Literature Compass最新文献

Amélie Nothomb's 1999 novel Stupeur et Tremblements portrays the misadventures, misunderstandings, and misgivings experienced by a Belgian professional in a large, modern Japanese workplace. This book is often read as an autobiographical account of the author's Japanese experience and a satirical critique of Japanese society. I argue that, while the narrator is unable to perform the duty for which she was hired, as a translator, she acts as an interpreter of Japanese mores. Always and indelibly perceived within the boundaries of Western culture in the novel, Japan becomes a stylised construct replete with references to Western concepts. My article sheds light on how this construct takes shape in the text by focusing on the narrative techniques that foreground the narrator's immersion in Western culture, including allusions to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, paraphrasing and injecting meaning, namedropping key Western figures and concepts, and using the eye as a recurring motif and metaphor.

The eighteenth century was a period of vital importance for the development of women's poetry: with each passing decade, more women began to read and write verse in every available genre and form. Since the late 1980s, this poetry has become increasingly accessible, and individual women poets have been thoroughly integrated into academic research and teaching. This essay provides an overview of recent scholarship on eighteenth-century women's poetry. It begins by outlining broad trends in women's literary history which have shaped the field, before highlighting the unique challenges that women's poetry presents. It then offers a more focused survey of recently published scholarship, with an emphasis on the last 2 decades. Emerging research themes span from the growth in book history and manuscript investigations, to the resurgence of formalist interpretation. Studies of women's poetry have allowed scholars not only to reassess women's contributions to eighteenth-century literary history, but to reconsider the very nature of that history—by re-envisioning how and why poetry was written, innovated, circulated, published, read, and valued within the period. The essay concludes by proposing future directions for the field, including the need for continued recovery work, more critical editions and monograph studies, new methodologies, cross-period dialogues with scholars of early modern and Romantic women's poetry, and practical initiatives to support precarious early career researchers.

This article gives an overview of health humanities (HH) scholarship within British Romanticism as a literary historical field. Romantic literary studies has a peculiar relationship to HH work—one that justifies examining it separately from its adjacent fields, 18th-century and Victorian studies. The article surveys HH work from the past 20 years of Romantic scholarship, drawing some conclusions about how the field's history has informed its current shape, before offering some tentative predictions about the future.

This review essays opens with concerns over “crisis” that have spurred widespread panic about the state and future of the humanities. Crisis, I suggest, is the rallying call for new directions in and reinvention of 18th-century queer studies. By advocating for recuperative histories wherein crisis is a motivational force that pushes 18th-century queer studies to be further self-reflexive and intersectional, I examine three potent trends and their portents for 18th-century studies: masculinity studies, the nexus of queer and disability studies, and trans studies. I close with a continued call for examinations of queerness and race as they might enlighten the long 18th century. This article ultimately surveys current terrains of 18th-century queer studies and its commitments to evolve inclusively, dynamically, and unapologetically.

Aesthetic considerations have often been ignored, or even derided, when it comes to discussions of race in the 19th century. A disregard for aesthetics and the genres that arise from aesthetic experience has prevented critics from seeing how crucial such questions are to thinking about racial formations. This essay argues for the necessity of taking aesthetic practices and effects seriously in contending with questions of Irishness and anti-Irish racism in Victorian Britain. In attending to Pre-Raphaelite fellow-traveler Ford Madox Brown's The Irish Girl (1860), this essay demonstrates how formal approaches not only allow us to observe how racial formations come to be in aesthetic terms but also teach us how to fully see the subject of the painting herself. Thinking about the painting according to the conventions of portraiture is significant for understanding the strategies by which minoritized racialized subjects—and particularly women and girls—make themselves visible.

Today’s world is changing rapidly, and writers are sensitive to these dynamics in their work. This article examines the principle of movement in the poetics of two modern novels: Steamship to Argentina (2014) by the Russian-German writer Alexei Makushinsky and Runaways (2007) by Polish novelist and Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk. As the literary analysis demonstrates, the principle of movement is a constitutive element of the artistic whole of these novels. It defines the image of the character, plot, spatial and temporal coordinates, and figurative dimension. The very titles—Steamship to Argentina and Runaways—are metaphorical and esthetically significant. To reflect this significance, the authors of this article offer an alternative translation of the title of Olga Tokarczuk's novel. When published in English, it was titled Flights. However, Runaways is semantically closer to the original Polish Bieguni and, as the article demonstrates, correlates more strongly with the semantic level of the text. Drawing on M. M. Bakhtin's ideas on the historical poetics of the novel, this study concludes that the poetics of Steamship to Argentina and Runaways is a form of representation of the new picture of the world, dynamic and transitional. This new literary world is recreated through the mobile chronotope and translingualism.

The article is in two parts. The first part tries to make an intervention in the ongoing debates on modernity. Based on extensive archival research on the numerous discussions and debates around questions of the ‘new kind of newness’, in the nascent Odia print public-sphere, it offers a detailed analysis of the advent of modernity in colonial Odisha. It works under the premise that since much of the Anglophone analysis of modernity in specific historical periods is conducted in non-vernacular idioms, the discourse itself does not remain uncontaminated by the historical baggage of the source cultures. Instead, this article prefers to bring into focus and analyse extant discourses in the vernacular to understand how the new Odia elite responded to Euromoderity when it impacted their culture under colonial hegemony. Beginning with the earliest discussions of newness in education, technology, medicine, notions of enlightenment and reason, and new literary genres, the Odia elite used such terms as bartaman, navya, nutana etc. as adjectives to refer to the newness. Soon, the term adhunik (for modern) came into vogue; but, the earliest deployment of this term was rather tentative, and began to stabilize around the turn of the century. This in itself tells the story of the uncertain steps Euromodernity takes in the colonial context. The analysis focuses on understanding how the cognitive and empirical aspects of modernity are understood in the Odia vernacular, as it tries to trace the progress of modernity in the Odia-speaking tracts. It looks to identify the moment of rupture in Odisha that changed the way the Odia elite saw themselves. The second part to follow will examine such questions as the possible co-existence of tradition and modernity; contradictions involved in the reception of modernity and whether Euromodernity itself remains unchanged in its new location.

This essay discusses Gertrude Stein's literary portraits within the affective terrain of literary and cultural studies by focusing on the idea of collaboration and relationality. It attempts to configure Stein as a sensory collaborator by concentrating on the oral/aural and other nondiscursive sensory qualities such as touch that Stein insists on, specifically through repetition in her literary portraits, which have been read mostly in the context of the poet's engagement with the visual arts. I offer a new reading of Stein's writing, beyond the visual paradigm, by considering her idea of listening as a form of attention and care. Furthermore, I look at how this affective mode is realized through her approach to writing poetry as an act of “caressing” her subject matter. I argue that Stein's writing is a site for sensorial collaboration, in which new modes of relation emerge, as her literary portraits suggest the ways in which our senses implicate not only one's individual perception of the subject but various forms of sociabilities and affective connections. This essay ultimately proposes that Stein's insistence on making telling, listening, repeating, and what she calls “caressing” into a combined mode of relation evokes how poetry can become a site in which extending or transforming oneself into a collaborative mode of being becomes possible.

In 18th-century Europe and North America, portraiture satisfied multiple purposes: the creation of individual and/or familial identity, verisimilitude, and the decoration of a home. Self-portraiture, a likeness of an artist created by the artist, often served as an artist's statement that articulated professional goals. Textile self-portraits, however, unlike the more popular sculpted and painted versions, have been neglected by scholars of the early modern period. Three examples were made by English embroiderers Mary Linwood (1755–1845), Mary Knowles (1733–1807), and Marie Thérèsa Lasselle (1735–1819), a New World settler whose family traded with Native American peoples on behalf of the British. Because the lives of these women are poorly documented, their embroidered self-portraits were more than just a likeness, for they served an important autobiographical function. The iconography and materiality of these portraits conveys information about late 18th-century beliefs about femininity, self-expression, and individual agency.