Literature Compass最新文献

Entrenched inequality within South African society has led to a notable focus within literary criticism on the subject of legitimacy. The perennial question of who has access to narrative representation and how this authority is wielded has informed literary production itself—with some writers, invariably emerging from the elite, attempting to circumvent or undermine the assumed claims of legitimacy which attend the novel. This article discusses how a particular modernist form, narratorial disidentification, coheres around this preoccupation with inequality and legitimacy, overturning idealist accounts of moral agency in history through an emphasis on the determination of the material environment. Narratorial disidentification subverts the normative structure of the novel, assuming that the legitimate subject of society is not narratable within the novel form. Drawing on the work of Warwick Research Collective (WReC), in particular their expanded sense of modernism, this article argues that experiences of social bifurcation in semi-peripheral locations are translated into this form of narrative coldness which seeks to undermine readerly identification and emphasize externality. It indicates how Camus's The Stranger can be productively re-read by considering the employment of this form by a number of South African novelists—from Nadine Gordimer's The Late Bourgeois World under apartheid, to postapartheid with Zoë Wicomb's Playing in The Light and Achmat Dangor's Bitter Fruit. This allows not only for formal continuities across apartheid-postapartheid to be historicized, but offers a comparative lens for approaching novelistic form within global contexts of inequality.

J.R.R. Tolkien (1892–1973) was highly influential in shaping modern fantasy literature and popularising medievalism. Scholarship has examined various aspects of Tolkien's literary imagination in The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955); however, to date, there has been no thorough scrutiny of the significance of aesthetics in his creative works. This paper contends that Tolkien's magnum opus as part of his long-life myth-making project was shaped profoundly by the late 18th-century aesthetics of the sublime. It draws on Burkean physiological sublime to argue that contrary to Kantian rationality, certain Tolkienian landscapes demonstrate the qualities of the natural sublime and generate physical experiences on the observer that accentuates the primacy of emotions over reason. The article proposes a new direction in Tolkien studies by highlighting the aesthetic overtones of Tolkien's engagement with the sublime, which played a significant role in constructing his English mythology.

The emergence of modern Kurdish poetry marks a period of great significance in the history of Kurdish literature since it witnessed the advent of modernity, the rise of Kurdish nationalism, the fall of the Persian and Ottoman Empires, and the creation of the Middle East with no country for Kurds. In this article I examine the complex process of the poetic modernisation which unfolded over the oeuvres of generations of poets from the late 19th century till its culmination in the 1940s. I illustrate that modern Kurdish poetry was an aesthetic response to the advent of modernity and its socio-political implications such as nationalism in Kurdish society.

It was in 2015 that the Blair edition featuring Blake's design first appeared in the Serbian language. Simultaneously, it was the first time in Serbia that Blake was approached solely as an artist, and not as a poet, i. e. not as the author of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793) or Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1789)—works he was mainly recognised for there. The aim of this article is to bring the figure of William Blake the designer closer to the Serbian reader, and to set it apart from the previously dominant figure of Blake the poet, when it comes to his reception in that country. Our conclusions point towards Blake the designer acting as a constructive reader, deconstructing the meaning of Blair's poem which he designed, confirming the notion by Morris Eaves (1980) that Blake was his own sole audience. We also tend to examine the hitherto neglected relationships that exist between English Graveyard Poetry and the so-called “Serbian Graveyard Poetry”.

This essay canvasses a variety of approaches to the cultural and literary study of water in recent historical eras. While various aqueously-minded approaches have been presented in recent decades, they have not been fully integrated into the ecological mainstream of environmental humanist criticism, particularly in nineteenth-century studies. This essay integrates discourses across geography, geology, cultural studies, and literary studies in order to theorize critical hydrography, an aqueous approach to cultural objects that apprehends water as an ecological domain influencing both method's design and its attentions. The essay shows how critical hydrography reflexively attaches itself to histories of race, empire, and capital in apprehending the scientific filiations of the environmental humanities. Critical hydrography conceptualizes water as method to raise its visibility in ecocritical discourse.

Acting on recently surging critical interest in late Romanticism, a subperiod taken to range roughly from the later 1810s through the 1840s, the present article reviews past and current work in this burgeoning field, particularly highlighting developing avenues for future research. Two competing accounts of late Romanticism are contrasted: a long-dominant take which regards the subperiod as fundamentally secondary, derived, and inferior; and a recently energised perspective which reveals the vibrancy and innovativeness of late-Romantic culture. If the former construes history by prioritising the experiences of poets, acting on a cultural paradigm that pivots on the centrality of a particularised genre, the latter pursues a Romanticism that is reconfigured under the pressure of a developing media system, in which multiple specialised genres acquire distinct functions. The discussion of these two perspectives is anchored in the late-Romantic fascination for times and places; that is, in debates pertaining to periodicity and eventfulness, and to nationalism and transnationalism.

“Quixotism” is a term pivotal to the histories critics tell about literature. Despite a scholarly consensus regarding the significance of quixotism to eighteenth-century transatlantic writing, there remain vast discrepancies in critical formulations of what quixotism actually is, to the point where trying to find common ground in different scholars' definitions of quixotism might appear, at first glance, a quixotic endeavour. Yet scholarship on quixotism persistently returns to dichotomies: romance versus the novel; the exceptional versus the typical; the original versus the copy; reason versus imagination. Quixotism remains both vexing question and floating signifier, caught between character and genre, system and allusion as it traverses and transforms eighteenth-century literature and culture. In this article I will both reflect on the state of quixotic studies in eighteenth-century studies and offer an account of Don Quixote's place in the history of literary criticism and theory.

This essay identifies emerging trends in Jane Austen scholarship published between 2010 and 2020, with a focus on monographs and edited collections. In recent work examining Austen through contemporary theoretical and critical lenses, the following new topics have been central: material culture, animal studies, masculinity, place, and celebrity. The last of these includes Austen's use of Regency celebrities in her novels and her connections with other women writers. Studies of the parallels between her and Shakespeare's rises to fame have also surged. Connected to the interest in celebrity is the explosion of fan-culture studies: Austen is now a multimedia superstar with wide appeal. This expansion of audience has meant a shift in the style of much scholarly writing on Austen as books try to cater to both academic and non-academic markets.

Taking as prerequisite Peter Frase's argument that the labor markets and living conditions of the twenty-first century will be primarily determined by the dual “specters of ecological catastrophe and automation,” this article investigates William Blake's poetic response to the problems of religious and financial debt within the context of his own environmentally compromised era. It briefly historicizes the financial components of Blake's printmaking before turning to an examination of his illuminated books, which imagine a form of debt relief grounded in a millenarian theory of political intervention. While Blake's investment in artisanal labor reveals an aversion to technological reproducibility, his cyclical notion of an artificially constructed ecological future models a technologically hybrid ontology useful for addressing Frase's nexus of environmental destruction and mechanized production.

Ruinenlust (‘ruin lust’) or ruin aesthetics is a prominent feature of George Gissing's unfinished historical novel, Veranilda (1904), which is set in sixth-century Italy and contains many memorable images of ruins. Drawing on the work of Georg Simmel, Rose Macaulay, Brian Dillon, and others, this article argues that, by examining these images in relation to the novel's characters' psychological states and motives, the thematic significance of decadence and anti-imperialism is heightened. The article closes by considering the unfinished nature of Veranilda, arguing, with reference to Susan Stewart's The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture (2020), that the novel itself can be appreciated as a kind of ruin. In doing so, it aims to shed light on an underexplored aspect of Gissing's work.