Comparative Criticism: Volume 18, Spaces: Cities, Gardens and Wildernesses

Addresses literary theory and criticism, comparative studies in terms of theme, genre movement and influence, and interdisciplinary perspectives.

E. S. Shaffer (Edited by)

9780521571487, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 7 November 1996

294 pages
23.6 x 15.7 x 2.1 cm, 0.54 kg

This volume, first published in 1996, addresses literary theory and criticism, comparative studies in terms of theme, genre movement and influence, and interdisciplinary perspectives. Geoffrey Hartman, one of the major comparatists of this period, whose subtle phenomenological readings have transformed Romantic studies in English, gives a lapidary account of those poets of the Holocaust Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs, whose refusal of traditional imagery is a last fragile link with it. The twentieth anniversary of the founding of the British Comparative Literature Association in 1975 at Norwich is also marked, with the publication of the plenary papers from the Seventh Triennial Congress held in Edinburgh in 1995. Anne Barton opens on the strange 'Wild Man' figure who haunts the literary and iconographical spaces of Europe, with notable examples in Shakespeare's Caliban and Timon; John Dixon Hunt counters with the civilized garden that is staked out and continuously retheorized in the midst of the forest wilderness.

List of illustrations
List of contributors
Acknowledgements
Frontispeice: L'Abbé Lorrain de Valmont Curiositez de la Nature et de l'Art, 1705
Editor's introduction: Spaces: an overview
Part I. Cities, Gardens and Wildernesses: 'Breaking with every star': on literary knowledge Geoffrey H. Hartman
The wild man in the forest Anne Barton
Paragone in paradise: translating the garden John Dixon Hunt
Native language Robert Crawford
The city in poetry Edwin Morgan
The city of wo/man: labyrinth, wilderness, garden Gerald Gillespie
The troubadour, the shaman and the palace lady: the cross-currents of desire Patrick Michael Thomas
Part II. Literature, Translation and Performance: What is comparative literature? An inaugural. Weidenfeld Visiting Professorship of European Comparative Literature, 1994–5, University of Oxford George Steiner
Winners of the 1994 BCLA translation competition: First prize: Corinna 'Revelation' a novella, translated from the Hebrew by Betsy Rosenberg with an introduction by Michael Sapir
Second prize: 'The Atli Lay' ad 'The Hamthir Poem', translated from the Old Norse with an introduction by Thor Ewing
Eleven stars over Andalusia: eleven poems translated from the Arabic by Mona Anis and Nigel Ryan
Part III. Essay Reviews: Orientalism, cccidentalism, and the notion of discourse: arguments for a new cosmopolitanism. On Edward Said's Orientalism and Chen Xiaomei's Occidentalism: a Theory of Counter-Discourse in Post-Mao China Douwe Fokkema
Heroic modernism: on Christopher Butler's Early Modernism: Literature, Music and Painting in Europe 1900-16 J. J. White
Books and periodicals received, compiled by Simon James: Bibliography of Comparative Literature in Britain and Ireland compiled by Nicholas Crowe.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]