Literary Exchange Research Articles

Clarifying the Eclipse

Abstract This essay examines a literary exchange between the Visigothic poet-king Sisebut (612-621 AD) and his scholar-bishop Isidore of Seville following an anomalous sequence of eclipses. After Sisebut commissioned a scientific treatise from Isidore on such natural phenomena, he responded to the bishop’s prose with a short poem on lunar eclipses (De eclipsi lunae). This study interprets the exchange of texts not as a literary game, but as high-stakes political correspondence. It situates the king’s verses in an ongoing process of cultural construction in Visigothic Spain, led prominently by Isidore himself, but also tied to a rising ascetic movement. It argues that Sisebut was attuned to Isidore’s designs to manage the discourses through which Christian power was proclaimed, and shows how the king attempted to versify in accord with scientific truth so as to fit within Isidore’s ascetic intellectual program.

‘Mr Gordon met his fate in the religious spirit’: A letter, empire, Christianity and the death of George William Gordon

One of the more important letters issuing from the Morant Bay Uprising of 1865 was written by George William Gordon, just before he was hanged on 23 October 1865. An examination of this letter and the circumstances of its writing gives an insight into the workings of Empire in the Caribbean, particularly the implications of the Christian faith for one Native Baptist, who squared off against the corrupt officials of Empire and the local elite. It exposes the Christian and colonial networks at play, providing indications of the important material and literary exchanges between metropole and colony, especially letters, which were the key communication technology of the era. Individual subjects engaged with the agents of Empire to solicit justice through telling their stories, even post mortem. Gordon’s letter emerged at a critical moment in which the British nonconformist missionary project in the West Indies was being rethought. Indeed, one key outcome in the aftermath of the Rebellion was a new relationship between nonconformist missionaries and the civil authorities to ‘civilise’ the Jamaican population to prevent another eruption of ‘the savagery’ of Morant Bay. Such efforts have reverberations for Jamaicans and the Jamaican state even till today.

Transpacific Poetics: Ideographic and Prosodic Transpositions in Li-Young Lee’s “Persimmons” and Marilyn Chin’s “Summer Sleep”

Through intercultural poetics, the speakers in “Persimmons” and “Summer Sleep” chart their journeys from “foreign” pupils disciplined by English authorities to bilingual wordsmiths. Lee’s speaker, punished by a schoolmarm for his inability to differentiate between English words that look alike, later uses Chinese sight rhyme in English to replicate the semantic use of ideographic “radicals” in Chinese poetry. Chin’s speaker, scorned by her mentor for being “mediocre,” grows up to become a sought-after instructor versed in prosodic sleight of hand. Both Lee and Chin address the loss of ethnic heritage and reclaim their inheritance by literary cross-pollination. Where Lee attempts to align the two dominant cultural traditions, Chin subverts both. This article demonstrates how transpacific literary exchanges can be advanced by different strategies that also require attendant linguistic knowledge and comparative analysis on the part of the critics.

A Comparative Study of Kalīlah wa Dimnah and Korean Folktale

This study compares five similar stories between Kalīlah wa Dimnah and Korean folktales in the aspects of plots and narrative patterns, motifs, tale elements, subjects and teachings. The original text of Kalīlah wa Dimnah is Panchatantra, and the original narrative of the five Korean folktales is Panchatantra, so they have many similar points in literary elements. There are, however, important differences that took place in the process of transmission and acceptance. It is worthy of note that two Korean folktales coincide with Kalīlah wa Dimnah rather than Panchatantra in main motifs and tale elements, which may suppose that the direct literary exchanges existed between Arabia and Korea in the past.

조선후기 한중 문인 교류 연구의 흐름 - 교류 기반과 양상을 중심으로 -

조선·청 문인 교류는 한중 교류 전체 역사 속에서 매우 특별한 의미를 지닌다. 특히 18세기 후반부터 시작된 양국 지식의 교류는 19세기에 들어서면서 더욱 확장되는 모습을 띠는데, 이는 명대의 그것보다 同文의 세계에 더욱 가까운 형태였다. 한문 능력을 매개로 이루어진 문인 교류는 인적 교류망의 형성, 학술토론의 공간, 지식 매체 왕래의 통로가 되었다. 한편 최근 중국에서는 ‘청사공정’을 추진하면서, 청과 주변국의 관계를 종속적인 것으로 규정하려는 의도가 나타나고 있다. 이러한 움직임에 대해 조선후기 문인 교류는 일방적·종속적이지 않은 상호 소통적 역사상을 드러내는 역할을 할 것이라 판단한다. 본고에서는 주로 2000년 이후에 생산된 연구들을 중심으로 조선·청 문인 교류 기반과 교류 양상을 고찰하고자 한다. 조선과 청의 국가 간 이동은 오직 양국에서 허락한 사신을 통해서만 가능했다. 따라서 사신 파견을 둘러싼 외교 구조의 형성과 작동방식은 문인 교류의 장기적 기반으로 기능하였다. 동시에 양국의 정치적 상황과 외교 제도의 변화는 단기적인 시간 속에서 교류의 정도를 규정하는 요소가 되었다. 교류의 구체적 양상에서는 우선 교류 주체의 계층적 특성을 고려하였다. 사신으로 대표되는 고관, 관직이 없는 수행관, 그리고 역관이 문인 교류의 중요한 주체였다. 교류의 장소도 또한 분석 범위에 넣었다. 크게는 북경과 북경 이외, 북경 내 다양한 교류 공간이 존재하였다. 교류방식의 부분에서는 직접 만나는 방식과 함께 서신 교류와 관련된 연구들도 정리의 대상으로 삼았다.

The Beijing institute of Russian language and translation of Russian literature in 20th century China

ABSTRACTThis article introduces the key stages and major figures in the historical development of the Beijing Institute of Russian Language (1899–1935), a leading school offering Russian language education in China at the end of the Qing Dynasty and during the Republican era. The institute attracted several notable Russian sinologists and brought up Chinese translators, who became the leading agents of Russian literary thought in China. Current work discusses the contribution that the school’s lecturers made in the field of intellectual and literary exchange between China and Russia while teaching in the Beijing Institute of Russian Language. It evaluates the translation activities carried out by the graduates, predominantly Geng Jizhi, Qu Qiubai, and Wei Suyuan, reflecting the changing priorities of Chinese literary thought from the beginning of the May 4th movement to the late 1930s.

Modernism and Latin America: Transnational Networks of Literary Exchange by Patricia Novillo-Corvalán

Reviewed by: Modernism and Latin America: Transnational Networks of Literary Exchange by Patricia Novillo-Corvalán Vanessa Marie Fernández (bio) MODERNISM AND LATIN AMERICA: TRANSNATIONAL NETWORKS OF LITERARY EXCHANGE, by Patricia Novillo-Corvalán. New York: Routledge Publishers, 2018. 190 pp. $140.00 cloth, $54.95 ebook. Patricia Novillo-Corvalán's Modernism and Latin America: Transnational Networks of Literary Exchange adds to the increasing scholarship that seeks to re-articulate Anglo-Modernism by pointing to its connections with other cultural networks. In five loosely connected chapters, Novillo-Corvalán examines Latin America as an overlooked modernist geography. Each chapter explores a unique avenue in which Latin America's impact on modernism has been overlooked. Novillo-Corvalán's exhaustive research offers new readings of canonical modernist texts such as Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out, D. H. Lawrence's The Plumed Serpent, and Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano alongside new perspectives on Latin American writings by the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges and Chileans Pablo Neruda and Roberto Bolaño.1 On the one hand, her work explores Latin America's influence on canonical Anglo-Modernist writers such as Argentina's importance for Woolf and Mexico's impact on Lawrence and Lowry. On the other, Novillo-Corvalán studies Latin America's relationship with Anglo-Modernism by offering examples such as Borges's and Bolaño's appreciation of a Joycean aesthetic and its presence in their work. A line of inquiry that permeates Novillo-Corvalán's study is attention to empire's role in shaping modernism. Exploring anti-imperialism in Woolf and Neruda in her first two chapters, for instance, offers two perspectives on the topic, the former from an insider, and the latter from an outsider. In chapter 1, "Empire and Commerce in Latin America: Historicising Woolf's The Voyage Out," she points out "that Virginia Woolf puts the complex issue of Great Britain's neocolonial domination in Latin America squarely on the cultural agenda of The Voyage Out" (10). Novillo-Corvalán's analysis in this chapter is an admittedly "intertwined reading" of Woolf's novel because it relies heavily on notes taken by the novelist two years after The Voyage Out was published (21). An engrossing read nevertheless, this first chapter offers an interesting discussion of topics such as Argentina's beef export industry, the country's relationship with Britain, and the novel's critique of British economic imperialism. Novillo-Corvalán [End Page 199] makes it plain that "the prevailing view that [Woolf's] knowledge of the continent was vague, deficient, and, at its worst, non-existent" is false (23). Questioning empire's role in modernist scholarship, NovilloCorvalán's second chapter, "Anti-imperialist Commitments: Mapping Neruda's Transnational Modernist Networks," offers Neruda as an example that "challenges the notion that aesthetic innovation is the product of the West" (51). She bases her argument on the Nobel Laureate's non-Eurocentric "complex émigré status" as a diplomat assigned to South Asia and Buenos Aires (51). In Novillo-Corvalán's estimation, having bypassed "a long-standing Latin American tradition" that required "the pilgrimage to Paris" as a rite of passage for an "aesthetic journey of initiation," "Neruda 'decentres' modernism by underscoring the aesthetic production of alternative cultural centres such as Colombo and Buenos Aires" (51, 52). Juxtaposing Neruda's perspective with Leonard Woolf's "reluctant insider" opposition to British imperialism in Ceylon, this chapter further underscores Neruda's own anti-imperialist position as a "self-conscious outsider" (59). While Novillo-Corvalán's appraisal of Virginia Woolf's and Neruda's negotiation of modernism and empire is thought-provoking, her most engaging examination of the topic surfaces in chapter 3, "The Cultural Politics of World Literature: Beckett, Paz, and UNESCO." This section provides a captivating account of the publication of UNESCO's An Anthology of Mexican Poetry, edited and translated by two Nobel Laureates, the Mexican poet Octavio Paz and the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, respectively.2 Foregrounding UNESCO's narrow, imperialistic attitude towards Latin America, this chapter first delves into Paz's initial misgivings about the project and the contentious episodes surrounding the "Mexicanness" of the anthology that ensued with his...

Rondeau

Rondeau Elizaveta Strakhov (bio) Geoffrey Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls details a dream vision in which Chaucer observes a group of birds, in a mock parliament, arguing over choosing mates for themselves on Valentine's Day. The birds conclude their assembly by singing a rondeau.1 This short lyric, originating in Francophone Europe, traditionally ranges in length between just eight and seventeen lines. It opens with a one- to two-line refrain that is repeated in the middle of the work and again at the end to create the circular structure suggested by its name. Chaucer points to the overseas roots of this form by having his dreamer note that the lyric's music "imauked was in Fraunce" (394, line 677).2 However, extant manuscripts of the Parliament of Fowls do not record anything that would actually resemble a French rondeau: three manuscripts omit the insertion entirely; three replace it with the popular French proverb "Qui bien aime a tarde oublie" [He who loves deeply is loath to forget], which also functions as a popular refrain in French lyric; and three do contain a short lyric text, but it does not actually feature the triple refrain structure.3 As an actual French rondeau, then, the birds' song is a manifest failure. In its failure, though, the moment signifies in other ways. It gestures aspirationally to the prestige of French poetry from across the Channel. The choice to offer the rondeau as birdsong heightens the rumination on translation here: the birds sing in this French mode, even if the song is not being transmitted, so that this scribal confusion is mapped onto an interspecies communication breakdown. In the three manuscripts that replace the rondeau with the proverb, this moment of interlingual rupture is only further intensified. Eclipsing lyric form and stifling bird-song, the French proverb-cum-refrain invades the English text, offering jarring code-switching as a broken replacement for translation. Chaucer's small untransmissible rondeau thus affords a wide-ranging meditation on Anglo-French literary exchange, translation loss, and translation failure, all revolving around the theme of Valentine's Day.4 One generation later these ideas, and the form for their expression, emerged in the poetry of the bilingual Anglo-French poet Charles d'Orléans. Charles d'Orléans composed two Valentine's Day ballades, [End Page 467] one in French and one in English, during his long imprisonment in England from 1415–40, during which he learned English and composed a lengthy cycle of English poetry full of Chaucerian echoes.5 After his release back to France, when he returned to composing solely in French, he produced, among other things, a set of Valentine's Day rondeaux. Amplifying Chaucer's far-reaching discussion of translation, interlingual disjuncture, and the breakdown of communication, Charles's rondeaux showcase the profound cultural force of the humble short-form lyric in the later Middle Ages. Charles's debt to Chaucer's treatment of Valentine's Day is especially apparent in Ballade 72, in which the speaker is woken up on Valentine's Day by the cries of birds choosing their mates. This moment is a clear allusion to the avian setting of the Parliament of Fowls: Charles's birds wish to "wrappe" their mates "in wingis softe" (FS 224, line 2467), while Chaucer's wrap wings around each other's necks (C 394, lines 670–71).6 The Chaucerian resonance is further strengthened by Charles's opening lines—"Whan fresshe Phebus, day of Seynt Valentine, / Had whirlid vp his golden chare aloft" (FS 224, lines 2455–56)—which echo the Squire's Tale's "Appollo whirleth up his char so hye" (C 177, line 671). In a further connection to Chaucer, Charles's birds sing in "ther latyne" (FS 224, line 2465), while again in the Squire's Tale, a falcon speaks in "ledene" (C 175, line 478), that is to say, in Latin. Charles's and Chaucer's odd mutual detail that birds speak Latin itself goes back to a commonplace of troubadour poetry, found in work by poets such as Marcabru and Arnaut Daniel and later Chrétien de Troyes and Guido Cavalcanti.7 As...

Mediated and Marginalised: Translations of Modern and Contemporary Chinese Literature in Spain (1949-2010)

The history and reception of translations of modern and contemporary Chinese literature in Spain form the basis of the discussion in this article. Eighty-four translations of modern and contemporary Chinese literature were published in Spain – either in Spanish or in Catalan – between 1949 and 2010. Using this under-researched corpus as a starting-point, this article explores two interrelated premises: the marginalisation of modern and contemporary Chinese literature in Spain and the mediation of its Spanish reception by Anglophone and Francophone literary systems. To do so, the study investigates the history of translations, pays attention to the evolution of types of translation (direct and indirect), and uses concrete examples from paratexts (back covers and prefaces) and translation reviews. After a discussion of the predominance of indirect translations, three recurring motifs inferred from an analysis of the paratexts and reviews are presented: (a) a preference for documentary value, (b) an insistence on difference and (c) an emphasis on politics and trauma (censorship, dissidence and the Cultural Revolution). In addition, I demonstrate the connections between these recurring motifs in the Spanish reception of Chinese literature in relation to European orientalism and area studies. Ultimately, the recent history of translations of modern and contemporary Chinese literature in Spain helps us to reflect on the complexity and hierarchical nature of literary exchanges on a global scale.

A Study on the Imbalance of Literary Exchange through Translation: Focusing on the case of Korea and Vietnam

A Study on the Imbalance of Literary Exchange through Translation: Focusing on the case of Korea and Vietnam

From Chinese Precious Scrolls to Vietnamese True Scriptures: Transmission and Adaptation of the Miaoshan Story in Vietnam

AbstractThis article deals with the process of adaptation of Chinese precious scrolls (baojuan) vernacular narratives in Vietnam in the period from the 18th to the early 20th centuries, with the example of the Princess Miaoshan story, which served the popular hagiography of Bodhisattva Guanyin (V. Quan Âm). This story was featured in severalbaojuantexts of the 15th-19th centuries that were transmitted from China to Vietnam in the 18th and 19th centuries. Several Vietnamese adaptations, both in Hán văn and in the indigenous language, transcribed in Nôm characters, were circulated in the printed form. We have collected these adaptations and undertaken a comparative study of the texts, demonstrating the complex nature of the literary exchange between vernacular literature with religious themes in Vietnam and China. We examine the place of these adaptations in traditional Vietnamese culture and demonstrate the differences in the social background of the original Chinesebaojuanand their Vietnamese adaptations.

조선 문인 李裕元과 游智開의 시문 교류

李裕元作為朝鮮高宗親政后的股肱之臣, 為冊封元子之事親自赴清, 旅途中偶然結識了永平太守游智開, 二人一見傾心, 以詩證交。李裕元以橘山為號, 嗜橘如命, 故向家居洞庭的游智開求橘樹, 游智開以僅有之盆橘相贈, 助友人完成心願, “橘”也因此成為二人友誼的見證。李裕元欲結交李鴻章, 游智開不辭辛苦, 代為周旋, 終於促成了二李在較長一段時間內的書信往來。李裕元完成使命返程歸國時, 游智開以私集相贈, 李裕元公務之暇翻閱唱和, 以神交於友人。李裕元與游智開的詩文交往是我們考察光緒時期中朝文人詩文交往的重要節點。

Medieval Transculturality in the Mediterranean from a Literary-Historical Perspective. The Case of Rudolf von Ems’ Der guote Gêrhart (ca. 1220–1225)

Abstract Most scholars working on the concept of transculturality consider it a modern phenomenon, but we can discover forms of transculturality already in the Middle Ages, and this in terms of political, scholarly, artistic, medical and literary exchanges. Within the framework of Mediterranean Studies, this article examines the extraordinary case of Rudolf von Ems’ Der guote Gêrhart (ca. 1220–1225) which illustrates how much the Mediterranean world proved to be a highly useful backdrop for the description of transcultural exchanges between the protagonist and a Moroccan castellan, Stranmûr. The verse narrative is based on the experiences of a wealthy Cologne merchant who proves to be extraordinarily open to other cultures, languages and religions and encounters an equally minded Muslim lord. We would not be far off by describing the poet’s projections as a case of medieval tolerance.

Muslim Andalusia: New Insights into Linguistic and Literary Exchanges between the East and the West

This paper offers a new perspective on the cultural relations between Arab Muslims of the East and Christians of the West, in medieval Iberia (known as al-Andalus by the Muslims) from 711 to 1031 C.E, identifying the benefits that emerged from such relations. Evidence has been extracted from primary historical sources, including the travel writings of Ibn Hayyan and Ibn Jubayr, along with other Western sources and writings born out of the academic exchange of ideas and literature between Muslim Spain and the European states of the time. The discussion also draws upon manuscripts and studies that transcend the stereotypical images of the victors and the defeated. The main thesis of this study argues that universal values and mutual respect between Muslim and non-Muslim communities of medieval Spain were in fact the norm and not the exception. It endeavours to show that literature, in all its forms, had a significant impact on the development and maintenance of harmonious, peaceful relations between Muslims and non-Muslims (mainly Christians). The paper highlights the synthesis between the Arabic and Spanish languages, between Arabic and European poetry and between Arab and European tales and stories. The findings contest the idea of a clash of civilisations and instead demonstrate how in medieval Spain, people of various creeds and cultures communicated and interacted successfully in spite of their religious and cultural differences.

A Chill in Spring: Literary Exchange and Political Struggle in the Hundred Flowers and Anti-Rightist Campaigns of 1956–1958

Who had the power to innovate in the linguistic and literary realms in the high Mao era? To date, scholars have emphasized a top-down enforcement of formulaic language through a mixture of Communist Party organization and Maoist charisma. This article challenges the exhaustiveness of that model by articulating the circulation, appropriation, and modulation of literary tropes during the political campaigns of 1956–1958. To this end, it traces the widespread uptake of the titular metaphor of the Hundred Flowers Campaign and its proliferation throughout public debate. Troubling the top-down model is the challenge to this propagation posed by sociologist Fei Xiaotong 费孝通 (1910–2005) with his essay “The Early Spring Weather of Intellectuals” and the impact that essay, and its central metaphor, had on public discourse. In exploring this battle over the metaphorical season, this article reimagines the Hundred Flowers, Rectification, and Anti-Rightist campaigns through the lens of literary exchange. It argues that in distinct cases it was control of public discourse through literary virtuosity that constituted a key battleground during the campaigns.

ANGLO-SOVIET LITERARY CONNECTIONS IN THE 30-ies TWENTIETH CENTURY

The relevance of the topic is due to the fact that cultural interstate relations are viewed as a democratic trend in diplomatic activity. In this connection, it is of scientific interest to reveal the mechanism of participation of various kinds of social circles, organizations and movements in foreign policy activity. In the article the main tendencies, stages and forms of the Anglo-Soviet literary exchange in the 1930s are analyzed on the basis of extensive archival material. It is emphasized that the basis for this was the interest of the public in the mutual enrichment and penetration of the cultures of the two peoples. Socialist construction was the subject of close attention of citizens of capitalist countries. On the other hand, the expansion of literary contacts with Great Britain was viewed by the Soviet leadership as a way to solve a number of political problems. The article concludes that the literary exchange in the 1930s has not undergone significant development, although there has been some revival in this area in 1934–1936, which was due to the improvement of political relations between the two countries. Since 1937 there has been a decrease in the intensity of literary connections. In the second half of 1939 there was a sharp decrease in the number of such contacts, although, in comparison with other cultural spheres, literary exchange still retained its significance. By the beginning of the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union, the cultural ties between Great Britain and the USSR, including literary ones, were virtually collapsed. The reason for this was the negative attitude of most of the British intelligentsia towards the Soviet Union in this period and the antiBritish orientation of Soviet propaganda.

Kiséry, András; Komáromy, Zsolt and Varga, Zsuzsanna (eds) Worlds of Hungarian Writing: National Literature as Intercultural Exchange (review)

Slavonic and East European Review, 96, 2, 2018 Reviews Kiséry, András; Komáromy, Zsolt and Varga, Zsuzsanna (eds). Worlds of Hungarian Writing: National Literature as Intercultural Exchange. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press and Rowman & Littlefield, Madison andTeaneck,NJ,Lanham,MDandLondon,2016.xi+284pp.Illustrations. Notes. Bibliographical references. Index. $90.00: £60.00. Edited and written by international scholars of a Hungarian background affiliated with prestigious universities of two continents, Worlds of Hungarian Writing fulfils and over-fulfils every expectation raised by the title. Providing a near-comprehensive overview of two centuries’ worth of ongoing cultural and literary exchange between a smallish East-Central European nation and the (mostly) English-speaking West, this collection of twelve thematically interrelated essays also caters to readers with a general interest in a whole range of long-established or newly emerging disciplines and research areas. Whether drawing on relevant findings offered by comparative literature, translation theory or memory studies, employing politically committed approaches exemplified by feminist or postcolonial criticism, adding their authors’ insight to developing areas such as intermediality or area studies, each and every chapter in the volume is informed by its writer’s commitment to engaging the reader of whatever academic orientation in a meaningful dialogue with the texts and contexts under examination. This is not to say that those with an expert’s interest in Hungarian or East-Central European studies will not find chapters of particular relevance in Worlds of Hungarian Writing. Scholars whose research is focused on the nineteenth century will want to start with the first four of the chronologically arranged chapters, first delving into Zsolt Komáromy’s treatment of the culturally-coded reasons why such emblematic first-generation English Romantics as William Wordsworth failed to register in Hungary’s cultural memory. The same readers are likely to go on to Veronika Ruttkay’s discussion of how nineteenth-century Hungary’s favourite Scottish poet Robert Burns was domesticated by two of Hungary’s foremost poet-translators of the period, János Arany and József Lévay, each intent on fitting Burns’s demotic diction into his own, peculiar, conception of his country’s ascendant popular-national aesthetic. Literary translation being a highly regarded cultural activity at a time reform-driven, post-revolutionary Hungary was striving to catch up with its perceived cultural betters in the West, Zsuzsa Varga’s introduction of three notable female translators — two aristocratic exiles in London and her country’s first ‘woman of letters’ in Pest-Buda (p. 87) — mediating between their shared homeland’s various ethnic cultures here and those of Germany, Britain, or America there is of as much relevance to historical feminism as it is to Hungarian studies. REVIEWS 325 What emerges from these chapters is that regardless of their class, politics or even gender, Hungary’s leading intellectuals in the period were all bent on adapting the cultural imports arriving from English- and German-speaking countries to the needs of their native country’s identity-formation on the one hand and, especially in the case of Theresa Pulszky and Júlia Jósika, those two progressive patriots in Varga’s chapter, on counteracting the defamatory propaganda spread abroad by forces hostile to Hungary’s national aspirations, on the other. Broadening the book’s perspective in yet another direction, Júlia Bácskai-Atkári’s contribution demonstrates how the poetic form initiated by Byron with Don Juan and Pushkin with Eugene Onegin solidified into nineteenth-century Hungary’s well-defined, prolific, and long-lived verse novel even as the genre faded out of its native environment. Bácskai-Atkári’s study will invite comparison within English literature between the Byronic original and its twentieth-century descendants the verse narratives of David Jones or Anthony Burgess among others. If the informed reader finds some smaller lacunae in these chapters’ argumentation, they will have that much greater incentive to continue with the research begun by the scholars contributing to Worlds of Hungarian Writing. Issues calling for further inquiry include the conundrum why all the Lake Poets were pre-emptively forgotten in nineteenth-century Hungary when only one of them, Wordsworth, was charged with triviality and vulgarity by the country...

Haitians in Exile: The Theoretical Turn

ABSTRACTThis essay chronicles literary reflections and critical exchanges between four Haitian authors—Jean Métellus (Jacmel, 1937–2014), Joël Des Rosiers (Les Cayes, 1951–), Dany Laferrière (Port-au-Prince, 1953–), and Edwidge Danticat (Port-au-Prince, 1969–)—who address the question of the relationship between their Haitian cultural origins and their exile from the place of their birth. It proposes conceiving of Haitian literature as a borderless global exchange based on shared historical and cultural commonplaces that create a literary community sustained by mutual critical gestures and reciprocal dialogues.

Bringing The Scarlet Letter into The Scarlet Professor: A Composer's Reflections

Bringing <i>The Scarlet Letter</i> into <i>The Scarlet Professor</i>: A Composer's Reflections

Rethinking the Eurocentric gaze in narratives of urban modernity: the Shaykh, the Flâneur, and the orientalist in Takhlīṣ al-Ibrīz and ʿAlam al-Dīn

ABSTRACTThis paper situates two early nahḍāh texts, Takhlīṣ al- Ibrīz fī talkhīṣ Bārīz and ʿAlam al-Dīn in the canonical imaginary of urban modernity. The paper argues that Takhlīṣ and ʿAlam al-Dīn capture the impact of technology and urban culture on literary writing in the nineteenth-century. By analyzing the authorial position of the figure of the Muslim shaykh in the nineteenth -century metropolis the paper traces the rise of a global Arabic literary imaginary. I argue that Takhlīṣ and ʿAlam al-Dīn posit the literary text as an essential site of legibility in an urban culture where circulation, mobility, and visual cognition played significant roles in shaping authorial positions. I examine how those two early nahḍah texts impose a reevaluation of the current canonical knowledge of the practice of flânerie—commonly associated with the bourgeois male figure of the flâneur. The paper analyzes the history of shaykh Ṭahṭāwī’s encounter with the culture of flânerie tracing its influence on ‘Alī Mubārak’s ʿAlam al-Dīn. By situating those early narratives in the canon of urban literature, this paper sheds light on the intersection between literary narratives, circulation, visual culture, and the conditions of unequal literary exchanges in modern urban culture.