Work Of Literary History Research Articles

A Counterfactual Canon

The article analyzes the relationship between gender and taste at Shakespeare and Company. Using the Shakespeare and Company Project datasets, we discover that the majority of the books in the lending library were by men, and that women were almost twice as likely as men to borrow books by women. We also discover that the female authors with a high ratio of male to female readers are now canonical: Agatha Christie, Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore. In contrast, the female authors with the highest ratio of female to male readers are less well-known: Margaret Kennedy, E. M. Delafield, Rebecca West, Elizabeth von Arnim. These final two discoveries are surprising: they suggest that the reading practices of men determined the canon of female authors, and that the reading practices of women might reveal a counterfactual canon of modernism. We consider how this counterfactual canon of female authors might influence future work in literary history.

Editor’s Note

Editor’s Note

Willa Cather’s Naivete

This article locates the place of Willa Cather’s work in literary history by revealing its relation to a central tradition of aesthetics. If at times her work has seemed to waver between romanticism and realism, if today it seems destined to be associated with modernism, yet another set of terms is more appropriate for defining it: by pursuing the sentimental, Cather’s work produces an advanced form of the naive. These terms emerge from an aesthetic tradition that ranges from Friedrich Schiller through Hegel, Emerson, and Ruskin to Theodor Adorno. Applied across Cather’s work, they reveal a mode of perception in her narration that not only elucidates the dialectical relationship between her romanticism and modernism but also offers a dialectical perspective on the relationship between her elegiac tendencies and her visions of empire..

Six Authors in Search of Justice: Engaging with Political Transitions by Michael Newman

Reviewed by: Six Authors in Search of Justice: Engaging with Political Transitions by Michael Newman James Dawes (bio) Michael Newman, Six Authors in Search of Justice: Engaging with Political Transitions (Oxford University Press, 2016), ISBN 978-0190495749, 315 pages. Michael Newman's new book, Six Authors in Search of Justice, is an unusual study. It is the sort of work, I surmise, that can only have been written by a scholar who, looking back on an accomplished career, no longer feels the need to acquiesce to the disciplinary divisions that define success in most scholarship and publishing. Six Authors in Search of Justice is a work of literary history by a political scientist that takes as its topic, broadly speaking, patterns of aesthetic and ethical reflection during times of political transformation. The monograph seeks to bring together two audiences: on the one hand, literary scholars who might be attracted to the case studies of writers Victor Serge, Albert Camus, Jorge Semprún, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Ariel Dorfman, and Nadine Gordimer; on the other hand, political scientists who might be interested in the case studies, respectively, of Stalinist Russia, Vichy France, Spain under Franco, post-colonial Kenya, Chile under Pinochet, and apartheid South Africa. With this as its aim, Six Authors in Search of Justice must thread a needle, simplifying each discipline to appeal to the other. The risk is that literary scholars will find Newman's readings of the selected oeuvres insufficiently [End Page 763] rigorous and dismiss the book; or that political scientists will judge his analysis of regime change theoretically lightweight and likewise turn away. The payoff, however, is that if Newman gets the balance just right between the two disciplines, he wins over both, bridging academia's version of the red state-blue state divide—that is, social sciences and humanities—and thereby contributing to the salutary breakdown of hyperspecialized academic silo-ism. In the end, I think Newman gets the balance just about right—but I have caveats. Before my disciplinary quibbling, however, a quick summary. Newman's goal is to shed light on "problems of justice and injustice in relation to political transitions and transformations,"1 by tracking the evolving ethical and political reflections of prominent authors living through major regime change. His introduction offers a brief biographical introduction of each author and then moves quickly to frame subsequent chapters by mapping out two primary areas of concern: theories of justice and the relationship between literature and politics. For the former, Newman takes the reader on a quick scamper of political theory from John Locke to John Rawls, focusing primarily on justice in liberalism and Marxism. He then briefly catalogues a range of other concepts of justice, including social justice, which focuses upon issues of inequality and redistribution; legal justice, which prioritizes procedural regulations for and between the state and its citizens; historical justice, which demands recognition and redress of past wrongs; and transitional justice, which encompasses a wide range of judicial and non-judicial action to stabilize and heal nations moving out of conflict or state repression. For his shorter primer on literature, Newman uses Sartre's reflections on "committed" literature to pose the question: Does literature that engages with urgent political problems succeed because it brings nuance and depth to issues that might otherwise be simplified for ideological purposes? Or does it fail because it sacrifices aesthetic integrity in favor of didacticism and the inelegant expression of soon-to-be-outdated political commitments? Newman then moves on to the authors. Serge, Newman writes, moved from a Marxist view that demanded revolutionary overthrow of the system to a curbed radicalism that acknowledged the need for institutional checks against dictatorial powers. Camus served in the Resistance to fight what he viewed as the absolute evil of Nazism, but after the war became suspicious of all forms of extreme ideology and violence, in particular shifting to an anti-communist stance. Semprún's and Dorfman's paths were distinct, but similar in the broad sense that they moved from leftist resistance to dictatorship to, with Semprún, anti-communism and, with Dorfman, human rights activism. Ngũgĩ initially focused upon colonialism as the world...

Writing Reconstruction: Race, Gender, and Citizenship in the Postwar South by Sharon Kennedy-Nolle (review)

Reviewed by: Writing Reconstruction: Race, Gender, and Citizenship in the Postwar South by Sharon Kennedy-Nolle Gretchen Long Sharon Kennedy-Nolle. Writing Reconstruction: Race, Gender, and Citizenship in the Postwar South. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2015. 428 pp. $45.00. The political, social, and cultural upheaval of the Civil War and Reconstruction introduced a host of new characters into the American dramatis personae— the wounded veteran, the unrepentant Confederate, the carpetbagger, the widowed [End Page 69] plantation mistress, the emancipated slave and his/her family who define their freedom and citizenship. The postwar Southern literary landscape, drawing on these characters and the postwar context, gave new meaning to themes of regional divide and reconciliation. How, then, is a work of literary history, particularly one whose aim is to explore that period, to organize itself? In Writing Reconstruction: Race, Gender, and Citizenship in the Postwar South, Sharon Kennedy-Nolle hits on a novel methodology. She draws scholarly inspiration from the most bureaucratic of sources—the map drawn up by the Union Army and U. S. government bureaucrats after the surrender at Appomattox. This map, which she kindly reproduces in the book’s early pages, divided the former Confederacy (most of it, anyway) into five districts and laid the geographic basis for the Freedmen’s Bureau rubric of assistant commissioners all reporting to a central commissioner in Washington. This structure provides Kennedy-Nolle with her chapter outline. In each of her five chapters save one (more on that later), she focuses on a single author. For this reviewer, the male authors were familiar. District Two, North and South Carolina gave us Albion Tourgée (novelist and legal scholar), and District Five, Louisiana/Texas contributed George Washington Cable. The women authors, and the locales from which they wrote were lesser known. The book opens with a strong chapter on Constance Fenimore Woolson, a Northern woman who set her travel sketches and short stories in Florida, which along with Georgia and Alabama comprised District Three; it ends with Octave Thanet, another Yankee and part-owner of a postwar cotton plantation in Arkansas. These four writers were all white, with varying degrees of experience with actual enslaved people and divergent styles of fiction ranging from magazine pieces to staged readings, from travel guides to novels. Thanet even dabbled in photography, and one her photographs—a haunting portrait of an African American child laborer—graces the cover of the paperback edition of Writing Reconstruction. All of these white authors took up ideas concerning freed people and their future. While Albion Tourgée wrote a brief supporting Homer Plessy in 1896, Octave Thanet happily reproduced and reinforced racial and labor hierarchies on her plantation, which in true antebellum style she (re)named Thanford, in her own honor and that of her woman companion JaneCrawford. Kennedy-Nolle argues that all of these white authors, who published their work from in the last third of the nineteenth century, imagined roles for African Americans as citizens and laborers. Furthermore, each author explicitly saw the potential for African American freed women to manifest uniquely some of the new contours of freedom. Some of Kennedy-Nolle’s insights on this front are more convincing than others. Most effective are her explorations into Cable’s deployment of enslaved and free women characters in The Grandissimes that allows him to explore interracial love, sex, revenge, and the possibilities of freedom. Woolson’s comparisons between Balearic women laborers originating from a region in Spain and freed black women serves as a concrete reminder of the vagaries of the color line in the late nineteenth century. Kennedy-Nolle’s most innovative chapter comes as she pushes the boundaries of her own formula. In her foray into District Four, composed by Virginia, Kennedy-Nolle chooses to focus on a geographic grey area, West Virginia. And, more innovatively, she explores a few African American writers associated with Storer College (an African American institution that closed in 1955) rather than choose a single, canonical author. This focus is a deft move on a few fronts. Firstly, it frees her to include African American writers without resorting to the “go to” list of late-nineteenth century African...

David Duff Romanticism and the Uses of GenreRomanticism and the Uses of Genre. David Duff. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. xiv+256.

<i>David Duff</i> Romanticism and the Uses of Genre<i>Romanticism and the Uses of Genre</i>. David Duff. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. xiv+256.

History and Rhetoric in the Liber Pontificalis of the Twelfth Century

This article considers the twelfth-century redaction of the Liber Pontificalis, ascribed to Cardinal Pandulphus Romanus, within a broader context than the narrow political perspective of the papal Schism of 1130, within which it has been traditionally discussed. It argues that the resumption of the writing of the ancient papal chronicle that had been interrupted in the late ninth century ought to be seen as expressing the ideal of “renovatio” in the written culture of Rome in the late eleventh and twelfth century, a parallel to the better-known revivals in architecture and the figurative arts, the liturgy, the law, and political thought. Its nature as a work of literary history is shown to reflect significant trends in Roman culture of this period of renaissance, and in particular the revival of interest in antiquity, both classical and Christian, including a renewed fascination with the ancient monuments of Rome, and a return to the primitive traditions of the Church of Rome, a major goal of the Reform Papacy.

How not to Speak of Books You Can’t Ignore – the Trouble with Francophone Literature

How not to Speak of Books You Can’t Ignore – the Trouble with Francophone Literature Oana Panaïté In what follows I propose to examine two works of literary history and one treatise on the evolution of literary language in France, while focusing on the explicit arguments and the implied motivations that constitute what Nicolas Bancel calls a “blockage” but would be better termed as epistemological trouble with the “other” French literature. Before I proceed, one clarification seems necessary: my goal is not to call into question the important contribution made by these works and their authors, first, to the renewal of literary history and second, to a better and more complete understanding of French literature, but rather to invite reflection on the possibilities of overcoming certain academic reflexes which prevent them from fulfilling their intellectual promise. The obvious and the obscured In the introduction to their book La littérature française au temps présent in which they offer a thorough and innovative approach to the study of new forms and directions in French literature, the authors Dominique Viart and Bruno Vercier discuss at length the cultural turn of 1980 and the institutional constraints exerted upon scholars interested in working on contemporary literature, due to what they inspiringly call the “myopia” of French critics towards it. When it comes to drawing the line but also highlighting the connections between “French or Francophone literature?”, the two scholars promptly recognize the idiomatic relation between the two, based on the use of the French language. Furthermore, [End Page 279] they state from the very beginning: “French is a shared language” (Viart 7); however the next line rules out any possibility of a shared literary space: “Several literatures, each one different from the others, are written in it.” In order to justify their refusal of a transfrontier reading, Viart and Vercier then proceed to offer a set of powerful arguments. The first argument relies on the widespread geographical presence of French across many diverse cultures, each with its own irreducible history, political context and racial and ethnic makeup. Therefore, in order to provide an accurate overview of French-language writing in Paris as well as Quebec, Polynesia, Switzerland, Lebanon and Africa, one must, Viart and Vercier contend, have studied in depth these countries or regions and their people. The second argument contends that such a broad reading would simply lead to a superficial and purely tokenistic treatment of Francophone literatures to which other works have allotted only a “minimal section.” The third argument delves into the obstacles facing a transfrontier reading of French-language literature. The most vexing one is the fuzziness of the criteria used to categorize Francophone authors. What criterion could tell us that a writer is French rather than Francophone? his birthplace ? his place of residence? his native publisher? his nationality? [...] Geography and political history have bequeathed us peculiar divisions: one is French in Guadeloupe and Reunion, but francophone in Haiti and Mauritius, although these islands are much closer to each other than to continental France. (8) The criterion of writers’ citizenship presents us with a puzzling set of situations. If only French citizens qualify for inclusion in a history of French literature, then for the last fifty years alone, Nathalie Sarraute, Pascal Quignard, Jean-Marie Le Clézio and Marguerite Duras, should be read side-by-side with Maryse Condé, Édouard Glissant, Déwé Gorodé or Daniel Vaxelaire, who were born in the non-metropolitan French territories, in the Caribbean, New Caledonia or French Polynesia. Another interesting case is that of first or second-generation French writers born of parents who immigrated to the country or of one French and one non-French parent, the classic examples here being the so-called “beur” authors such as Azouz Begag, Leïla Sebbar, and Paul Smaïl. Paradoxically, according to the argument cited above, they are to be considered less “French” than European writers who chose to adopt France and its language to produce and publish their literary works, who [End Page 280] have thus successfully “assimilated”, like Samuel Beckett, Eugène Savitzkaya or Amélie Nothomb. Viart and Vercier set forth a set of pragmatic parameters that fulfill...

Tocqueville in America: An Interview with Leo Damrosch

Tocqueville in America: An Interview with Leo Damrosch Randall J. Stephens LEO DAMROSCH IS THE ERNEST BERNBAUM PROFESSOR OF Literature and Harvard College Professor, Emeritus. He has written an array of biographies and works of literary history, including Samuel Johnson and the Tragic Sense (Princeton University Press, 1972); Symbol and Truth in Blake’s Myth (Princeton University Press, 1980); God’s Plot and Man’s Stories: Studies in the Fictional Imagination from Milton to Fielding (University of Chicago Press, 1985); The Imaginative World of Alexander Pope (University of California Press, 1987); The Sorrows of the Quaker Jesus: James Nayler and the Puritan Crackdown on the Free Spirit (Harvard University Press, 1996); and Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius (Mariner Books, 2007), a National Book Award finalist. His latest book, Tocqueville’s Discovery of America (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2010), uses the journey of Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont to reveal the lively character of 1830s America. Historically Speaking editor Randall Stephens caught up with Damrosch at his Widener Library office and spoke to him about the work and influence of one of America’s keenest observers. Randall Stephens : There were many Europeans who traveled through America in the 1830s and 1840s and wrote about their experiences. Why has Tocqueville’s account withstood the test of time while the published observations of so many others have faded into obscurity? Leo Damrosch : Tocqueville had an overriding purpose. He wanted to understand American democracy. He was convinced that democracy was the way of the future. His family was very reactionary and had reason to be. They suffered in the French Revolution, and his parents barely escaped execution. They wanted to turn back the clock, and he was certain that that could never be. But he was also of two minds about democracy. He was interested but skeptical. He asked Americans a lot of really penetrating questions and was more open-minded than most visitors were, particularly when it came to politics. Most Europeans came to see what American manners were like. If they were interested in politics, they tended either to be quite conservative, so they came here to prove that democracy doesn’t work, or they were very liberal and came armed with even more radically egalitarian ideas for Americans to adopt. They had an ax to grind. He didn’t in that sense. He paid attention to anyone with something interesting to tell him. It didn’t matter if they were famous, as some of them were, or backwoods storekeepers. He wanted to know what Americans themselves had to say about American democracy. Sam Houston is a great example. I believe that he gave Tocqueville the kernel of his great chapter on race in America. Houston had grown up with the Cherokees and lived with them even in adult life. Houston said that the Indian has always enjoyed absolute liberty; he has been taught from infancy to make every decision for himself. You will never get him to assimilate into American society. And at the other extreme slaves had never been allowed to make any decisions for themselves. They wouldn’t know what to do with freedom because they’d never had any. This notion is the lynchpin of Tocqueville’s long chapter on race. And I think it came from Houston. When Tocqueville met him, he seemed at first like an absurd kind of backwoods raffish character. Tocqueville couldn’t believe he had ever been governor of one of the states, but when he got to know him he paid attention to what Houston had to say. When Tocqueville arrived in America, his English was only passable. He could read it better than speak it, which is true of my French. By the time he left he was pretty fluent, but he didn’t have an ear for slight differences in usage that drove English visitors up the wall. So what seemed to them vulgar or coarse or uneducated didn’t matter to Tocqueville. He was an aristocrat. He believed that it was his duty to work hard for the public good as had his father, an administrator of the French government. In America he saw that status was...

"God and Trujillo": Literary and Cultural Representations of the Dominican Dictator (review)

IGNACIO LOPEZ-CALVO, God and Trujillo: Literary and Cultural Representations of the Dominican Dictator. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2005. 256 pp.A large body of works on the Dominican dictator Rafael Leonidas Molina (1891-1961) went largely unknown in its breadth and multiform complexity, at least outside certain literary circles, until the appearance of this significant 2005 study by Ignacio Lopez-Calvo. Lopez-Calvo describes the scope of his book in these terms: Besides contributing to the rescue of the voices of numerous Dominican authors and testimonialists from oblivion, this study adds further insight into the lasting effects Trujillo's ironclad rule had on the Dominican psyche, on the formation of the Dominican nation, and on the contemporary political arena (xv). Such insights are substantiated by the book's astounding catalog of atrocities committed under the aegis of the dictatorship, whose monstrous abuses were masked in general by the regime's own extreme style but also justified, perhaps most notably, in the invocation of the providential principle God and Trujillo by courtesan and heir to the Trujillist legacy, Joaquin Balaguer.Indeed, what Lopez-Calvo accomplishes here is a dynamic sort of x-ray (reminiscent in some ways of Martinez Estrada's Radiografia de la pampa) of the authoritarian personality in and through the multiple dimensions of domination. Making this book a must-read for all concerned the blight of dictatorship and its treatment in the novela del dictador is the thorough-one could say horizontal-approach taken by the author in his account of virtually every literary text having to do the dictatorship. As Gene H. Bell-Villada rightly notes in his foreward to the book, Lopez-Calvo succeeds in providing necessary plot summaries with skill and sensitivity (xi). Not only plot summaries, but also an invaluable reconstruction of the contexts render understandable the sociopolitical critique that the author elaborates in masterful prose. The entire book constitutes a complex cautionary tale, grounded in a reading of some thirty-six narrative texts, which takes in the entire system of Trujillo's hell and explains the ways in which the dictator turned the whole Dominican Republic into his private corporation and the whole Dominican citizenry into his accomplices.As the author states on the first page of his preface, he aims to fill a surprising lacuna in the critical study of the narratives. In doing so, Lopez-Calvo's contribution not only supplies us valuable insights into the mechanisms of the dictatorship but also validates the use of literature as a way of knowing and analyzing the inner workings of tyrannical rule and the wounded psyche of a people who most directly suffered its violence. Attentive to the conventions of the genre as well, Lopez-Calvo appropriately places the narrative of the trujillato in the context of the Spanish American novel of the dictator, so as to elucidate the place of this body of works within a larger literary tradition.This work of literary history is also a valuable political analysis: recourse to the tools of criticism, it lays bare the monstrous Machiavellianism of Trujillo's rule over all Dominicans in all its diabolical themes and variations. Lopez-Calvo recalls the dictator's ruse of ordering the execution of his adversaries but afterwards honoring the same victims and pledging justice against their assassins. He also tells of the corruption of the intellectuals, some of whom had long opposed the tyranny only to succumb finally to its blandishments or extortions. Additionally, he relates the dictator's penchant for picking and choosing schoolgirls whom he forced or seduced into sexual submission, as in the well-known case of Lina Lovaton. Lopez-Calvo's study thus provides an etiology of subjugation under the shadow of Trujillo. Among the book's signal achievements is an examination of the not widely read The Era of (1956), written by the former subordinate and later critic of the regime, Jesus Galindez, who, working in self-imposed exile as a professor at Columbia University, was almost certainly abducted by Trujillo's agents and returned to the Dominican Republic, where he was tortured and executed. …

Introduction

Introduction Donna Landry and William J. Christmas When Raymond Williams wrote of the democratizing of print culture that began in the early modern period as a "long revolution," he sounded a celebratory note. He did not, however, suggest that the transformation would be an easy one.1 Recovery work in literary history has enriched our understanding of the many writers of laboring background who achieved some success in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Many of these writers for whom the epithets "humble," "uneducated," or "labouring" appeared as essential labels—credentials as necessary for entering the literary marketplace as press cards for press conferences—were poets. Their struggles often strike modern readers as heroic, and their careers may seem miraculous. Touched by the numinous hand of celebrity, their sweaty and poorly paid day jobs now put behind them, they emerge in authorial splendor, possessed of slim volumes of verse. The emergence of these writers into historical view as laborers as well as poets, however, is accompanied by certain critical consequences. As representatives of the working class, the downtrodden and exploited, they are often scrutinized for their political awareness and critical capacities as much as for their mastery of verse forms or ingenuity of poetic innovation. Ideology critique and political-contextual reading have been the dominant forms of critical analysis brought to bear upon these poets. Yet this emphasis might be said to contradict the animating purpose of these writers, in so far as they were first and foremost poets. Whatever their political alignments, poets have traditionally engaged with intoxicated or metaphysical inspiration, if not bardic prophecy; they have committed themselves to demanding forms and to technical expertise, whether they were writing for Ottoman courtiers, city artisans, fellow drinkers at taverns and alehouses, or country gentry, and whether their chosen medium was the broadside ballad or the epic. The most common question elicited by endeavors to bring neglected writers to light has always been "But were they any good?" Pious answers have often [End Page 413] been given to this question: intrinsic historical interest, history from below, righting the historical record with regard to the actual contributions of working-class men and women, challenges to bourgeois aesthetics. Analyzing laboring-class poetry according to strictly formal criteria without some obeisance to the ideological or political stakes involved has rarely been undertaken, if at all. It remains an open question as to whether or not the aesthetic as a category of analysis can ever float entirely free of political or ideological determinants. Yet to subordinate, if not bury entirely, formal and aesthetic questions in favor of social and political ones is to be once again complicit in tying laboring-class writers so tightly to their social difference from polite culture that their achievements cannot be appreciated artistically, but only sociologically. In raising such aesthetic matters, we hope this special issue of Criticism might go some way toward rectifying previous critical imbalances between history and the literary, or politics and aesthetics, with regard to laboring-class writing. There has now been a sufficient body of textual recovery work done on British laboring-class poets for their collective literary achievement to begin to appear to public view. Laboring-class poets could be glimpsed in revisionist anthologies like Roger Lonsdale's influential Oxford pair or Andrew Carpenter's Verse in English from Eighteenth-Century Ireland, but in order to engage in a serious reading of these poets, a good archive or a penchant (and patience) for microfilm was essential.2 In just the last few years, however, a wide range of laboring-class poetry has appeared in edited editions both large and small. Noteworthy volumes include Robert Bloomfield's Selected Poems, Isabella Lickbarrow's Collected Poems, the last installment of the magisterial Clarendon edition of John Clare's complete poems, and The Works of Mary Leapor, the first critical edition of a laboring-class poet not named Clare to appear since the late nineteenth century.3 The publication of the monumental Pickering and Chatto edition of poetry by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century laboring-class writers marks a watershed in terms of public accessibility and potential knowledge.4 Here, over its six volumes and some twenty-five...

Lilyan Kesteloot and the History of African Literature

For specialists as well as for African students, indeed even for the merely curious, Lilyan Kesteloot has been indisputably, among European critics of African literature, one of the most defining figures of the literary life of the black world for the past forty years. Moreover, Africa has not been, for this scholar of Belgian origin, a simple object of study to be examined in the cold light of science, which, as we furthermore all know, is often the shamefully derelict excuse that is proffered. She chose very early on to burn with passion for Africa .... But was it truly a choice? Rather, it might be said that Africa was imposed on her through force of circumstance; her fate has been linked to it; she settled in; she lives and she works there; Africa is very much a part of her. Since 1963, the date of publication of her first work, Les ecrivains noirs de langue franfaise: naissance d'une litterature, the result of research for her thesis defended two years earlier at the Institute of Sociology at the University of Brussels, Lilyan Kesteloot's contribution to African literary criticism has been considerable. Beyond that first work of literary history, many other essays, an anthology, and critical studies with a pedagogical purpose have made her, with the passing of time, the most internationally recognized specialist of the movement: Aime Cisaire, poete d'aujourd'hui (1963), Anthologie negro-africaine: Panorama critique des prosateurs, poetes et dramaturges noirs du XXeme siecle (1967), et situation coloniale (1968), Aime Cesaire, l'homme et l'oeuvre (1973), Comprendre le Cahier d'un retour au pays natal d'Aime Cesaire (1982), Comprendre les poemes de Leopold Sedar Senghor (1986). But Lilyan Kesteloot demonstrated quite early the will to offer, beyond the Negritude movement, the broadest possible view of literary life in Africa and the black world, as can be seen in her Neufpoetes camerounais (1965), the successive reissues (1981 and 1983), with revisions and additions, of her Anthology negro-africaine, and the Memento de litterature africaine et antillaise. Histoire, oeuvres et auteurs (1995), written as a textbook for use in schools and universities.

Feeling, Evidence, and the Work of Literary History: Response to duCille

Journal Article Feeling, Evidence, and the Work of Literary History: Response to duCille Get access Sara Blair Sara Blair Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar American Literary History, Volume 12, Issue 3, Fall 2000, Pages 463–466, https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/12.3.463 Published: 01 October 2000

Nekrolog over Gustav Albeck

Gustav Albeck 1906 - 1995By William MichelsenWilliam Michelsen writes an obituary of Gustav Albeck, Professor of Nordic Literature. In his commemorative words, William Michelsen quotes at some length from the commemorative speech, made by Bishop Henning Høirup, Doctor of Divinity, on the occasion of Gustav Albeck’s funeral in the Cathedral of Aarhus.In his commemorative speech Bishop Høirup describes Gustav Albeck’s close ties to Aarhus, where his father, Chief Consultant Viggo Albeck, was the prime mover behind the foundation of the University of Aarhus. Thus, Gustav Albeck’s first publication after his university graduation in 1932 was a pamphlet about the history of the establishment of the Jutland university. The paper is evidence of a fundamental feature of Gustav Albeck’s personality: his loyalty to the family, and to the heritage from previous generations. It is emphasized by Henning Høirup that Gustav Albeck’s research work covered a wide field from runic inscriptions to modem Danish 20th century literature, and that his personal commitment and sympathetic insight combined seriousness with humour, most often inextricably linked together. As an expert on Danish Golden Age literature Albeck was superb. Høirup describes Gustav Albeck’s inspiring work in the Grundtvig Society from its foundation, and his 43 years as editor of Grundtvig Studier, the high scholarly standards of which were of paramount importance for him. Finally Bishop Høirup tells about Gustav Albeck’s invaluable work to promote classical music in Aarhus, and he concludes his speech by remarking on the joy felt by Albeck over the gift to man received in baptism, and his love of Danish poetry.Subsequently William Michelsen draws an equally personal portrait of Gustav Albeck and his work in literary history, in Grundtvig scholarship and popular enlightenment. Gustav Albeck took his M.A. degree in Nordic philology in 1932, and became a Doctor of Philosophy with his thesis on the Nordic Kings’ sagas in 1946, and in 1959 he was appointed Professor at the University of Aarhus, after having been on the teaching staff for a number of years. As early as 1934 Grundtvig wrote his first study of Grundtvig’s early poetry, and through the 1940s he published a number of shorter books on Grundtvig’s writings. In 1948 he contributed to the first annual volume of Grundtvig Studier, and in 1951 he became the editor of the yearbook, a post he held until his death.William Michelsen suggests that Gustav Albeck’s Grundtvig research should be seen on the background of Grundtvig’s visions of a new Danish university, unhampered by rigid academic traditions - visions that found expression in Grundtvig’s folk high school thoughts and his ideas of a Scandinavian university in Gothenburg. Gustav Albeck regarded the University of Aarhus and the University Extension Institution as realizations of these ideas. He agreed with Grundtvig about the crucial importance of popular enlightenment, but always preserved an objective and matter-of-fact distance to the ideas in Grundtvig’s writings. What was important to Gustav Albeck in literary studies was to state what literature says, not to evaluate it or relate oneself personally to it. Thus, to him it was essential to emphasize that Grundtvig was a poet and a great poet - a visionary poet who remained critical towards his own time. Albeck’s philological approach to literary scholarship finds expression in his work on Grundtvig manuscripts, such as the publication of .Grundtvig’s diaries and extract collections. in 1979. Albeck’s most significant book as a Grundtvig scholar was published in 1955 in the series Acta Jutlandica, entitled .Around Grundtvig’s Poetry Collections.. This book deals with Grundtvig’s poetical works in the years 1808-1816, but also contains a large amount of material that throws light on Grundtvig’s development over these years.Fundamentally important to Grundtvig research is Gustav Albeck’s preparation of a model for the registration of Grundtvig’s posthumous works, used by the group of scholars who worked out the 30-volume register. Gustav Albeck’s greatest book is his last publication, .University and People., from 1984, with the modest subtitle .Contributions to the History of the University Extension Institution.. The book contains a wealth of information about how Grundtvig’s vision of a people’s university became a reality around the turn of the century. For 30 years Gustav Albeck was the president of the University Extension Institution in Aarhus.William Michelsen concludes his obituary of Gustav Albeck by pointing out that as Albeck saw him, Grundtvig was not so different from his own time as we tend to see him today. And Gustav Albeck could finish his chapter on Grundtvig in the Politiken Literary History by quoting Jørgen Elbek saying that Grundtvig, with his unshakable faith in the word, was a poet in a far more exclusive sense than any of his contemporaries.

Works of Literary History as an Instance of Historicity

Works of literary history are an integral part of the global literary phenomenon that we shall call a polysystem, after Itamar Even-Zohar (1978). We might consider these works, taken as a whole, as a system within the polysystem, in the sense that they determine several domains of literary and cultural life.' Our task as historians will be to show the correlations between these domains and the functioning of the system that they compose, the ultimate effect of which is the constitution of a nation's official literary canon. The first domain encompasses the teaching and the didactics of literature, in which the school textbook serves as the prototypical instrument. To explore this domain, it is necessary to have information about academic levels and curricula within the educational institutions of a given nation. It is

Banished from their father's table: loss of faith and Hebrew autobiography

In this work of literary history and criticism, Alan Mintz details the development of a new mode in Hebrew prose narrative - the autobiography. Against the historical background of the Haskalah (Enlightenment), Mintz explores the work of three key writers including: M. Z. Feierberg, M. Y. Berdichevsky, and Y. H. Brenner. At the turn of the century, these Hebrew writers found in autobiography a way of telling the truth about the realities of the self, its inner life, and its fate in a world void of God. Through careful examination of the Hebrew autobiographical tradition, Mintz provides not only new understanding of a literary genre but also access to a unique perspective on modern Jewish history.

Authority, autonomy, and representation in American literature, 1776-1865

From the Revolutionary War to the Civil War, a familiar scene appears and reappears in American literature: a speaker stands before a crowd of men and women, attempting to mitigate their natural suspicions in order to form a body of federated wills. In this important study of the relationship of literature and politics, Mark Patterson argues that this scene restates political issues in literary terms and embodies the essential problems of American democracy facing both politicians and writers: What is autonomy? How does representation work? Where does true authority lie? Beginning with the debate over ratification of the United States Constitution, Patterson follows out the complex literary consequences of these questions.A work of literary history and criticism, this study also offers valuable insights into matters of political and literary theory. In separate chapters on Benjamin Frankin, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, and Charles Brockden Brown in the post-Revolutionary period and on Fenimore Cooper, Emerson, and Melville in the antebellum period, Patterson provides a series of brilliant readings of major texts in order to describe how American writers have conflated political and literary concerns as a means to their own social authority.Originally published in 1988.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The Towneley Processus Talentorum: Dicing Toward Jerusalem

The Play of the Talents may be the most surprising work in literary history, simply because it depends so heavily on the use of game as a context for its narrative, its drama, its moral instruction, and ultimately its art. Crowded into its four hundred and twelve lines are continuous references to a lottery, dicing, and several other games, along with the violence, cursing, anger, and disappointment that attend the losers in such contests. There is also a great deal of the mirth and tumult that accompanies winning. This is astonishing because the play covers a very sobering topic: the gambling for Christ’s seamless robe immediately following the crucifixion.