Claudia Olk

Stephen G. Nichols

Hesiod’s concept of a Golden Age, together with analogous myths – Babylonian, Egyptian, Hebrew, etc. – speak to the psychic appeal, perhaps even deep-rooted need, for humans to conceive alternate worlds free from the anguish, toil, and dangers of the one they inhabit. Classical poets and philosophers explored the myth; the Middle Ages imagined it as the land of Cockaigne; Early Modern dramatists incorporated it; Romantic poets and nineteenth-century writers imagined it in various guises. This volume explores the configuration presented by Hesiod and the history of its reception and transformation in European literature and culture. The chapters study how texts written in specific historical moments of European history reshape elements of the myth to explore contemporary issues of concern. The book addresses these issues of cultural hybridization, and, from a transhistorical perspective, provides new insights into the dynamics of epochal shifts. It also looks at similar configurations in non-Western civilizations (China), which complements the spectrum of contributions that covers periods from classical antiquity to the Age of Goethe.

Myths of the Golden Age in European Culture

Joachim Küpper

Andreas Kablitz

The essays in this book lay bare the dynamics of cultural confrontation between Europe and the Mediterranean world from medieval to modern times.

Mediterranean Palimpsests in European Culture

Spectral Sea

Kevin Brownlee

Stephen G.. Nichols

Marina Scordilis Brownlee

"This is a substantial and readable volume, and it is supplied with a rich array of documentation in the notes and bibliography. It deals with a question of critical importance for current research on medieval 'literature': namely, the relationship between this literature and us... This is an important collection, and one may congratulate the editors of their ambitious undertaking."--Paul Zumthor, Speculum.

The New Medievalism

John A. Galm

A. Bartlett Giamatti

Bernart de Ventadorn was a twelfth-century Catalan poet and troubador. These forty-one poems, filled with nostalgia, joy, and tenderness, were written between 1150 and 1180. This edition, with notes and a complete glossary, contains the original texts accompanied by the only English translations available at the time of publication.

The Songs of Bernart de Ventadorn

R. Howard Bloch

"While modernists are currently so mired in the question of who did what to whom during World War II that they have lost a sense of intellectual urgency, the study of medieval literature and culture has never been more alive or at a more interestingly innovative stage." -- from the Introduction Medievalism and the Modernist Temper brings major and outstanding younger medievalists into confrontation with the notion of medievalism itself in order to chart the directions the field has taken in the past and may take in the future. The collection not only explores modern conceptions of cultural patterns in the Middle Ages but also makes a significant contribution to the wider field of sociology of knowledge in the humanities. In its largest sense, it is a study of the institution of modern scholarship, using medieval literature as a focus. Contributors are R. Howard Bloch, Alain Boureau, E. Jane Burns, Michael Camille, Alain Corbellari, John M. Ganim, John M. Graham, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Suzanne Fleischman, David Hult, Carl Landauer, Seth Lerer, Stephen G. Nichols, Per Nykrog, and Jeffrey M. Peck. "This highly original, polemical and paradigm-shifting book challenges academics to look more closely at the ideological foundations of the very disciplines we practice. Perhaps its most extraordinary contribution to literary studies as a whole (and it emerges with luminous clarity from the editors' Introduction) is to offer a new, historicized means of reviving what was once known as 'source studies.'" -- Jody Enders, University of California, Santa Barbara

Stephen G. Nichols

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