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"Foreign countries in literature"
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Literature, travel, and colonial writing in the English Renaissance, 1545-1625
What was the purpose of representing foreign lands for writers in the English Renaissance? This book argues that writers often used their works as vehicles to reflect on the state of contemporary English politics, particularly their own lack of representation in public institutions. Sometimes such analyses took the form of displaced allegories, whereby writers contrasted the advantages enjoyed, or disadvantages suffered, by foreign subjects with the political conditions of Tudor and Stuart England. Elsewhere, more often in explicitly colonial writings, authors meditated on the problems of government when faced with the possibly violent creation of a new society. If Venice was commonly held up as a beacon of republican liberty which England would do well to imitate, the fear of tyrannical Catholic Spain was ever present—inspiring and haunting much of the colonial literature from 1580 onwards. This book examines fictional and non-fictional writings, illustrating both the close connections between the two made by early modern readers and the problems involved in the usual assumption that we can make sense of the past with the categories available to us. The book explores representations of Europe, the Americas, Africa, and the Far East, selecting pertinent examples rather than attempting to embrace a total coverage. It also offers fresh readings of Shakespeare, Marlowe, More, Lyly, Hakluyt, Harriot, Nashe, and others.
eBook
Ethnography After Antiquity
Although Greek and Roman authors wrote ethnographic texts describing foreign cultures, ethnography seems to disappear from Byzantine literature after the seventh century C.E.-a perplexing exception for a culture so strongly self-identified with the Roman empire. Yet the Byzantines, geographically located at the heart of the upheavals that led from the ancient to the modern world, had abundant and sophisticated knowledge of the cultures with which they struggled and bargained.Ethnography After Antiquityexamines both the instances and omissions of Byzantine ethnography, exploring the political and religious motivations for writing (or not writing) about other peoples. Through the ethnographies embedded in classical histories, military manuals, Constantine VII'sDe administrando imperio, and religious literature, Anthony Kaldellis shows Byzantine authors using accounts of foreign cultures as vehicles to critique their own state or to demonstrate Romano-Christian superiority over Islam. He comes to the startling conclusion that the Byzantines did not view cultural differences through a purely theological prism: their Roman identity, rather than their orthodoxy, was the vital distinction from cultures they considered heretic and barbarian. Filling in the previously unexplained gap between antiquity and the resurgence of ethnography in the late Byzantine period,Ethnography After Antiquityoffers new perspective on how Byzantium positioned itself with and against the dramatically shifting world.
eBook
From Francophonie to World Literature in French
In 2007 the French newspaperLe Mondepublished a manifesto titled \"Toward a 'World Literature' in French,\" signed by forty-four writers, many from France's former colonies. Proclaiming that the francophone label encompassed people who had little in common besides the fact that they all spoke French, the manifesto's proponents, the so-called francophone writers themselves, sought to energize a battle cry against the discriminatory effects and prescriptive claims offrancophonie.
In one of the first books to study the movement away from the term \"francophone\" to \"world literature in French,\" Thérèse Migraine-George engages a literary analysis of contemporary works in exploring the tensions and theoretical debates surrounding world literature in French. She focuses on works by a diverse group of contemporary French-speaking writers who straddle continents-Nina Bouraoui, Hélène Cixous, Maryse Condé, Marie NDiaye, Tierno Monénembo, and Lyonel Trouillot. What these writers have in common beyond their use of French is their resistance to the centralizing power of a language, their rejection of exclusive definitions, and their claim for creative autonomy.
eBook
Portable property : Victorian culture on the move
\"Portable Property examines how culture bearing objects came to stand for distant people and places, creating or preserving a sense of self and community despite geographic dislocation. Victorian novels - because they themselves came to be understood as the quintessential portable property - tell the story of this change most clearly. Plotz analyzes a wide range of works, paying particular attention to George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, Anthony Trollope's Eustace Diamonds, and R. D. Blackmore's Lorna Doone. He also discusses Thomas Hardy and William Morris's vehement attack on the very notion of cultural portability. The result is a richer understanding of the role of objects in British culture at home and abroad during the Age of Empire.\"--BOOK JACKET.
Book
Apostles of Modernity
Following World War II, Americans entertained a far more international political, cultural, and intellectual awareness as well as a greater fascination with development, progress, and modernity than ever before. In a revisionist account that takes \"development\" as its main theme, Guy Reynolds charts the responses of novelists, travel writers, and literary intellectuals to the nation's deepening engagement in world affairs. Reynolds remaps recent literary history featuring authors as diverse as James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, Paul Bowles, Pearl Buck, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ernest Hemingway, Peter Matthiessen, Richard Powers, Susan Sontag, and Richard Wright.
Apostles of Modernityoffers an original, in-depth study of the literary manifestations of this period of globalism in novels, memoirs, essays, reportage, and political commentary. Through close readings of texts Reynolds revisits and reassesses U.S. internationalism, showing how writers and intellectuals engaged with a cluster of topics: decolonization, the rise of the Third World, Islamic difference, the end of European empires, China's enduring significance, and transatlantic and cosmopolitan identities. Throughout, the ideals of the United States as \"apostle of modernity\" and sponsor of \"development\" feature as central to American letters in the decades after World War II.
A major contribution to the study of literary internationalism,Apostles of Modernityestablishes new paradigms for understanding America's place in the world and the world's place in America.
eBook
Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora
In this original and interdisciplinary work, Jing Tsu advances the notion of “literary governance\" as a way of understanding literary dynamics and production on multiple scales: local, national, global. “Literary governance,\" like political governance, is an exercise of power, but in a “softer\" way - it begins with language, rather than governments. In a globalizing world characterized by many diasporas competing for recognition, the global Chinese community has increasingly come to feel the necessity of a “national language,\" standardized and privileging its native speakers. As the national language gains power within the diasporic community, members of the diaspora become aware of themselves as a community. Eventually, they move from the internal state of awakened identity to being recognized as a community, and finally exercising power as a community. But this hegemony of the “national language\" is constantly being challenged by different, nonstandard language uses, including various Chinese dialects, multiple registers, contested alphabet usage, and Chinese men and women who write in foreign languages. “Literary governance\" reflects both the consensus-building power and the inherent divisiveness of these debates about language and is useful as a comparative model for thinking about not only Sinophone, Anglophone, Francophone, Lusophone, and Hispanophone literatures, but also any literary field that is currently expanding beyond the national.
eBook