Taking Stock - Twenty-Five Years of Comparative Literary Research

Read an interview with Norbert Bachleitner.

In this 200th volume of Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft the editors Norbert Bachleitner, Achim H. Hölter and John A. McCarthy 'take stock' of the discipline. It focuses on recurrent questions in the field of Comparative Literature: What is literature? What is meant by 'comparative'? Or by 'world'? What constitute 'transgressions' or 'refractions'? What, ultimately, does being at home in the world imply? When we combine the answers to these individual questions, we might ultimately reach an intriguing proposition: Comparative Literature contributes to a sense of being at home in a world that is heterogeneous and fractured, rather than affirming a monolithic canon marked by territory and homogeneity. The volume unites essays on world literature, literature in the context of the history of ideas, comparative women and gender studies, aesthetics and textual analysis, and literary translation and tradition.

List of contents

List of Illustrations
Notes on Contributors

Introduction

Part 1
Comparative and World Literature
1 Comparative Literature: Being at Home in the World
John A. McCarthy
2 An On/Off Affair. Voltaire in Eighteenth-Century Vienna
Norbert Bachleitner
3 Ludwig Tieck's Book Collection: the Holdings of the Austrian National Library (önb)
Achim Hölter and Paul Ferstl

Part 2
Literature and History (of Ideas)
4 Pride and Conviviality - Pride in Conviviality. The Rise and Recognition of a Prospective Force
Ottmar Ette
5 Enlightened Citizenship in Lessing's Emilia Galotti and Mozart's Lucio Silla
Carl Niekerk
6 Good Comrades for Young Readers: the First World War in the Fiction of Boys' Periodicals in Britain and Germany
Barbara Korte
7 Fighting the 'Freudian Farce': Vladimir Nabokov's Portrayal of America's Post-War Infatuation with Psychoanalysis
Juliane Werner

Part 3
Women and Gender Studies
8 Enlightenment Angst: James Parsons' A Mechanical and Critical Enquiry into the Nature of Hermaphrodites
Stephanie M. Hilger
9 Writing the Nation, Writing the Self: Discourses of Identity in Fanny Lewald's Italienisches Bilderbuch and George Sand's Un hiver à Majorque
Sandra Vlasta
10 'Jewish Mothers' by Jenny Erpenbeck, Julia Franck, and Adriana Altaras
Agnes C. Mueller
11 Theorising Central European Postcoloniality: a Postcommunist Reading of 21st Century Literature from Slovakia
Dobrota Pucherová

Part 4
Aesthetics and Textual Analysis
12 Aesthetic Illusion and the Breaking of Illusion in Ancient Literature?
Werner Wolf
13 Intermediality in Twentieth Century Animal Poetry. Guillaume Apollinaire - Ted Hughes - Durs Grünbein
Annette Simonis
14 Autofiction and Its (Involuntary) Protagonists: A Comparison of Autofictional Novels by Mario Vargas Llosa, Javier Cercas, Karl Ove Knausgård, and Navid Kermani
Stefan Kutzenberger
15 'Sometimes things begin with the wrong book': Images and Intertexts in Darryl Pinckney's Black Deutschland
Gianna Zocco

Part 5
Translation and Tradition
16 Translation, Transmission, Irony: Benoît de Sainte-Maure and the Trope of the Fictional Source Text in Western Literature before Cervantes
Daniel Syrovy
17 Of 'Conversion' and 'Reversal': Georg Philipp Harsdörffer and His Adoptions of Jean Pierre Camus in the Context of the Counter-Reformation, Reform Catholicism, and Jansenism
Christoph Schmitt-Maaß
18 The Romes of Titus Andronicus
Manfred Pfister
19 Towards a Global South Literary Genealogy: M. G. Vassanji and Joseph Conrad as Secret Sharers in The Book of Secrets and Heart of Darkness
Russell West-Pavlov

Index

Report

"The volume Taking Stock offers a valuable overview of current trends in comparative literature [...]. Since this book is very broad in scope, nearly any scholar of literature and cultural history will find some topics, approaches, concepts, and references of interest. Given that the collected texts are for the most part, case studies, they can be viewed as heuristic examples as well."
-Igor Tyss, Institute of World Literature SAS, Slovak Republic, in World Literature Studies, Vol. 13 Iss. 2, 2021, pp. 99-101

Product details

• Assisted by: Norbert Bachleitner (Editor), Achim Hölter (Editor), John A. McCarthy (Editor)
• Publisher: Brill
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 01.01.2020
• EAN: 9789004546714
• ISBN: 978-90-0-454671-4
• No. of pages: 558
• Weight: 959 g
• Series: Internationale Forschungen Zur
• Subject: Humanities, art, music > History > Contemporary history (1945 to 1989)