, is English of English literature? In order to answer this question, I thought I would start at an obvious place, with a few examples of mainstream canonical English literature, drawn from writers I studied when I was 'reading', as they say, for my BA in 'English Language and Literature' at Oxford University - surely place, if anywhere, that represents heartland of English, of pure English English and English literature proper.My first example is a poem I was given to read in my very first term, on arrival in Oxford.Oft him anhaga are gebideoMetudes miltse beah be modceariggeond lagulade longe sceoldehreran mid hondum hrimcealde sa;,wadan wraxlastas: wyrd bio ful ara;d!Swa CW2CO eardstapa. . .3So here, it seems, is authentic English literature, straight from Oxford BA course on English Language and Literature. Perhaps someone should try submitting a book for Commonwealth Writer's Prize written in Anglo-Saxon. You might object, though, that claim by Anglo-Saxonists to call their object of study 'Old English' forms part of a particular, now historical ideology about origins of English in Anglo-Saxonism.4 So let us look at something more recent. I could cite some Chaucer, whose language resembles modern English a little more than poet of The Wanderer, but I thought John Donne might be fairer as a more comparatively recent canonical figure of English literature:Qvot dos haec Linguists perfetti Disticha feront,Tot cuerdos Statesmen, hic livre fara tunc. …

The influence of British literature on global literature is enormous. In so many ways, British literature has influenced world literature. The Anglo-Saxon period established the British literature tradition, which continues to influence world literature today. In this blog post, we will look at various aspects of British literature's influence on global literature. The study of literary works from the United Kingdom and other countries around the world is known as British and world literature. It includes classic and contemporary works, often translated into English, that reflect regional and historical cultural and social norms. Individuals who study British and world literature gain insights into the historical, social, and cultural contexts in which the works were written. This allows for a better understanding of human experiences and the appreciation of different points of view. British literature composition is the process of creating written works in the English language that originate in or are related to the United Kingdom. This includes works written by British authors throughout history in the genres of fiction, poetry, drama, and nonfiction. Different literary movements, such as Medieval, Renaissance, Romanticism, and Postmodernism, have shaped the evolution of British literature composition. The composition of British literature has had a significant impact on the literary world and continues to inspire many contemporary writers.

While W.E.B. Du Bois’s first novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), is set squarely in the USA, his second work of fiction, Dark Princess: A Romance (1928), abandons this national framework, depicting the treatment of African Americans in the USA as embedded into an international system of economic exploitation based on racial categories. Ultimately, the political visions offered in the novels differ starkly, but both employ a Western literary canon – so-called ‘classics’ from Greek, German, English, French, and US American literature. With this, Du Bois attempts to create a new space for African Americans in the world (literature) of the 20th century. Weary of the traditions of this ‘world literature’, the novels complicate and begin to decenter the canon that they draw on. This reading traces what I interpret as subtle signs of frustration over the limits set by the literature that underlies Dark Princess, while its predecessor had been more optimistic in its appropriation of Eurocentric fiction for its propagandist aims.

This article aims at giving an overview on the whole romantic period. The start of the romantic period, the way it happened, the poets that helped to make this period shine, the background of the poets and the details of the romantic poetry that ruled this era – all of the aspects are described very elaborately in this article. The romantic age was established at the end of the eighteenth century and it lasted up to the 30’s of the nineteenth century. This romantic period replaced the neoclassical period where the classical poets like Alexander Pope made classical poetry famous among readers. Elements such as imagination, emotion, nature were used very passionately in the romantic poetry. There are more than four poets who wrote romantic poems in this period but only the life and poetry of the significant four poets are written in this article who was William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, John Keats, P. B Shelley. Wordsworth and Coleridge were the very first influencers of the romantic period. Wordsworth portrayed nature very artistically with his imagination in his poems. He wrote poems to pleasure the feelings of the common people. His close friend, Coleridge was influenced by some early politic affairs, his master James bowers and poet William Bowles to write romantic poetry. His investigation of the human nature through his poems made his poems very relatable. John Keats came after Wordsworth and Coleridge in this era. He upheld beauty and imagination frequently in his writing and shared the importance of his created term ‘negative capability.’ P.B Shelley differed from the other romantic poets by giving some importance to logic. He cared about morality and good lessons in his poems. He also portrayed melancholy very beautifully with his pen. This article will guide people in knowing even the little things of the romantic era.

Modern Chinese Literature and World Literature from a European Perspective Theo D'haen (bio) I have pointed out in Concise Routledge History of World Literature that the main European languages and literatures have formed the core of what used to pass for Weltliteratur, notwithstanding the fact that Goethe first mentioned the term when reading a Chinese novel in translation (D'haen, Concise 1). Indeed, the 1911 book by Richard Green Moulton, World Literature and Its Place in General Education, the very first book on the subject in English, argues that world literature looks different according to one's particular native literature perspective. As he was English but taught in the United States, his intention was to trace the "literary pedigree" of the "English-speaking peoples." (Moulton v) As Moulton claims, world literature would be the "autobiography of civilization." However, we surmise that only what he deems to be of interest to the growth of Englishlanguage literature can contribute to such an "autobiography," a term that then appears not only as relative to English-language literature but truly absolute or universal. And then, of all the other literatures that have been linked to "major" civilizations, Moulton singles out the Chinese and Japanese as not having contributed anything to world literature. Obviously and happily, things have changed almost beyond recognition over the last forty years. These days, when I visit comparative literature departments in the US at higher-ranked universities, it is common to find graduate students studying non-European languages, and less who concentrate exclusively on European languages. The study of Chinese, language and literature, is one of the fields of study to have benefited from this most. This change of choices and preferences has to do with larger changes in the world, changes that have to do with geo-economics and geo-politics, with the diminished weight of Europe in [End Page 153] demographic, economic, and political importance after World War II, and with the vastly increased importance of especially China in all these respects. As far as the "American" situation is concerned, it has had to deal with demographic shifts, such as the growing weight of the Pacific states with their large and growing populations of East-Asian provenance and strategic decisions in the economic, political, and even military fields, which has compelled the US to direct its gaze towards the Pacific and away from the Atlantic. Though perhaps to a lesser or at least immediate degree, these same shifts manifest themselves in European academe, where attention to what happens in the United States, though still considerable, has certainly waned in favour of attention given to developments elsewhere, and particularly in East Asia. At the same time, interest in things Western, and particularly American, has greatly increased in China following Deng Xiaoping's 1978 Reform and Opening-Up of China. Specifically, in literary studies Western theory, almost invariably filtered through American academe, has set the tune for much, if not most, Chinese literary theory during the last few decades. Aspects of this have been the subject of recent issues of Neohelicon (vol. 46, 2019), MLQ (vol. 79, no. 3, September 2018), and the European Review (vol. 24, no. 2, May 2016), all of them edited or co-edited by Wang Ning. With the present issue of JML Wang Ning, along with his co-editor Peng Qinglong, continues in this same vein. The essays gathered in this JML issue foreground the interesting factor that Henrik Ibsen played a huge role in the renewal of Chinese literature in the first half of the twentieth century as well as the influence Russian, and later Soviet-Russian literature exerted during different parts of that same twentieth century. Ibsen was not an isolated exception. We are reminded of how China's most famous twentieth-century writer, Lu Xun, began by absorbing French, German, and English literature, translating novels by Jules Verne and reading Nietzsche, Walter Scott, Stuart Mill, and Harriet Beecher Stowe alongside Chinese writers introducing Western scientific ideas, and in the 1909 collection Fiction from Abroad (Yuwai xiaoshuo ji) he edited with his brother Zhou Zuoren also focused on Russian or East-European works that highlighted the plight of the oppressed and subjugated...

Romantic Poetry encompasses twenty-seven new essays by prominent scholars on the influences and interrelations among Romantic movements throughout Europe and the Americas. It provides an expansive overview of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poetry in the European languages. The essays take account of interrelated currents in American, Argentinian, Brazilian, Bulgarian, Canadian, Caribbean, Chilean, Colombian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Mexican, Norwegian, Peruvian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, and Uruguayan literature. Contributors adopt different models for comparative study: tracing a theme or motif through several literatures; developing innovative models of transnational influence; studying the role of Romantic poetry in socio-political developments; or focusing on an issue that appears most prominently in one national literature yet is illuminated by the international context. This collaborative volume provides an invaluable resource for students of comparative literature and Romanticism. This volume is part of a book set which can be ordered at a special discount: https://www.benjamins.com/series/chlel/chlel.special_offer.romanticism.pdf

As someone who entered the United States as a foreign student in the late 1980s, my academic career was intensely shaped by the then burgeoning discourses on colonialism and postcolonialism.1 The triumvirate of Said, Spivak, and Bhabha functioned like a citation machine; and despite Said’s Orientalism, South Asia, especially India, dominated as the colonial/ postcolonial site par excellence. Much of this had to do not just with the presence of many a South Asian scholar studying, writing, and teaching in U.S. universities but also with the fact that some of the most brilliant work was being undertaken on India: Lata Mani’s work on the discourses on sati, the work of the Subaltern Studies historians, Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and her famous essays on the Rani of Sirmur, and of course Bhabha’s legendary essays “Sly Civility” and “Signs Taken for Wonders.” The outpouring of anglophone fiction from South Asia, topped off by the publication of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, made certain that there would be no dearth of work on South Asian (read Indian) postcolonial fiction, and even today, despite a fairer distribution of attention to other parts of the ex-colonial worlds, works on South Asia continue to dominate the scene. Much has been written about this privileging of South Asia (again, read India) and its incarnation as the quintessential postcolonial site, and I am not going to rehearse the debates here. But suffice it to say that while my teaching spans continents, my first book was part and parcel of the work on the discourse of gender and nationalism in colonial and postcolonial literary representations by British, Bengali, and anglophone South Asian writers. But, in another sense the book was comparative because it brought into play writers working in different languages, and I remember getting a report from Cambridge University Press asking me why there was no chapter on Rushdie.

The Location of Literature:The Transnational Book and the Migrant Writer Rebecca L. Walkowitz (bio) Precisely where is English literature produced?" This is Gauri Viswanathan's question, from an essay about the transformation of English studies in the wake of postcolonial theory (22). Her answer—not only "in England, of course"—focuses on the genealogy of the discipline, its development within the British Empire and other dominions outside England through the education of colonial subjects and the efforts of strangers such as "Jews, Dissenters, and Catholics" (23). But her answer also focuses on the dynamic relationship between "sites of cultural production and institutionalization," the way that "English literature" names a mode of analysis and a collection of works as well as the way that modes of analysis establish collections. In fact, she suggests, there is no "English literature" before institutionalization: only with disciplinary protocols do cultural products become a field (20). "Where is English literature produced?" thus asks us to consider that the location of literature depends not only on the places where books are written but also on the places where they are classified and given social purpose. In its emphasis on critical geographies, Viswanathan's question remains important to continuing debates about the "national attributes" of literature (21). Yet today we would be likely to ask several other questions as well: In what language does English literature circulate? Where is English literature read? Who counts as a producer (writers, but also editors, printers, designers, publishers, translators, reviewers)? And how has the global circulation of English literature shaped its strategies and forms of appearance? These questions turn from production to circulation, and back again, reflecting a new [End Page 527] emphasis on the history of the book and what Leah Price calls "the geography of the book" within postcolonial studies and world literature ("Tangible Page" 38). This work reinvigorates and reframes Homi K. Bhabha's claim that disciplinary models of comparison and distinction will have to be tested by new ways of understanding community. In The Location of Culture, published in 1994, Bhabha argued, "The very concepts of homogenous national cultures, the consensual or contiguous transmission of historical traditions, or 'organic' ethnic communities—as the grounds of cultural comparativism—are in a profound process of redefinition" (5). A decade and more later, essays and reports about the future of literary studies assume the heterogeneity and discontinuity of national cultures, and many scholars now emphasize "networks" of tradition and the social processes through which those networks are established (Damrosch, "What Is World Literature" 3; Greene 216–21). Haun Saussy's essay on the state of comparative literature, published with replies as Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization, marks and elaborates this turn. Like Saussy's volume, Immigrant Fictions suggests that literary studies will have to examine the global writing of books, in addition to their classification, design, publication, translation, anthologizing, and reception across multiple geographies. Books are no longer imagined to exist in a single literary system but may exist, now and in the future, in several literary systems, through various and uneven practices of world circulation. Consider, for example, the literary systems represented on the cover of this volume, which displays in miniature the covers of five contemporary works of fiction in English—or, really, the covers of five editions of those works: they are, from left to right, the U.S. paperback reprint of George Lamming's Season of Adventure (1999; first edition, 1960), the U.S. paperback reprint of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictée (2001; first edition, 1982), the British paperback translation of Iva Pekárková's Gimme the Money (2000; first edition, 1995), the Japanese paperback translation of David Peace's Nineteen Seventy-Seven (2001; first edition, 2000), and the U.S. paperback reprint of Monica Ali's Brick Lane (2004; first edition, 2003). These editions (as well as several others) are discussed in the volume's essays, which follow Contemporary Literature's stated mission by focusing only on literature in English. But as I have been suggesting, [End Page 528] it has become more difficult to assert with confidence that we know what literature in English is. Some of the books depicted...

A Cultural Ambassador East and West: J. Hillis Miller’s <i>Lectures in China</i>

On Comparative Literature in Korea Chon Young-Ae Regarding Comparative Literature in Korea, it would be best to say that it’s still growing and gradually moving away from its dependence on foreign influence. The origin of Comparative Literature in Korea may be found in the reception of world literature—the majority of which was Western literature—in the fifties and sixties. World literature served to fill the cultural vacuum following the colonial period and the Korean War. At that time, two publishing houses created series of world classics, which consisted of more than a hundred works from the traditional world literary canon. The concept of Comparative Literature was introduced in the 1950s as a natural development of the increased availability of world (Western) literature. Let me attempt to contextualize this process: Koreans take great pride in over 5,000 years of history and tradition. But they have also experienced a short painful tabula rasa through the rupture of tradition during the colonial and war periods. After the war, Korea grew rapidly in terms of economic development. Korean scholars endeavored to fill the spiritual vacuum left by its rapid economic growth. This movement sometimes brought about a hasty reception of Western culture. The Korean Comparative Literature Association ( kcla ), founded in 1959, currently has about 500 members. The association consists of scholars from diverse disciplines of national and foreign literature. Scholars of Korean, English, German, French, Spanish, Japanese, and Chinese literature all participate in the association. Comparative literature is practiced mainly by scholars who bring their expertise in national literatures to bear on their interest in Comparative Studies. Recently, there are more formally trained comparatists, many of whom studied Comparative Literature in Europe and in the United States. The annual conferences of the kcla take place twice a year, providing an opportunity for scholars from all over Korea to meet. The kcla also produces a journal that is published three times a year. Its articles cover a wide variety of topics, including comparisons of national and foreign literary works, research on translated works, and comparisons between literary works and other art forms. Currently, applications of the new theoretical methods to Korean literary works are particularly popular. The journal also provides a forum for gender and postcolonial studies. A few titles from the latest volumes, 39 and 40 (2006), demonstrate the breadth and depth of Korean Comparative Literature. [End Page 25] The Open Motifs in Lyric: A Comparative Study of Sowol’s “Ummaya Nunaya” and Goethe’s “Wanderers Nachtlied” A Study on the Translations of Old Korean Poems—With a Special reference to The Grass Roof of Younghill Kang The Formation of National Identity in the Film “Welcome to Dongmakgol” The Postmodern Rhetoric in the Pre-1900 Korean Tales and Folklores (The Postmodern Rhetoric in Choonhyangjeon) A Comparative Study on Diderot’s and Zeami’s Acting Theory from a Deconstructionist Perspective The Comparative Study on Extramarital Affairs in the Works of Korean and Chinese Female Writers In short, Comparative Literature in Korea is interdisciplinary. It also serves as a crucial medium for enriching our own literary tradition. As a discipline at Korean universities, Comparative Literature has yet to be strongly established at an institutional level. On the undergraduate level, it exists in the form of comparative area studies, which mainly focus on East Asian culture. Currently there are five Comparative Literature graduate programs. These programs are sustained through interdisciplinary cooperation, as in the case of my own institution, Seoul National University. My colleagues and I in the German department, for example, offer the students the opportunity for research abroad. We are engaged along with our students of Comparative Literature in a very good partnership with the Comparative Literature Institute of the University of Munich. We regularly exchange students and colleagues for cooperative research, financially supported by the daad . Korea is in the process of opening itself energetically, perhaps even more than other countries, to the world. Korean scholarship in Comparative Literature can only benefit from this increased openness. [End Page 26] Chon Young-Ae Seoul National University Copyright © 2008 Southern Comparative Literature Association

Lusophonia vs. Lusutopia, MLA vs. MTA

Anna Frajlich: Departures, Returns, Memory

Introduction:Socialist World Literature Yanli He (bio) and Daniel W. Pratt (bio) This special issue of The Journal of Narrative Theory, "Socialist World Literature," opens a window onto World Literature from the socialist perspective, through a focus on Socialist Realism broadly considered.1 Socialist Realism as a genre has largely been pilloried in Western scholarship, with a few notable exceptions, such as in the work of Katerina Clark and Evgeny Dobrenko. Clark herself describes the reaction when she would tell someone that her research was "on the Soviet Soviet novel, on those hundreds of unreadable texts that serve as examples of Socialist Realism": there would be a "dreadful pause," presumably of disbelief that such works could be seriously studied (Clark ix). Clark describes Socialist Realism as a taboo topic in Western scholarship (ix), and this situation is still true to a certain degree to this day. However, such a dismissive approach to Socialist Realism belies the power that it had throughout the twentieth century, and not just as the official genre of Soviet literature from 1933 to 1988. Socialist Realism, along with the Soviet project more generally, represented an alternative to Western European cultural hegemony for much of the world. If Russia had been "belated," as it was so often described, then the Bolshevik Revolution and the new Proletarian art transformed it into a leader on the world-historical stage. Socialist Realism went hand in hand with anti-colonial movements, liberation struggles, and the voices of ignored and oppressed literati all over the world. This led to a construction of World Literature centered on Moscow instead of the West, with Socialist Realism being the foundational form radiating from the new center. [End Page 267] In the Socialist countries, reimagining World Literature started in the 1930s, as a method of battling rising nationalism and fascist movements. During the First Soviet Writers' Congress of 1934 in Moscow, the German/Soviet critic and Socialist activist Karl Radek delivered a lengthy address, "Contemporary World Literature and the Tasks of Proletarian Art." According to Radek, there were three important historical events in the twentieth century that formed the criteria of how to evaluate the progress of World Literature: "the World War, the October Revolution and the fascists' advent to power in a number of countries" (74). Radek criticized the content of World Literature during World War I because it "sang songs in praise of war," with only a few exceptions, such as Maxim Gorky and Martin Andersen Nexø, but he claimed that the February Revolutions started to "turn world literature against the wars" of imperialism and colonial oppression (78). Radek specifically announced a new line of Socialist World Literature in his speech. According to him, the October Revolution began to change the landscape of World Literature, at first only in the negative way, because bourgeois literature became "an object of libel" for treating the October Revolution as "a mutiny of slaves engineered by scoundrels" and "the progeny of hell" (86). The development of an alternative to the hegemonic culture, according to Radek, "disturbed the minds of the more reflective representatives of world literature far more than did the events of October 1917" (91). The rise of the Soviet Union contributed to the "split in world literature" into two forms: "the literature of decaying capitalism, inevitably evolving towards fascism, [and] the new proletarian literature" with Moscow at its center (94). Bourgeois literature lost its "monopoly in world literature," and "proletarian literature was beginning to spring up in all countries" (95). Writers from all over the world were turning to Moscow for inspiration, and not just any authors, but already world-famous writers, such as Theodore Dreiser, Nobel laureate Romain Rolland, future Nobel laureate André Gide, and others. Radek understood Socialist World Literature and Socialist Realism in particular as part of the battle against fascism. Anyone who had remained with bourgeois literature was now forced to "side with [fascists]," and "write from the viewpoint of [fascist] philosophy" or join the proletariat (109). Thus, only one month after German fascists came to power on January 30, 1933, they lit a bonfire of German and World Literature near the [End Page 268] square of the University of Berlin. The...

An Ecology of World Literature: From Antiquity to the Present Day