Body Of Literary Works Research Articles

The Reception of Jeremiah in Modern Hebrew Literature

Looking at some illustrative examples of the reception of Jeremiah in modern Hebrew literature, this article explores how both the prophet and the book named after him were reworked by modern Hebrew authors and poets in the body of literary works in Hebrew that emerged during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Europe in the wake of the Enlightenment.

Editorial

In lieu of an abstract: In preparing this issue, I was reminded that nearly twenty years ago I attended the UK’s first national conference on YA fiction. The event was called “Turning Point”, and one of the topics of discussion was how YA was “the least economically significant area of children’s books […] because the audience predominantly borrows rather than buys its books” (Belbin 140). The commercial turn in YA since 2002 may have transformed this landscape, but thinking about YA as a market, as well as a body of literary work, is what has always made our scholarship so exciting. Many of us are interested in the way that texts flow between authors, publishers, and readers, enriched by the contributions made by translators, adaptors, booksellers, commentators, fans, and educators. Taking account of the material and economic conditions that shape YA is a crucial enterprise, as is taking the producers and consumers of this literature to account, in the way that several of the authors of our articles do. Criticism can undertake valuable work in drawing our gaze towards the gaps and omissions in our field, and the distorted representations that might be on offer to young readers. This second issue of <em>IJYAL</em> pays attention to these relationships, scrutinising the productive, sometimes problematic, dynamics that have emerged in the YA market in the twenty-first century.

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»Old Poet«, New Readings: Recent Work on Hans Sachs and Perspectives for Future Research Stimulated by the flourishing of research on literature and culture of the early modern period in recent decades across the disciplines, interest in the body of literary works by the Nuremberg author Hans Sachs (1494–1576) is also on the rise again. This paper offers a report on scholarship devoted to his wide-ranging creative output and published between the re-emergence of Sachs studies in the mid-1970s up until the present day. Beginning with a retrospective that is primarily thematic in structure, it then turns to a discussion (in terms both of methodology and of content) of the focus and findings of studies to date, including the consideration of continuing gaps and desiderata. The latter are in the main related to textual problems, but also touch on many other aspects (literary, historical etc.) yet to be properly examined. There follows, finally, a delineation, based on the status quo as presented, of four highly relevant fields of study: the report thus provides a thematic and methodological framework of potential use for future research.

Embodying Histories of Violence: Representations of Scarred Bodies of Sri Lankan Tamil Women in Sri Lankan Tamil Diasporic Women’s Writing in English

The paper seeks to explore embodied histories of violence through an insightful discussion on the representations of scarred bodies of Sri Lankan Tamil women in Sri Lankan Tamil diasporic women’s writing in English. The study employs a qualitative approach and conducts a content analysis of selected narratives in the primary texts: Shankari Chandran’s Song of the Sun God (2017), V.V. Ganeshananthan’s Love Marriage (2008), and Mary Anne Mohanraj’s Bodies in Motion (2005). The narratives selected for the study are approached as a body of literary work that portrays scarred bodies of Sri Lankan Tamil women both within and outside Sri Lanka against the backdrop of ethnic and communal violence. It posits that in a context of war, bodies of Sri Lankan Tamil women, as represented in the novels, are perceived as battle sites on which warring factions inscribe their authority. The study then examines the legacy of violence as a shared communal trait among Sri Lankan Tamils and argues for the alternative presented through the narratives of approaching the scarred bodies of Sri Lankan Tamil women as spaces of empowerment, as opposed to impure or sullied bodies that are incapable of representing their Sri Lankan Tamil families and communities.

Literature and Postcolonial Capitalism in Contemporary Vietnam: Indian Characters in Hồ Anh Thái’s Writings

This paper explores the relationship between literary representation and nationalism in contemporary Vietnam, a socialist state which has opened up to capitalist forms of economic organization. It asks if Vietnamese literature has changed its political role in the context of Vietnam pursuing policies of economic liberalization, engaging with global capitalist relations and opening to global private capitalist sectors. In other words, the paper asks how national literature, a body of literary works in the Vietnamese language that was historically constructed in anti-colonial, anti-imperial terms, has participated in the contemporary cultural, economic and political projects that the Vietnamese state has undertaken in order to retain its socialist and nationalist goals, while practicing transnational negotiation and socialist flexibility. In continuing the tradition of constructing Indian characters as “capitalists” and “foreign invaders,” Hồ Anh Thái’s writing suggests that the so-called political and economic relaxation of post-reform Vietnam is a strategy for the Vietnamese state to maintain itself on the path of socialism and nationalism. Through its examination of Hồ Anh Thái’s novels and short stories, focusing on their construction of Indian characters, the paper argues that socialist realism remains the guiding principle of contemporary Vietnamese literature. The choice of Hồ Anh Thái and his writing about Indians is based on the fact that the author and the Indian setting of his work embody important political and economic characteristics of post-reform Vietnam.

The Apparel of Imminent Bliss

The article considers the issues of apparel, costume, and fashion across an extensive body of literary works known as utopian fiction. These include classic utopias of Thomas More, Tommaso Campanella, and Francis Bacon, as well as socialist novels by Etienne Cabet, Edward Bellamy, William Morris, and Alexander Chayanov, or even science fiction such as the works of Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, and Ivan Yefremov. Regardless of their genre, era, authors’ intents or personal preferences, when utopias are studied through the lens of fashion, dress, clothes production, and etc., they usually reveal theories on perfecting apparel in general, fashion critiques, and clothing reform ideas. Utopian fiction presents often misleading yet partially followed examples, as well as serious futuristic projections and surprisingly precise trendsetting forecasts.

Knowledge, Power and Being: Literature and the Creation of an Archive of “Marginal” Sexualities in the Maghreb

SummaryThis article analyses the role of literature in creating knowledge and an archive of “marginal” sexuality in the Maghreb. Cultural and religious discourses have functioned in a manner that has not only marginalised non-normative sexuality but, more importantly, rendered them invisible. The bourgeoning body of literary works that have dared to break the silence on such sexuality has played a pivotal role in establishing a significant archive of the marginalised lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) individuals in Arab-Muslim Maghreb. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s postulations on the archive, this article contends that the construction of an archive of “marginal” sexuality involves a questioning and challenging of the existing hegemonic heteronormative archive of sexuality in the Maghreb. This heteronormative archive has of course deliberately omitted non-normative sexualities which have been rendered taboo and unsayable. This article will show that in the quest to remember these marginalised sexualities; the project to construct an archive and knowledge of “marginal” sexualities relies greatly on the French archive of nonnormative sexualities. This reliance is however imbued with agency considering how the selected corpus of literary texts also destabilise the orientalist gaze which has constructed Maghrebian sexualities as exotic and “other”.

Translation, Littérisation, and the Nobel Prize for Literature

This work is a cultural economics study of the problem of translation production and assessment in and leading up to the literary Nobel Prize deliberations. I argue that the constraints of assessing an unevenly and partially translated body of literary works, many of them from less common languages, present an unbreachable expertise gap. Translation as a sacralization, or consecration in Casanova’s (2004) term, of a writer’s work is considered in the context of the award. Ultimately the prize is shown to depend upon translations carried out in dissimilar circumstances for each candidate. The award of the Nobel is part of the founder’s call for works to be more widely circulated, not to reward fame; thus a Nobel is more an invitation to translate than a recognition of an author in translation, although evidence suggests that the post-Nobel translational impact may vary by writer and over time. This study sheds light on the degree to which the Prize is an authority-mediated phenomenon, and while critiquing the quixotic task of judging disparate forms and amounts of cultural capital side by side, and never from a point of neutrality, it also attempts to show how translation shapes this symbolic form of prestige in the struggle for existence. I posit that alternative prizes and prize-awarding in general as fraught with similar cross-language challenges. Possibilities for future research, qualitative analysis of the Nobel and translation demand, among other consequences, are briefly sketched.

An Interview with James Hollis

Drs. James Hollis and Alan G. Vaughan discuss Jim's impressive body of literary work, grounded in Jungian theory. His work includes fourteen books, beginning with The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife (1993) to the recent publication of Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives (2013). The interview touches on the major themes developed in some of these works and provides an opportunity for our readership to know Jim on a more personal level through his reflections on his life and some of his work.

Studying Urban Space and Literary Representations Using GIS: Lisbon, Portugal, 1852-2009

This article proposes a methodology to address the urban evolutionary process, demonstrating how it is reflected in literature. It focuses on “literary space,” presented as a territory defined by the period setting or as evoked by the characters, which can be georeferenced and drawn on a map. It identifies the different locations of literary space in relation to urban development and the economic, political, and social context of the city. We suggest a new approach for mapping a relatively comprehensive body of literature by combining literary criticism, urban history, and geographic information systems (GIS). The home- range concept, used in animal ecology, has been adapted to reveal the size and location of literary space. This interdisciplinary methodology is applied in a case study to nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels involving the city of Lisbon. The developing concepts of cumulative literary space and common literary space introduce size calculations in addition to location and structure, previously developed by other researchers. Sequential and overlapping analyses of literary space throughout time have the advantage of presenting comparable and repeatable results for other researchers using a different body of literary works or studying another city. Results show how city changes shaped perceptions of the urban space as it was lived and experienced. A small core area, correspondent to a part of the city center, persists as literary space in all the novels analyzed. Furthermore, the literary space does not match the urban evolution. There is a time lag for embedding new urbanized areas in the imagined literary scenario.

Studying Urban Space and Literary Representations Using GIS

This article proposes a methodology to address the urban evolutionary process, demonstrating how it is reflected in literature. It focuses on “literary space,” presented as a territory defined by the period setting or as evoked by the characters, which can be georeferenced and drawn on a map. It identifies the different locations of literary space in relation to urban development and the economic, political, and social context of the city. We suggest a new approach for mapping a relatively comprehensive body of literature by combining literary criticism, urban history, and geographic information systems (GIS). The home-range concept, used in animal ecology, has been adapted to reveal the size and location of literary space. This interdisciplinary methodology is applied in a case study to nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels involving the city of Lisbon. The developing concepts of cumulative literary space and common literary space introduce size calculations in addition to location and structure, previously developed by other researchers. Sequential and overlapping analyses of literary space throughout time have the advantage of presenting comparable and repeatable results for other researchers using a different body of literary works or studying another city. Results show how city changes shaped perceptions of the urban space as it was lived and experienced. A small core area, correspondent to a part of the city center, persists as literary space in all the novels analyzed. Furthermore, the literary space does not match the urban evolution. There is a time lag for embedding new urbanized areas in the imagined literary scenario.

The Whole Field of Postcolonial Literature

The Whole Field of Postcolonial Literature John Marx (bio) Keywords postcolonial literature, postcolonial studies, Marxist criticism, globalization and literature, Edward Said, Fredric Jameson The Postcolonial Unconscious. Neil Lazarus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Neil Lazarus describes a field of postcolonial literature that is both too big and too small. Too big, in that this "vast and hitherto unevenly and indifferently theorized corpus" contains too many works published in too many places and circulating in too many ways to be neatly summed up (35). The field is too small, however, in that few postcolonial works actually garner anything like meaningful scholarly attention. Saying he is "tempted to overstate the case," Lazarus declares "that there is in a strict sense only one author in the postcolonial literary canon. That author is Salman Rushdie, whose novels—especially Midnight's Children, Shame, and The Satanic Verses—are endlessly, not to say catechistically, cited in the critical literature" (22). The point remains even if one is inclined to supplement this canon with another likely suspect or two—J.M. Coetzee, say, or Arundhati Roy. Many literary fields combine sublime abundance with restrictive canonicity, which means the situation Lazarus describes is hardly unique. As it might for any other field, furthermore, Lazarus believes that in postcolonial studies shuttling between too big and too small has produced intellectual stasis. The field's band of privileged authors and works has become so stock as to breed boredom, if not outright contempt. At the same time, the idea that a much larger range of works might be included in the postcolonial canon can only appear as a threat to supporters of the curriculum's current composition. Given that postcolonial literary studies has historically embraced its reputation as a [End Page 389] scholarly insurgency, it is noteworthy to find Lazarus arguing that the field has transformed into yet another subdiscipline interested more than anything else in policing its own boundaries. The goal of The Postcolonial Unconscious is to figure out how and why this has happened and what to do about it. After his Introduction frames the project with a telling history of the field, Lazarus's two most substantial chapters tackle the prospects for revising scholarship's relationship to postcolonial literature. The remaining three chapters of The Postcolonial Unconscious consider how the field might revisit three major theorists: Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, and Fredric Jameson. When he distinguishes between postcolonial literature in all of its incipient variety and postcolonial studies in its increasingly narrow institutional form, Lazarus makes clear that he is not against institutionalization per se. To the contrary, what he would like is to build a postcolonial studies that is adequate to its literary objects. Adequacy is a key term in The Postcolonial Unconscious, and captures the ideal of a "vast, scattered, heterogeneous, but still, in principle, systematisable archive of literary works" (115). Adequacy will only be achieved, Lazarus supposes, by opposing "the ideological and epistemological assumptions that have tended to frame postcolonial studies" while avoiding the pitfall of replacing one programmatic set of assumptions with another (36). It also means specifying what a postcolonial studies informed not only by literary criticism but also by philosophy, art history, sociology, anthropology, and various area studies has to learn from such a diverse, but "systematisable" body of literary works. "There is a clear discrepancy or disjunction," Lazarus explains, "between what a very large amount of this literature has tended to show and what most postcolonialist critics have tended to register as significant. My proposal is that where the two forms of discourse (that is, '"postcolonial" literature' and 'postcolonial criticism') diverge, we would do well to think hard about the understandings in play in the former before moving to ratify those prevailing in the latter" (115). The task at hand, he argues, is figuring out the best method for discovering what literature can show scholars across the interdisciplinary range of postcolonial studies. Developing a cultural materialist perspective, Lazarus tests the limits of what postcolonial studies has been able to think about its foundational theoretical texts as well as its literary ones. The notion that postcolonial studies should have conceptual limits to test is not necessarily intuitive. Even though postcolonial in...

A Commentary on Plutarch's Pericles

Plutarch's Life of Pericles is one of the outstanding works of ancient biography. Called by some a coward and others a boor, Pericles was a genius as a statesman. He ruled Athens like a monarch between 441 and 430 B.C., a period of great political and intellectual achievement. In the first comprehensive commentary in this century on Plutarch's text, Philip Stadter explores both the literary and historical aspects of this extraordinary work, which is included here in Greek in its entirety. In an extensive introduction, Stadter considers the broad questions of the biography's structure, its place and importance within Plutarch's body of literary works, and its relation to its companion piece, the Fabius Maximus. He discussed Plutarch's historical method and argues that the biographer's innovative and thorough use of sources, especially contemporay histories, make Pericles particularly valuable to modern scholars. Examining the literary devices that shape and organize the work, Stadter analyzes the Greek text line by line. a detailed study of word usage and meaning complements grammatical and lexicographical notes that make the peculiarities of Plutarch's Greek accessible to readers unfamiliar with the original text. This evaluation of Plutarch's biographical technique is exceptional in its combination of archaeological, epigraphical, and historical analysis. Pericles emerges from the discussion as a masterpiece of later Greek prose and biography. Stadter's thorough and insightful analysis secures the importance of this text as both a work of literature and a vivid depiction of the society, culture, and politics of fifth-century Athens. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

American Literary Nationalism: The Process of Definition, 1825–1850

TheInk used by the signers of the Declaration of Independence barely had time to dry before Americans began talking about a national literature. Debate was initiated which went on actively for 75 years — and indeed is still occasionally revived. From the first, two aspects of the subject were considered, two steps were recognized as necessary. The first was the problem of definition: what should be the materials of an American literature and what should be the spirit and purpose of American writers. The second was, of course, the actual creation of a body of literary work which should be recognizably and worthily American.