Theo d'. Haen

Theo d' Haen

Johannes Willem Bertens

British Postmodern Fiction

The contributors to the present volume, in espousing and extending the programme of such writers as Edward Said, Benedict Anderson, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Spivak, lay bare the genealogy of 'writing' empire (thereby, in a sense, 'un-writing' it). One focus is the Caribbean: the retrograde agenda of francophone créolité; the re-writing of empire in the postmodern disengagement of Edouard Glissant; resistance to post-colonial allegiances, and the dissolving of binary categories, in contemporary West Indian writing. Essays on India, Malaysia, and Indonesia explore various aspects of cultural self-understanding in Asia: un-writing high culture through hybrid 'shopping' among Western styles; the use of indigenous oral forms to counter Western hegemony; romantic and anti-romantic attitudes towards empire and the land. A shift to Africa brings a study of Nadine Gordimer's feminist un-writing of Hemingway's masculinist colonising narrative, a searching analysis of Soyinka's restoration of ancient syncretic elements in his West African re-visions of Greek tragedy, changing evaluations of the validity of European civilization in André Gide's representations of Africa, and tensions of linguistic allegiance in Maghreb literature. North America, finally, is brought back into the imperial fold through discussions of Melville's re-writing of travel and captivity narratives to critique the mission of American empire, Leslie Marmon Silko's re-territorialization of expropriated Native American oral traditions, and Timothy Findley's representation of Canada's troubled involvement with its three shaping empires (French, British, American).

(Un)writing Empire

Hans Bertens

The Postmodern, the (post-)colonial, and the (post-)feminist

Liminal Postmodernisms

Postmodern Fiction in Europe and the Americas

Verbal, Visual Crossings, 1880-1980

C. C. Barfoot

Writers' Reaction to Real and Imagined Revolutions 1789-1989

Tropes of Revolution

American Postmodern Fiction in Germany, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands

'Closing the Gap'

Bart Westerweel

Studies in Anglo-Dutch Literary Translation

Something Understood

Helmut Lethen

Rainer Georg Grübel

This work is a critical evaluation of the concepts of convention and innovation as applied in the study of changing literary values, hierarchies and canons. Two approaches are analyzed: (1) the linking of convention and the subject's awareness of convention, and (2) systems theory. The merits of both approaches are discussed and an attempt is made to combine them and to regard systems of literary communication primarily as systems of conventions. Specific cases of changing conventions and innovation are illustrated with examples from the field of versification (Rimbaud), reception studies (Puskin, Goethe, George Eliot), the dichotomy of forgetting/remembering (Nietzsche, Proust), avant-garde, the American dream, and popular genres assimilated in Postmodernism.

Convention and Innovation in Literature

Nadia Lie

Contributes to Shakespeare studies by examining a number of specific refigurations of Caliban. Authors explore the Caliban figure's role and function within a specific work of art, its relations to the other signifiers in the same work, the interests that are invested in the Caliban figure, and what (and whose) values it represents or advocates. These fascinating case studies are informed by current theoretical debate in areas such as women's studies, sociology of literature, nation-formation, and new historicism. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Figurations of a Character

Constellation Caliban

Pieter Vermeulen

Cultural Identity and Postmodern Writing seeks to ascertain the relationship obtaining between the specific form postmodernism assumes in a given culture, and the national narrative in which that culture traditionally recognizes itself. Theo D'haen provides a general introduction to the issue of “cultural identity and postmodern writing.” Jos Joosten and Thomas Vaessens take a look at Dutch literature, and particular Dutch poetry, in relation to “postmodernism.” Robert Haak and Andrea Kunne do the same with regard to, respectively, German and Austrian literature, while Roel Daamen turns to Scottish literature. Patricia Krus discusses postmodernism in relation to Caribbean literature, and Kristian van Haesendonck and Nanne Timmer turn their attention to Puerto Rican and Cuban literature, while Adriana Churampi deals with Peruvian literature. Finally, Markha Valenta investigates the roots of the postmodernism debate in the United States. This volume is of interest to all students and scholars of modern and contemporary literature, and to anyone interested in issues of identity as linked to matters of culture.

Cultural Identity and Postmodern Writing

Narrative Turns and Minor Genres in Postmodernism

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.

Literature for Europe?

History and Post-war Writing

Text to Reader seeks to find a critical approach that links a novel's form to its socio-cultural context. Combining elements from Iser's reception aesthetics, speech act theory, and Goffman's frame analysis, this book starts from the assumption that a reader has certain conventional expectations with regard to a novel, and then goes on to examine how violations of these expectations rule the reader's relationship to the novel. The theory sketched in the first chapter is then, in four subsequent chapters, applied to The French Lieutenant's Woman by the English author John Fowles, Letters by the American John Barth, Libro de Manuel by the Argentinean Julio Cortázar, and De Kapellekensbaan by the Flemish novelist Louis-Paul Boon. The particular form each of these novels takes is analyzed as correlative to that novel's communicative function. This book will be of interest to comparatists, students of English and American literature, and the literatures of Latin-America and the Low Countries.

A Communicative Approach to Fowles, Barth, Cortázar and Boon

Text to Reader

P. Th. M. G. Liebregts

Wim Tigges

Configuring Romanticism focuses on the ways in which “Romanticism” continues to change shape in light of new discoveries, new readings, new approaches. To this end, some essays here gathered offer novel interpretations of Romantic “classics” such as Wordsworth, Blake, and Southey, or discuss the Celtic roots of Romanticism. Others address the relationship of Romantic literature, particularly the work of Scott, Shelley, and De Quincey, to issues of colonialism and imperialism. Yet others trace the “afterlife” of Romanticism and the Romantics, specifically Byron, Shelley, and Keats, in the writings of Leigh Hunt, Elizabeth Gaskell, James Thomson, Algernon Swinburne, William Michael Rosetti, James Clarence Mangan, Francis Parkman, Gilbert and Sullivan, and T.S. Eliot, as well as in Dutch nineteenth-century criticism. The volume closes with discussions of the Romantic aspects of World War II propaganda, twentieth-century translations of the Aeneid in view of Romantic principles, the Romantic face of recent Québecois fiction, and present-day film versions of Jane Austen's Emma.

Essays Offered to C.C. Barfoot

Configuring Romanticism

Theo d'. Haen

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