Beginnings Of Literature Research Articles

Geofeminism in Romanian Fiction. An Introduction

The relationship established between geography, literature, the study of space, and gender studies is one that generates increased knowledge regarding perspectives on literary works. From this vantage point, in the present essay we offer an analysis of several Romanian novels, temporally close to the beginnings of literature in Romania, from a geofeminist perspective, a hybrid concept which aids the mapping of literary territories. The maps thus resulted from this type of analysis offer a much more complex positioning within the European cultural space, even more so if one considers the surfacing of real historical elements, inserted into the novels analysed, which stand as samples for the present demonstration.

Истоки и традиции использования поэтики мифа в узбекской литературе

The myth contributed to the birth of literature and was the source and beginning of literature. It is difficult to overestimate the importance of mythology in the development of various types of arts, in the very development of artistic and figurative thinking, and, of course, primarily in the development of fiction. The study of the poetics of myth is associated with the revival of the mythologizing tradition in Uzbek literature.

Talking Animals and Politics of World Literature

Talking animals are well known in storytelling, a tradition we can trace back to the very beginnings of literature in ancient Mesopotamia. Animal tales in the style of Aesop are still read all over the world and are regularly featured in educational programs. This genre can be considered an eminent part of world literature, with an almost continuous history of more than 3000 years. Following one of the oldest animal tales we know of—“The Eagle and the Serpent”—the paper discusses several variants of the “same” story, exploring how different meanings are generated at different times and within different cultural frameworks. After a comparative analysis of the basic structure of the story, an evaluation of its variants, and an examination of the textual strategies it employs, the paper concludes with a short outline of a project for the computational analysis of large text corpora featuring animal tales. The example stories discussed in the paper serve as case study for the development of methods for computational comparative literature. The ultimate goal is the ability to conduct cross-cultural reading on a wide range of texts across a number of cultural contexts and languages, leading to a better understanding of the varying functions of talking animals within the long tradition of animal tales.

Odisej kao prototip junaka bajke

Homerovi epovi snažno su utjecali na razvoj pripovjednih vrsta. Književna povijest navodi Homera kao početak književnosti europskoga kulturnoga kruga, s druge strane jedan od najznačajnijih karaktera književnosti starog vijeka je "Odisej onaj koji počinje sjajan niz junaka književnosti kasnijih stoljeća" (Beker 1997:7). Rad se bavi Odisejevim hodom po mukama - od Troje do Itake koji utječe na građenje paradigme djelovanja junaka bajke. Hod po mukama označen je preprekama koje nameću bogovi, a u bajkama su to tipične crte djelovanja junaka koji traženo dobro ili pravednost ostvaruje savladavajući prepreke. U radu se izdvajaju motivi integrirani u narativnu strukturu bajke, koje nalazimo u Odiseji. Iščitani motivi temelje se na mitološkom shvaćanju života i svijeta.

At the Limit of Literature

At the Limit of Literature Nicholas Jose The Cambridge History of Australian Literature. Peter Pierce, ed. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. x + 612. $180.00 (cloth). [Erratum] What, if anything, is Australian literature? That this question can be asked, still and again, as happens directly and indirectly through this welcome new collective history, is less a matter of regret than a tribute of sorts to the Australian propensity for keeping apart from conventional categorisations. I’m not sure if this happens from Australia, looking out, or to Australia, looking in. Most likely it’s a combination of both internal pressures and external arrangements, as some of the “history of the book”—of reading, writing and publishing—in Australia details here. Re-definition of, or escape from, boundaries has been a shaping force in Australian literature since the first boatloads of convicts and settlers arrived in Sydney with a printing press in 1788 (as Elizabeth Webby reminds us in her chapter on “The beginnings of literature in colonial Australia”), until today, when boatloads of would-be refugees— from Afghanistan, from Sri Lanka, poets and journalists among them perhaps—are pushed back to sea. The convict and colonial confine is resisted in actuality, and in imaginative transposition and impersonation, linguistic promiscuity and genre-busting. As Tanya Dalziell writes about colonial fiction in her chapter “No place for a book?,” two projectsin- process intersected during the nineteenth century: “the shaping of an idea of ‘fiction’ [ . . . ] and the making of ‘Australia’” (113).1 That convolution of community (or, less comfortably, nation) and literature has continued, even as authors from Australia routinely disavow any Australianness, or seek to transcend that part of their biography through art and internationalism. The poet John Kinsella uses the term “international regionalism” for the positive potential of this double position. In a big-picture chapter called “Groups and mavericks” that is one of the best things in this multi-authored volume, he links the anxiety around definition to perceptions of Australia as “quarantined space,” an insular exceptionalism that, for better and worse, maps the “reiteration of uniqueness and separateness [End Page 935] [that] still underlies much Australian writing.” “It seeks to set itself apart,” Kinsella claims (473). Yet in setting itself apart, it is set apart by others, falling below the horizon line.2 In the new domain of world literature—transnational, global Anglophone—Australia barely rates a mention (in Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters [1999; English translation 2004], for instance, or David Damrosch’s What is World Literature? [2003]) As the new Cambridge History of Australian Literature amply shows, however, the body of Australian material, variously constructed, is a fascinating case of what might be called “literature at the limit of world-literature,” to adapt a phrase from Ranajit Guha.3 As editor of the Cambridge History of Australian Literature, Peter Pierce brings to the task a lifetime’s participation in and advocacy for the field. Along with important scholarly work on a wide range of topics—lost children, Australians at war—and authors —notably Thomas Keneally —he has produced a literary guide to Australia for the general reader, and written and reviewed regularly for the mainstream press. During his professional career he must have watched as Australian literary studies modulated from the consensually celebrated achievements of a generation ago (around the time of the 1988 bicentenary of British invasion/settlement) to its more devolved and perplexed state today. The history he has compiled is not primarily a chronicle of authors and texts, so much as an argument for the existence of that larger thing, Australian literature, which connects writers, books and readers in a cultural and social space. Thus the history moves through a series of temporal, spatial and generic excursions, horizontal rather than vertical, in a quite equable gathering of diverse approaches and interests across its span of two hundred years or more. The end effect is of a three-dimensional edifice, and this is Pierce’s great achievement. “Authoritative judgments [are] less enticing and true to the history of this literature than provisional ones,” he writes as he goes on to outline a structure that works chronologically in three parts—the colonial...

A systems model of the evolution of literary paradigms

The paper applies a cybernetic theory of the dynamism of systems to create a model of the evolution of literary paradigms in a macro-historical perspective, that is, from the hypothetical beginnings of literature up to the present day. The physical properties of the three main dynamic phases (exodynamic, static, endodynamic) determine the characteristics of the three main historical literary paradigms, referred to as magico-religious, philosophic, and scientific. The general systems model is then used to generate more detailed statements relevant to such problems as the dominant literary kind, mode, and style, the character of the protagonist, the ontological nature of described events, the social role of the author, the status of the author within the text, the social role of literature and so on.

Xénophobie et orientalisme dans la littérature grecque archaïque et classique. À propos d'un ouvrage récent

Martin West's East Face of the Helicon tries to make it clear that the first Greek culture, both its poetry and myths, contained important elements of Near Eastern origin, and that there is no adequate reason for the philologist to deny a full influence of the classical civilizations at the East on Archaic Greece. A term by term translingual comparison of literary motives tends to corroborate West's main argument : by intermarriages, migra-tions, extended contacts over a large measure of time and so forth, Archaic and Classical Greece should have welcomed strangers and patronized their beginnings in literature, so as to produce an elaborated kind of melting-pot civilization. As a main argument, this is neither a cogent nor a onesided truth, nay, it is a phantom : already in the age of Archilochus Greeks were outstandingly proud of their community of civilization as the opposite side of bestiality, and seldom, if ever, showed any complacency about the ones they called Barbarians. Sexual puns concentrating on the so-called barbaric deviations, pettiness relating to political infirmity, geographical prejudices discarding the Barbarian neighbourhood for the far away Greek countryside, are nothing of an exception and ought to be told for what they are : signs of xenophobia. In Archaic Greece strangers were not welcome. What is true as far as history of science is concerned, that the Greek tradition sponte sua recognized Near East as the birth of its own take off, is untrue in the whole field of classical culture.

Contemporary Slovene Literature

Contemporary Slovene literature from 1950 to the present has been deeply influenced, above all, by two major factors: first, its own tradition through a century-long development, and secondly, the socio-political position of literature immediately after the Second World War. As concerns tradition, it should be noted that the beginning of literature in the Slovene language coincided with the arrival of Protestantism in the sixteenth century; only sparse religious records are known from previous centuries. This literature remained within the framework of ecclesiastical needs until the late eighteenth century, similar to those found in Lithuania, Estonia or Finland. At the end of the eighteenth century, Slovene literature began to resemble the Central European literature typical of Croatia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland. This is not only evident in the same literary trends and genres, but above all in the fact that national ideology as well as social and moral ideas acquired a significant role in its concepts.

Myth and Text: Readings in the Modern Greek Novel

‘… they did not suspect that La Mancha and Montiel and the knight’s lean figure would be, for posterity, no less poetic than the episodes of Sinbad … For in the beginning of literature is the myth, and in the end as well.’ J.L. Borges, ‘Parable of Cervantes and the Quixote’Mythos is used by Aristotle both in its received sense in his day, meaning a story which need not be literally true but has a special institutional status outside of literature, and in a sense which seems to be new in the fourth century B.C., as a rational ordering of events (synthesis ton pragmaton), a mediating term between story (pragmata) and discourse (tragodia). It is specifically by means of mythos (whether invented or traditional) that tragedy (discourse) can be an imitation (mimesis) of action (praxis/story).

Libraries in Iraq and Egypt: A comparative study

Libraries have existed in both Iraq and Egypt since the very early period of recorded history, and since the earliest period of human civilization. In Iraq, or what was known as Mesopotamia, the earliest accumulations of written records were stored in the Sumerians’ temples. Those records contained writings on various subjects, such as: history, commercial accounts, mathematics, medicine, astrology, hymns, religions and the beginning of literature. At Nippur, in the southern part of Iraq, part of a large temple library and archives containing clay tablets have been discovered. These tablets were dated partly from the Sumerian period, about 4000 B.C., and partly from the Babylonian and Assyrian periods, about 3000 B.C. At the temple of this city there were several rooms used for the library and archives. In the period of the Assyrian greatness, which followed that of the Babylonians, the library and archives of King Ashur-Bani-Pal were established in the city of Nineveh, in the northern part of Iraq, which was the capital of the Assyrians. More that 20 000 tablets were excavated in this city. Some private Assyrian libraries have also been found. A general classification was also found in the Nineveh library, called the Royal Classification, for the main subjects dealt with. The tablets were arranged on shelves or in large pots and vessels.1 It was reported that about half a million tablets have been excavated to date from the ruins of ancient Iraq (Mesopotamia) and some other parts of the Near East. Many of these tablets were moved to European museums, particularly the British Museum, during the British occupation and mandate in the area. Like Iraq, the Egyptian temples were believed to contain one of the first organized library collections. The library of King Ramses II

Africa's Literature Beyond Politics

The literature of contemporary Africa is more than a response to the politics of Africa. It is an aspect of the political debate, of course, but it is also an intrinsically important element in the total African renaissance of our times. True, the earliest beginnings of literature in contemporary Africa are rooted in politics and political protest. (I exclude the African writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for the simple reason that most of them did not see fiction, poetry or drama as possible vehicles for their anti-colonial and antislavery protests.)Négritude, the literary movement of the French African and Antillean deracine, was created as a literary response to European cultural imperialism (defined by Gallicism) Its prophets, Césaire of Martinique, Damas of Guyana, and L. S. Senghor of Sengal, expressed the anguish of their delirious alienation, frustration, protest against European culture, and against that romantic glorification of Africa, the Sartrean imaginary continent.

Death in Children's Literature

Death in Children's Literature* Francelia Butler (bio) C. S. Lewis, whose "Narnia" fantasies for children are one expression of his religious philosophy, observed that "a children's story is the best art form for something you have to say."1 Like a parable—or sometimes, an epitaph—the limpid simplicity of the form makes it easier to see into the depths, even of death. Once upon a time, children and adults shared the same literature and together understood what there was to be understood about death. That time was from the beginning of literature up until the end of the seventeenth century, when a separation began to take place between the literature of adults and that of children. From then on, the treatment of death became part of a larger problem—the commercial and psychological exploitation of children through a special literature aimed at them alone. Indications are that the separation might have begun with the "Warnings to Apprentices," published by commercial interests in the seventeenth century. These bear a striking resemblance to the warnings to little children, the "deathbed confessions" of children who disobeyed moral "laws" and reformed too late. Numerous books of these confessions were published in England and America by the Puritan merchant class in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These deathbed confessions and other dire warnings to children were continued in the hundreds of Sunday School tracts which grew out of the Sunday School movement begun by Robert Raikes. Raikes, a wealthy shipowner, acknowledged that he began the Sunday Schools to keep working children from depredations on Sundays.2 These tracts distorted goodness itself by getting children to do the right things for the wrong reasons. Raikes' family ties with John Newbery, who is considered to be the "father" of children's literature, could be one indication that the establishment of children's literature as a separate field had an economic basis. As a result of the separation, so little good literature for children has been produced that the whole field is not even considered worthy of investigation by most departments of the Humanities.3 This neglect by scholars has resulted in a lack of respected criticism and has led to an indiscriminate lumping of all books for children, classical and commercial, into the category, "children's literature." There is no clear demarcation, as there is in adult literature, between books of real literary merit and books which were designed to sell or those which were written for propaganda purposes. The few great books written primarily for children have been mostly by writers with such deep emotional [End Page 104] problems that they have been afraid to express themselves openly to their peers and hence have written simply and honestly to children as their equals.4 Before the seventeenth century, children learned about death in literature shared with adults. They heard Bible stories, fables, legends, ballads, folk tales, or folk plays or read them themselves. Death could be seen in proper perspective because in this literature all the convictions, fears, and hopes of people about many things were gathered up and transmitted. For the most part, this literature encouraged hope for life after death in some form. Stith Thompson's Motif-Index of Folk Literature abounds with references to restoration to life, either by magical reassemblage of the body's dispersed members, or by administration of the water of life, or by medicines, or in various other ways. Men may come back as women or women as men. People may become children, dwarves, monsters, princes or princesses, stars or angels or gods. They can return to earth as fish, horses' heads, donkeys, cows, bulls, oxen, calves, buffalo, swine, wild boar, goats, cats, dogs, lions, wolves, rabbits, foxes, deer, seals, bears, hyenas, jackals, elephants, monkeys, rats, otters, ducks, owls, hawks, eagles, swallows, cuckoos, doves, pigeons, ravens, quails, partridges, herons, cranes, geese, peacocks, parrots, snakes, lizards, crocodiles, tortoises, or frogs. Or they may come back as bees, butterflies, fleas, weevils, bedbugs, salmon, goldfish, sharks, whales, leeches, scorpions, crabs. Again, they may turn into trees, roses, lilies, lotus, grass, straw, herbs, bramble-bushes, tobacco plants, peanut plants, eggplants, musical instruments, dishes, fountains, balls, wind, stones, salt, smoke...

"Wish'd, Wint'ry, Horrors": The Storm in the Eighteenth Century

X T ISH'D, WINT'RY, HORRORS-the idea is almost yVY unthinkable before the eighteenth century. The phrase is from James Thomson's Winter (1726), and shows a revolution in attitudes which had until then been virtually unchanged since the beginnings of literature. Hitherto, man's feelings about the storm were fairly constant, the expression of three or four closely related attitudes. Basically the storm was disliked, whether in real life or imagined in a work of fiction. It was dangerous to life and property; it reflected the Creator's anger with his creation, and particularly with man; it was a sign of discord and imperfection within the natural world; and it was, as an aesthetic spectacle, a symbol of the irregularity and inferiority of the natural world, to be compared unfavorably with the finished, balanced, and superior works of civilized man. In Western literature storm descriptions ring the changes on these attitudes until the early eighteenth century.1 Fictional accounts also make use of storms as a mechanical element of the plot, to bring about a change in the hero's fortunes, to isolate him or to thrust him into new adventures; and in fiction there is often the element of exaggeration, to win the reader's sympathy with the suffering hero, threatened with disaster by the violence of the storm. Lucretius sums up this last feeling with his Suave, mari magno turbantibus aequora ventis, e terra magnum alterius spectare laborem2