Download or read book A History of European Literature written by Walter Cohen and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-19 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Walter Cohen argues that the history of European literature and each of its standard periods can be illuminated by comparative consideration of the different literary languages within Europe and by the ties of European literature to world literature. World literature is marked by recurrent, systematic features, outcomes of the way that language and literature are at once the products of major change and its agents. Cohen tracks these features from ancient times to the present, distinguishing five main overlapping stages. Within that framework, he shows that European literatures ongoing internal and external relationships are most visible at the level of form rather than of thematic statement or mimetic representation. European literature emerges from world literature before the birth of Europe — during antiquity, whose Classical languages are the heirs to the complex heritage of Afro-Eurasia. This legacy is later transmitted by Latin to the various vernaculars. The uniqueness of the process lies in the gradual displacement of the learned language by the vernacular, long dominated by Romance literatures. That development subsequently informs the second crucial differentiating dimension of European literature: the multicontinental expansion of its languages and characteristic genres, especially the novel, beginning in the Renaissance. This expansion ultimately results in the reintegration of European literature into world literature and thus in the creation of todays global literary system. The distinctiveness of European literature is to be found in these interrelated trajectories.
Download or read book Scenes from the Drama of European Literature written by Erich Auerbach and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1984 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scenes from the Drama of European Literature was first published in 1984. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. In his foreword to this reprint of Erich Auerbach's major essays, Paolo Valesio pays tribute to the author with an old saying that he feels is still the best metaphor for the genesis of a literary critic: the critic is born of the marriage of Mercury and Philology. The German-born Auerbach was a scholar who specialized in Romance philology, a tradition rooted in German historicism—the conviction that works of art must be judged as products of variable places and times, not from the eye of eternity, nor by a single unchanging aesthetic standard. The mercurial element in Auerbach's work is significant, for in a life of motion—of exile from Hitler's Germany—he came to believe that literary history was evolutionary, ever-changing—a view reflected in the title of his book, which suggests life and literature are historical drama. Auerbach is best known for his magisterial study Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, written during the war, in Istanbul, when he was far from his own culture and from the books that he normally relied on. In 1957, just before his death, he arranged for the publication in English of his six most important essays, in a volume called Scenes from the Drama of European Literature.As in Mimesis,Auerbach's fresh insights bring to the disparate subjects of the essays a coherence that reflects the unity of Western, humanistic tradition, even while they hint at the deepening pessimism of his later years. In the first essay, "Figura," Auerbach develops his concept of the figural interpretation of reality; applied here to Dante's Divine Comedy,it also served as groundwork for his treatment of realism in Mimesis. A second essay on Dante's examines the poet's depiction of St. Francis of Assisi. The next three essays deal with the paradoxical nature of Pascal's political thought; the merging of la cour and la ville—the king's entourage and the bourgeoisie—chiefly in relation to the seventeenth-century French theater; and Vico's formulation concepts by the German Romantics. In the final essay Auerbach confers upon Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal the designation "aesthetic dignity" because, not in spite of, the hideous reality of the peoms. "A major collection of important essays on European literature, almost all classics, and almost all required reading for their various centuries—thus the book is indispensable for the medieval period,the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries; in addition, the 'Figura' and the Vico essays are very significant theoretical statements. The book is lucid and far more accessible for undergraduates than, say, current high theory. Nor has Auerbach's own work aged . . . All of his varied strengths are evidence in this collection, which is a better way into his work than Mimesis." –Fredric Jameson, University of California, Santa Cruz.
Download or read book Gypsies in European Literature and Culture written by V. Glajar and published by Springer. This book was released on 2008-04-28 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces representations of "Gypsies" that have become prevalent in the European imagination and culture and influenced the perceptions of Roma in Eastern and Western European societies.
Download or read book An Introduction to Modern European Literature written by Martin Travers and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Each chapter concludes with a detailed chronology of the major literary texts of each movement, covering fiction, drama and poetry."--Cover.
Download or read book Metamorphosis and Other Stories written by Franz Kafka and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2008-02-26 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliant new translation of Kafka’s best-known work, published for the 125th anniversary of his birth This collection of new translations brings together the small proportion of Kafka’s works that he thought worthy of publication. It includes Metamorphosis, his most famous work, an exploration of horrific transformation and alienation; Meditation, a collection of his earlier studies; The Judgement, written in a single night of frenzied creativity; The Stoker, the first chapter of a novel set in America and a fascinating occasional piece, The Aeroplanes at Brescia, Kafka’s eyewitness account of an air display in 1909. Together, these stories reveal the breadth of Kafka’s literary vision and the extraordinary imaginative depth of his thought.
Download or read book Lateness and Modern European Literature written by Ben Hutchinson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern European literature has traditionally been seen as a series of attempts to assert successive styles of writing as 'new'. In this groundbreaking study, Ben Hutchinson argues that literary modernity can in fact be understood not as that which is new, but as that which is 'late'. Exploring the ways in which European literature repeatedly defines itself through a sense of senescence or epigonality, Hutchinson shows that the shifting manifestations of lateness since romanticism express modernity's continuing quest for legitimacy. With reference to a wide range of authors--from Mary Shelley, Chateaubriand, and Immermann, via Baudelaire, Henry James, and Nietzsche, to Val ry, Djuna Barnes, and Adorno--he combines close readings of canonical texts with historical and theoretical comparisons of numerous national contexts. Out of this broad comparative sweep emerges a taxonomy of lateness, of the diverse ways in which modern writers can be understood, in the words of Nietzsche, as 'creatures facing backwards'. Ambitious and original, Lateness and Modern European Literature offers a significant new model for understanding literary modernity.
Download or read book The Unbearable Lightness of Being written by Milan Kundera and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2023-03-28 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Far more than a conventional novel. It is a meditation on life, on the erotic, on the nature of men and women and love . . . full of telling details, truths large and small, to which just about every reader will respond.” — People In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera tells the story of two couples, a young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing, and one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover. In a world in which lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and by fortuitous events, a world in which everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence, we feel "the unbearable lightness of being" not only as the consequence of our pristine actions but also in the public sphere, and the two inevitably intertwine. This magnificent novel is a story of passion and politics, infidelity and ideas, and encompasses the extremes of comedy and tragedy, illuminating all aspects of human existence.
Download or read book Landmarks in Classical Literature written by Philip Gaskell and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Providing the context of time and place as well as discussing the translations,Landmarks in Classical Literaturesurveys the most influential authors of ancient Greece and Rome. Part of the three-book series,Landmarks in European Literature, which presents the major authors of European literature and their works, from ancient times until the 20th century, this volume is designed for general readers and students, looking for additional guidance in their reading or wishing to understand the context in which these fascinating works were written. Helping and encouraging readers to explore and enjoy the European literary heritage, theLandmarks in European Literatureseries includeLandmarks in Continental European Literature,Landmarks in Classical Literature, andLandmarks in English Literature, all of which will prove valuable at any library supporting literary studies.
Download or read book Columbia Dictionary of Modern European Literature written by Jean Albert Bédé and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1980 with total page 932 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With more than 1800 critical entries on the writers and literatures of 33 languages, this work presents the entire range of modern European writing -- from the symbolist and modernist works rooted in the last decades of the nineteenth century; through the avant-garde and existentialist movement to Barthes, Blanchot, Breton, and continental thought pertinent today.
Download or read book Essays on European Literature written by Ernst Robert Curtius and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-03-08 with total page 539 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although the reputation of the great German scholar Ernst Robert Curtius was firmly established for English and American readers by the translation of European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, much of his work is still unknown to them. These twenty-four essays, written over a period of nearly thirty years, range widely in time and scope and consider some of the greatest figures in European literature, among them Virgil, Goethe, Balzac, Joyce, Eliot, Ortega y Gasset, and Hesse. The essays show the qualities that made Curtius one of the great critics of our age: his lucid, penetrating mind, his comprehensive erudition, his cosmopolitan outlook, and above all his passionate concern for European culture. Like T. S. Eliot, the subject of one of his finest essays, Curtius believed in an ideal order, a cultural unity of the West. The unifying element in all these essays is a concern to insure the conservation and continuance of European humanistic culture. For him this culture consisted of the literary heritage of Greece and Rome, developed and enriched by the Christian civilization of the Middle Ages. Consequently he selected for discussion those poets and writers who have been conscious of the unity of these two European currents and who have striven to maintain it in our time. As he ranged freely through the languages and literatures of all Western cultures, Curtius himself did much to preserve this tradition, to demonstrate its relevance, and insure its continuity. Originally published in 1973. 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 editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover 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.
Download or read book Europeana written by Patrik Ourednik and published by Deep Vellum Publishing. This book was released on 2024-06-25 with total page 127 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracing the Great War through the Millennium Bug, 1999 through 1900, Dadaism through Scientology through Sierra Leonean bicycle riding and back, award-winning Czech author Patrik Ourednik explores the horror and absurdity of the twentieth century in an explosive deconstruction of historical memory. Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century opens on the beaches of Normandy in 1944, comparing the heights of different forces’ soldiers and considering how tall, long, or good at fertilizing fields the men’s bodies will be. Probing the depths of humanity and inhumanity, this is an account of history as it has never been told: “engaging, even frightening.” At once recreating and uncreating the twentieth century, Ourednik explores the connections across the decades between the disparate figures, events, and politics we thought we knew. Patrik Ourednik’s Europeana merits the author’s reputation as a giant of post-1989 Czech literature. Now translated into 33 languages, the book is a masterwork of cubism, a polymorphic monologue of statistics and movements and fine print and discoveries that evokes the deadpan absurdity of Kafka and the gallows humor of Hašek. Ourednik has created a mesmerizing, maddening account of the past, and his interrogation of “truth” and objectivity resonates now more than ever.
Download or read book Roxolana in European Literature History and Culture written by Galina I. Yermolenko and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-08 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection is the first book-length scholarly study of the pervasiveness and significance of Roxolana in the European imagination. Roxolana, or "Hurrem Sultan," was a sixteenth-century Ukrainian woman who made an unprecedented career from harem slave and concubine to legal wife and advisor of the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent (1520-1566). Her influence on Ottoman affairs generated legends in many a European country. The essays gathered here represent an interdisciplinary survey of her legacy; the contributors view Roxolana as a transnational figure that reflected the shifting European attitudes towards "the Other," and they investigate her image in a wide variety of sources, ranging from early modern historical chronicles, dramas and travel writings, to twentieth-century historical novels and plays. Also included are six European source texts featuring Roxolana, here translated into modern English for the first time. Importantly, this collection examines Roxolana from both Western and Eastern European perspectives; source material is taken from England, Italy, France, Spain, Germany, Turkey, Poland, and Ukraine. The volume is an important contribution to the study of early modern transnationalism, cross-cultural exchange, and notions of identity, the Self, and the Other.
Download or read book Things and Thingness in European Literature and Visual Art 700 1600 written by Jutta Eming and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-12-06 with total page 612 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The eleven chapters in this international volume draw on a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches to focus our attention on medieval and early modern things (ca. 700–1600). The range of things includes actual objects (the Altenburg Crucifixion, a copy of Hieronymus Brunschwig’s Liber de arte distillandi, a pilgrim’s letter), imagined objects (a prayed cloak for the Virgin Mary), and narrative objects in texts (the Alliterative Morte Arthure, the Ordene de Chevalerie, Hartmann von Aue’s Erec, Heinrich of Neustadt’s Apollonius of Tyre, Luís de Camões’s Os Lusíadas, and the vita of Saint Guthlac). Each in its own way, the papers consider how things do what they do in texts and art, often foregrounding the intersection between the material and the immaterial by exploring such questions as how things act, how they express power, and how texts and images represent them. Medieval and early modern things are repeatedly shown to be more than symbolic or passive, they are agentive and determinative in both their intra- and extradiegetic worlds. The things that are addressed in this volume are varied and are embedded, or entangled, in different contexts and societies, and yet they share a concerted engagement in human life.
Download or read book Reconsidering the Postmodern written by Thomas Vaessens and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reconsidering the Postmodern takes the reader on a whirlwind tour through European national literatures. Focusing on novels by authors as diverse as Arnon Grunberg, Michel Houellebecq, Aleksander Hemon and Javier Marías, twelve literary experts reflect on postmodernism and its aftereffects in contemporary fiction. These essays are personal, ironic, and historical without being nostalgic, while reassessing the constantly evolving state of the European novel and the way in which postmodernism has permanently altered the face of fiction. Reconsidering the Postmodern is an important qualitative evaluation of the literary value and legacy of the postmodernism movement.
Download or read book European Others written by Fatima El-Tayeb and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Considers the complications of race, religion, sexuality, and gender in Europeanizing from below
Download or read book Literature for Europe written by Theo d'. Haen and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2009 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Literature for Europe? leading scholars from around Europe reflect on the role played by literature, and by the study of literature, in the constant re-negotiation and re-construction of cultural identities in Europe implied by the accession to the European Union, in the early years of the twenty-first century, of fifteen new member states, with the accession of a number of Balkan states impending, and Turkey waiting in the wings, while at the same time transatlantic relations of the EU to the USA are hotly debated, in politics as in culture, China and India awake as economic giants, and globalization is upon us. At the same time, two of the earliest signatories to the treaties eventually leading to the European Union rejected a proposal for a European Constitution, and linguistic, religious, and ethnic dividing lines show even in some of Europe's oldest nation states. How do literary texts, genres, and forms, thinking about them and teaching them, respond to and shape ongoing processes of European self-understanding in our era of globalization? The volume seeks to answer these questions by charting key developments in a number of fields crucial to the emergence of a European common literary "space" literature and cultural value systems, literature and cultural memory, literary history, translation, the impact of the new media and the information age on matters of literature and identity, and the impact of the postcolonial. Literature for Europe? is a thought-provoking tour d'horizon of cutting-edge developments in the relationship between literary studies and "the matter of Europe," and suggesting an exciting agenda for literary studies in Europe. It will be of interest to everyone working in European studies and/or European literature.
Download or read book Heidi written by Johanna Spyri and published by . This book was released on 1915 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Swiss orphan is heartbroken when she must leave her beloved grandfather and their happy home in the mountains to go to school and to care for an invalid girl in the city.
