Gerald Gillespie

Bernard Dieterle

Manfred Engel

In this volume a team of three dozen international experts presents a fresh picture of literary prose fiction in the Romantic age seen from cross-cultural and interdisciplinary perspectives. The work treats the appearance of major themes in characteristically Romantic versions, the power of Romantic discourse to reshape imaginative writing, and a series of crucial reactions to the impact of Romanticism on cultural life down to the present, both in Europe and in the New World. Through its combination of chapters on thematic, generic, and discursive features, Romantic Prose Fiction achieves a unique theoretical stance, by considering the opinions of primary Romantics and their successors not as guiding “truths” by which to define the permanent “meaning” of Romanticism, but as data of cultural history that shed important light on an evolving civilization.SPECIAL OFFER: 30% discount for a complete set order (5 vols.).The Romanticism series in the Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages is the result of a remarkable international collaboration. The editorial team coordinated the efforts of over 100 experts from more than two dozen countries to produce five independently conceived, yet interrelated volumes that show not only how Romanticism developed and spread in its principal European homelands and throughout the New World, but also the ways in which the affected literatures in reaction to Romanticism have redefined themselves on into Modernism. A glance at the index of each volume quickly reveals the extraordinary richness of the series’ total contents. Romantic Irony sets the broader experimental parameters of comparison by concentrating on the myriad expressions of “irony” as one of the major impulses in the Romantic philosophical and artistic revolution, and by combining cross-cultural and interdisciplinary studies with special attention also to literatures in less widely diffused language streams. Romantic Drama traces creative innovations that deeply altered the understanding of genre at large, fed popular imagination through vehicles like the opera, and laid the foundations for a modernist theater of the absurd. Romantic Poetry demonstrates deep patterns and a sharing of crucial themes of the revolutionary age which underlie the lyrical expression that flourished in so many languages and environments. Nonfictional Romantic Prose assists us in coping with the vast array of writings from the personal and intimate sphere to modes of public discourse, including Romanticism’s own self-commentary in theoretical statements on the arts, society, life, the sciences, and more. Nor are the discursive dimensions of imaginative literature neglected in the closing volume, Romantic Prose Fiction, where the basic Romantic themes and story types (the romance, novel, novella, short story, and other narrative forms) are considered throughout Europe and the New World. This enormous realm is seen not just in terms of Romantic theorizing, but in the light of the impact of Romantic ideas and narration on later generations. As an aid to readers, the introduction to Romantic Prose Fiction explains the relationships among the volumes in the series and carries a listing of their tables of contents in an appendix. No other series exists comparable to these volumes which treat the entirety of Romanticism as a cultural happening across the whole breadth of the “Old” and “New” Worlds and thus render a complex picture of European spiritual strivings in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, a heritage still very close to our age.

Romantic Prose Fiction

Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) ist ein Ereignis. Der Schöpfer der Gedichtsammlung "Die Blumen des Bösen" und der lyrischen Prosa in "Spleen von Paris", Übersetzer von Edgar Allan Poe und Bewunderer von Eugène Delacroix ist ein wegweisendes Phänomen für die gesamte europäische Dichtung. Seine eigene Biographie bleibt jedoch ohne bedeutsame Wendungen und große Auftritte, die sich beobachten oder fotografisch fixieren und als Marksteine zu einem konventionellen Lebenslauf fügen ließen. Ausschlaggebend waren vielmehr persönliche Begegnungen von erschütternder Tiefe, die kongeniale Auseinandersetzung mit Werken der bildenden Kunst, der Literatur - und immer wieder das intensive Studieren des Mikrokosmos Paris. Es sind diese Momentaufnahmen, anhand derer Bernard Dieterle den Weg Baudelaires erkundet.

Charles Baudelaire

Yves Clavaron

Université de Saint-Etienne. Centre d'études comparatistes

Les villes sont des hauts lieux de la mémoire. Elle a son versant officiel (celui de l'auto-représentation) constitué par des bâtiments publics et des monuments. Et puis il y a tout le reste, un ensemble peu programmatique de signes ou de traces, souvent de nature plus discrète et plus fugitive, offerts au décryptage des artistes et des auteurs. En tant que dépositaires de ces divers codes historiques, les villes sont aussi des espaces de prédilection pour le travail de la mémoire subjective, elles suscitent des textes (et des images), invitent à se souvenir, à découvrir et à construire le passé.

La mémoire des villes

Société française de littérature générale et comparée. Congrès

Dans les médias, le métissage revêt volontiers la figure séduisante des plages exotiques des Caraïbes ou du Brésil : spectacle coloré d'une fête des corps offerts à la jouissance solaire, expression bigarrée d'une synthèse euphorisante de tous les particularismes et de toutes les différences. Mais le phénomène du métissage ne se réduit pas à ce nouveau produit de consommation des sociétés post-industrielles, entraînées dans d'annuelles migrations des hautes vers les basses latitudes. Dans le processus de rapprochement généralisé que connaît l'exotisme aujourd'hui, les couleurs de l'altérité métisse ne sont-elles pas banalisées et compromises? Non, si l'on comprend le métissage en tant que contraire de l'autisme, exhibition des enjeux de la rencontre avec l'altérité, manière de déjouer l'assignation des identités comme la radicalisation ethnique. La texture métisse s'élabore sur l'hybridation et la métamorphose des identités en contact. Phénomène interculturel et interlinguistique, double acculturation, le métissage est une manière de subvertir le dualisme identité/altérité au profit de l'universalisme et du relativisme. Consensuel et universel, le métissage séduit; perçu comme le cheval de Troie de la mondialisation, il effraie. L'intervalorisation des éléments singuliers et hétérogènes au sein du métissage ne doit déboucher ni sur l'abdication de l'identité ni sur l'amnésie culturelle. C'est ce concept " nomade " que l'ouvrage se propose d'explorer dans le champ littéraire.

actes du XXXIIe congrès de la SFLGC, Saint-Etienne, 8-10 septembre 2004

Métissages littéraires

Gerald Ernest Paul Gillespie

In this volume a team of three dozen international experts presents a fresh picture of literary prose fiction in the Romantic age seen from cross-cultural and interdisciplinary perspectives. The work treats the appearance of major themes in characteristically Romantic versions, the power of Romantic discourse to reshape imaginative writing, and a series of crucial reactions to the impact of Romanticism on cultural life down to the present, both in Europe and in the New World. Through its combination of chapters on thematic, generic, and discursive features, Romantic Prose Fiction achieves a unique theoretical stance, by considering the opinions of primary Romantics and their successors not as guiding truths by which to define the permanent meaning of Romanticism, but as data of cultural history that shed important light on an evolving civilization.SPECIAL OFFER: 30% discount for a complete set order (5 vols.).The Romanticism series in the Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages is the result of a remarkable international collaboration. The editorial team coordinated the efforts of over 100 experts from more than two dozen countries to produce five independently conceived, yet interrelated volumes that show not only how Romanticism developed and spread in its principal European homelands and throughout the New World, but also the ways in which the affected literatures in reaction to Romanticism have redefined themselves on into Modernism. A glance at the index of each volume quickly reveals the extraordinary richness of the series' total contents. Romantic Irony sets the broader experimental parameters of comparison by concentrating on the myriad expressions of irony as one of the major impulses in the Romantic philosophical and artistic revolution, and by combining cross-cultural and interdisciplinary studies with special attention also to literatures in less widely diffused language streams. Romantic Drama traces creative innovations that deeply altered the understanding of genre at large, fed popular imagination through vehicles like the opera, and laid the foundations for a modernist theater of the absurd. Romantic Poetry demonstrates deep patterns and a sharing of crucial themes of the revolutionary age which underlie the lyrical expression that flourished in so many languages and environments. Nonfictional Romantic Prose assists us in coping with the vast array of writings from the personal and intimate sphere to modes of public discourse, including Romanticism's own self-commentary in theoretical statements on the arts, society, life, the sciences, and more. Nor are the discursive dimensions of imaginative literature neglected in the closing volume, Romantic Prose Fiction, where the basic Romantic themes and story types (the romance, novel, novella, short story, and other narrative forms) are considered throughout Europe and the New World. This enormous realm is seen not just in terms of Romantic theorizing, but in the light of the impact of Romantic ideas and narration on later generations. As an aid to readers, the introduction to Romantic Prose Fiction explains the relationships among the volumes in the series and carries a listing of their tables of contents in an appendix. No other series exists comparable to these volumes which treat the entirety of Romanticism as a cultural happening across the whole breadth of the Old and New Worlds and thus render a complex picture of European spiritual strivings in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, a heritage still very close to our age.

Bernard Dieterle

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