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As a very young man, one of the most celebrated English authors of the eighteenth century translated a tome about Ethiopia. This experience permanently marked Samuel Johnson, leaving traces of the African discourse he encountered in that text in his drama Irene;several of his short stories; and his most famous fiction, Rasselas. This book provides a much needed perspective in comparative literature and postcolonial studies on the power of the discourse of the other to infuse European texts. This book illuminates how the Western literary canon is globally produced by developing the powerful metaphor of spirit possession to posit some texts in the European canon as energumens, texts that are spoken through. The model of discursive possession offers a new way of theorizing transcultural intertextuality, in particular how Europe’s others have co-constituted European representations. Through close readings of primary and secondary sources in English, French, Portuguese, and Gəʿəz, the book challenges conventional wisdom on Johnson’s work, from the inspiration for the name Rasselas and the nature of Johnson’s religious beliefs to what makes Rasselas so strange.

The Aesthetics of Island Space discusses islands as central figures in the modern experience of space. It examines the spatial poetics of islands in literary texts (from The Tempest to The Hungry Tide), journals of explorers and scientists (such as Cook and Darwin), and Hollywood cinema (e.g. The Hurricane and King Kong), tracing how islands have offered vivid perceptual experiences as well as a geopoetic oscillation between the poetic energies of words and images and the material energies of the physical world. Its chapters focus on America’s island gateways (e.g. Roanoke and Ellis Island), tropical islands (e.g. Tahiti and imagined South Sea islands), the islands of the Pacific Northwest, and mutable islands (e.g. the volcanic and coral islands in Wells’s fiction). The book argues that the modern voyages of discovery posed considerable perceptual challenges to spatial experience, and that these challenges were negotiated via the poetic engagement with islands. Postcolonial theorists maintain that islands have been imagined as geometrical abstractions subjected to the colonial gaze. There is, however, a second story of islands in the Western imagination which runs parallel to this colonial story: the experience of islands in the age of discovery also went hand in hand with a disintegration of received models of global space. Rethinking (post-)phenomenological, geocritical, and geopoetic theories, The Aesthetics of Island Space suggests that the modern encounters with islands as mobile and shifting territories implied a diversification of spatial experience, and explores how this disruption is registered and negotiated by non-fictional and fictional responses.

This book analyzes how Africans have engaged with African American music and its representations in the long twentieth century (1890–2011) to offer a new cultural history that attests to pan-Africanism’s ongoing and open theoretical potential. The book argues that African American popular music appealed to continental Africans as a unit of cultural prestige, a site of pleasure, and most importantly an expressive form already encoded with strategies of creative resistance to racial hegemony. Ghana, Senegal, and South Africa are considered as three distinctive sites where longstanding pan-African political and cultural affiliations gave expression to transnational black solidarity. Ghana, the first sub-Saharan British colony to gain independence, repeatedly issued calls to the black diaspora to “return” and participate in pan-African unity, and has been a primary destination for heritage tourism and grappling with slavery’s legacies. Senegal functioned similarly for the Francophone world, and Léopold Senghor’s formulation of négritude remains provocative, as demonstrated by the alternatives articulated by Senegalese and diasporan artists. Meanwhile, South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle motivated unique forms of solidarity after the era of African independence movements with which many diasporans identified. The book shows how such transnational ties fostered expressions of what is theorized as stereomodernismalong axes counter to the colonizing process. Accounting for the specificity of various media through which music was transmitted and interpreted—poetry, novels, films, recordings, festivals, live performances and websites—stereomodernism, lies at the intersection of music, media, and solidarity, tapping music’s capacity to refresh our understanding of twentieth century black transnational ties.

This book advances a “horizontal” method of comparative literature and applies this approach to analyze the multiple emergences of early realism and novelistic modernity in Eastern and Western cultural spheres from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Naming this era of economic globalization the “Age of Silver,” this study emphasizes the bullion flow from South America and Japan to China through international commerce, and argues that the resultant transcontinental monetary and commercial coevolutions stimulated analogous socioeconomic shifts and emergent novelistic realism in places such as China, Japan, Spain, and England. The main texts it addresses include The Plum in the Golden Vase (anonymous, China, late sixteenth century); Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes, Spain, 1605 and 1615); The Life of an Amorous Man (Ihara Saikaku, Japan, 1682); and Robinson Crusoe (Daniel Defoe, England, 1719). These Eastern and Western narratives indicate from their own geographical vantage points commercial expansion’s stimulation of social mobility and larger processes of cultural destabilization. Their realist tendencies are underlain with nationally symbolic and politically critical functions. This horizontal argument realigns novelistic modernity with a multipolar global context and reestablishes commensurabilities between Eastern and Western literary histories. On a broader level, it challenges the unilateral equation of globalization and modernity with westernization, and foregrounds a polycentric mode of global early modernity for pluralizing the genealogy of “world literature” and historical transcultural relations.

This book comprises sixteen essays from legal academics, literary experts, and influential judges. The book begins by investigating American Guys—the heroic nonconformists and rugged individualists who populate American fiction. It then examines these manly men in relation to the law, while also highlighting the tensions underlying and complicating this type of masculinity. A second set of chapters examines Outsiders—men on the periphery of the American Guys who proclaim a different way of being male. Chapters take up countertraditions of masculinity ranging from gay male culture to Eli Roth’s Jewish lawyer. This book is the third in a series of volumes arising out of conferences at the University of Chicago Law School. Like its predecessors, this collection aims to reinvigorate the study of law and literature by broadening the range of methodological and disciplinary perspectives brought to bear on the subject.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, many in Britain believed their nation to be a dominant world power that its former colony, the United States, could only hope to emulate. Yet by the interwar years, the United States seemed to some to embody a different type of global eminence, one based not only on political and economic stature but also on new forms of mass culture like jazz and the Hollywood film. Britain’s fraught transition from formidable empire to victim of Americanization is rarely discussed by literary scholars. However, the dawn of the “American century” is the period of literary modernism and, this book argues, the signs of Americanization—from jazz records to Ford motorcars to Hollywood films—helped to establish the categories of elite and mass culture that still inspire debate in modernist studies. This book thus brings together two major areas of modernist scholarship, the study of nation and empire and the study of mass culture, by suggesting that Britain was reacting to a new type of empire, the American entertainment empire, in its struggles to redefine its national culture between the wars. At the same time, British anxieties about American influence contributed to conceptions of Britain’s imperial scope, and what it meant to have or be an empire. Through its treatment of a wide range of authors and cultural phenomena, the book explores how Britain reinvented itself in relation to its ideas of America, and how Britain’s literary modernism developed and changed through this reinvention.

This book considers the impact of Australia and New Zealand on the formation of American literature, from the eighteenth century to the present day. It discusses how the antipodes, as both a philosophical idea and as a historical fact, came to influence how American writers in the nineteenth century conceived of Australasia after the settlement of this South Pacific region by the British. From this perspective, classic American writers of the nineteenth century regarded Australia as their own country’s doppelganger, the British colony where a War of Independence had never happened. The book will also consider how and why the significance of Australia and New Zealand for American writers has for so long been overlooked, despite the fact that these regions attracted the attention of canonical figures such as Brockden Brown, Irving, Melville, Thoreau and many others. It argues that American cultural critics have not traditionally been comfortable with considering how their literature engaged with the specters of British colonialism, and that this has produced a distorted understanding of American literature as committed primarily to a rhetoric of constitutional independence. It will continue to track the importance of Australasia to American writers during the twentieth and twenty-first century, taking into account the significance of both World Wars, Vietnam, and other forms of transnational cultural exchange. It suggests how the antipodean figure of a world upside down continues to haunt American writers through the beginning of the twenty-first century.

This book contributes to the study of South African literature, offering readings of writers such as Coetzee, Gordimer, Fugard, Tlali, and Mda. Focusing on the relationship between place, subjectivity, and literary form, the study examines our understanding of apartheid as a geographical form of control, and of its imagined and actual transformation.

Love begets poetry; poetry begets love. These two propositions have seemed evident to thinkers and poets across the Western literary tradition. Plato writes that “anyone that love touches instantly becomes a poet.” And even today, when poetry has largely disappeared from the mainstream of popular culture, it retains its romantic associations. But why should this be so—what are the connections between poetry and erotic love that lead us to associate them so strongly with one another? An examination of different theories of both love and poetry across the centuries reveals that the connection between them is not merely an accident of cultural history—the result of our having grown up hearing, or hearing about, love poetry—but something more intrinsic. Even as definitions of them have changed, the two phenomena have consistently been described in parallel terms. Love is characterized by paradox. Above all, it is both necessarily public, because interpersonal, and intensely private; hence it both requires expression and resists it. In poetry, especially lyric poetry, which features its own characteristic paradoxes and silences, love finds a natural outlet. This study considers both the theories and the love poems themselves, bringing together a wide range of examples from different eras in order to examine the major structures that love and poetry share. It does not aim to be a comprehensive history of Western love poetry, but an investigation into the meaning and function of recurrent tropes, forms, and images employed by poets to express and describe erotic love.

This book maintains that the poetic texts examined here constitute an active process of composing history; they are not simply historicized. They give name to the nation and compose of a historical narrative for its denizens. They are literary artifacts, bearing the vestiges of the past while provoking new interpretations. As visionaries and composers of New World history, Frances Harper, Cristina Ayala and Auta de Souza are a part of a larger process of conceptualizing freedom in the New World. Frances Harper’s trans-hemispheric poetic gestures delimit the scope of this project. By exemplifying the kind of readings that can evolve from following one poet’s trans-hemispheric allusions and articulate the fundamentally transnational aspect of African American literature in the United States, and inspire more re-evaluations of trans-hemispheric literary currents across national boundaries in afrodescendente literatures. The spectre of race and its particular performances of gender identities among afrodescendente peoples in the New World, informs these poetics but does not conform them to a monolithic body of national literature. Afrodescendente poetry in the Americas highlights the power of words to imagine new histories and new forms of identity. In their interplay, the poems tell us certain truths about how the concept of freedom can evolve. They say: “Freedom” cannot be understood as a byproduct of slavery’s abolition. They say: Freedom is a poetic process. They say: Freedom cannot just be legislated, it has to be written.

Beyond Desire: Sexuality in Modern Tamil Literature is the first monograph on sexuality in modern Tamil literature. The book offers an interpretation of shifting representations of masculine desire in Tamil short stories and novels across the twentieth century. Through a reading of seven male writers many of whom drew inspiration from the Tamil writer K.P. Rajagopalan (1902–1944), there emerges a whole range of sensual intimacies between men and women that are irreducible to the sexual act. The book resists the equation of desire with sexual intercourse and explores the interpenetration of desire and other sensual modes of relating to the world that include spirituality, social reform, artistic creativity, and labour. Most of these narratives are focalized through men who are seemingly conflicted by their sexual desires and their attempts to preserve their religious or aesthetic integrity. There is no resolution to this conflict as these men try to offset the threat of (female) desire by idealizing women and reorienting their desires in other forms of sensual activity. The failure to either resist or entirely satisfy or sublimate desire compels the reconfiguration of meaning and subjectivity. While the first five writers of this book focus on the possibility of spiritualizing desire, the last two explore the reformative possibilities of asexual cross-gender partnerships and the transformative potential of labour that binds and reconfigures marginalized (lower-caste, working-class female) subjects.

This amazing inter-cultural correspondence (1919–1940) between two cultural icons of the twentieth century—Nobel laureates from the East and the West: the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) and the French novelist, playwright and biographer Romain Rolland (1866–1944)—had remained undiscovered for far too long. Published for the first time in English, these letters and telegrams are among the finest exchanges of thought between the East and the West, and script the intellectual history of that period. It is also the story of a profound friendship, where Tagore and Rolland unlock their hearts to each other. The book also records the differences of opinion and misunderstandings between the two outstanding humanists of contemporary history, who often felt isolated in their own countries, on serious issues like Gandhi and fascism. This majestic and serene correspondence, comprising 46 letters and telegrams, along with three dialogues between the two at various times, as well as letters by Rathindranath Tagore and others, is a journey towards the imaging of a different world which would create the possibility of a new space outside cultural hegemony. Edited and annotated by one of India’s foremost French scholars, it is one of the most important quests for an alternative discourse in the last century.

‘Which writer today is not a writer of the Holocaust?’ asked the late Imre Kertész, Hungarian survivor and novelist, in his Nobel acceptance speech: ‘one does not have to choose the Holocaust as one’s subject to detect the broken voice that has dominated modern European art for decades’. This book attends to this broken voice in literature in order to explore the meaning of the Holocaust in the contemporary world, arguing, again following Kertész, that the Holocaust will ‘remain through culture, which is really the vessel of memory’. Drawing on the thought of Hannah Arendt, it identifies and develops five concepts—the public secret, evil, stasis, disorientalism and kitsch—in a range of texts by significant writers (including Kazuo Ishiguro, Jonathan Littell, Imre Kertész, W. G. Sebald, and Joseph Conrad) as well as in work by victims and perpetrators of the Holocaust and of atrocities in Africa. In this way, the book explores the interweaving of complicity, responsibility, temporality, and the often problematic powers of narrative which make up some part of the legacy of the Holocaust.

An intellectual biography of early Arabic feminist Zaynab Fawwaz and a study of her life in Ottoman Syria and Egypt, in the context of debates on gender, modernity and the good society, 1890s-1910. Chapters take up her writing and debates in which she participated, concerning social justice, girls’ education, marriage, divorce and polygyny, the question of ‘Nature’ and Darwinist notions of male/female, and intersections of nationalism, anti-imperialism, and feminism. Fawwaz also wrote two novels and play, which are analysed in the context of fiction rewriting history, and on theatre as a reformist tool of public education in turn-of-the-century Egypt. The book also comprises a study of some important periodical venues for public debate in Egypt in this period, particularly the nationalist press and one early women’s journal, and it highlights the writings of lesser-studied journalists and other intellectuals, within the context of the Arab/ic Nahda or intellectual revival. It argues that Fawwaz’s feminism, based on an Islamic ethical worldview, was distinct from prevailing ‘modernist’ views in posing a non-essentialist, open-ended notion of gender that did not, for instance, highlight maternalist discourses. Fawwaz’s own background was Shi’i, an element that was quietly present in her work.

In all the complex cultural history of the islands of Britain and Ireland, the idea of the coast as a significant representative space is critical. For many artists, coastal space has figured as a site from which to braid ideas of empire, nation, region, and archipelago. They have been drawn to the coast as a zone of geographical uncertainty in which the self-definitions of the nation founder; a peripheral space of vestigial wildness, of island retreats and experimental living; a network of diverse localities richly endowed with distinctive forms of cultural heritage; and a dynamically interconnected ecosystem, which is also the historic site of significant developments in fieldwork and natural science. This collection situates these cultures of the Atlantic edge in a series of essays that create new contexts for coastal study in literary history and criticism. The contributors frame their research in response to emerging conversations in archipelagic criticism, the blue humanities, and Island Studies, challenging the reader to reconsider ideas of margin, periphery, and exchange. These twelve case studies establish the coast as a crucial location in the imaginative history of Britain, Ireland, and the north Atlantic edge. Coastal Works will appeal to readers of literature and history with an interest in the sea, the environment, and the archipelago from the eighteenth century to the present. Accessible, innovative, and provocative, Coastal Works establishes the important role the coast plays in our cultural imaginary and suggests a range of methodologies to represent relationships between land, sea, and cultural work.

This book considers the advantages of describing fictions as governed by a set of social contracts. It combines current cognitive research with attention to the historical context of works of imagination to argue against the claim that fictions corrupt clear thinking and provide, at best, inert pleasures. The chapters explore the different ways creative work in media from statues to stage plays helps to maintain cultural homeostasis. Like the social contracts of law, language, kinship, and money, the social contracts of fiction are constructed and continually revised within communities. They teach us how to think about the stuff of daily life, animate and inanimate, as abstractions. It is because our brains have evolved to toggle between concrete tokens and abstract types that we can speak, trade, and live together. The discussions of lyrics, portrait paintings, religious relics, plays, and films explore the ways fictions work within culturally constructed and historically specific frames that since Plato have been used to mark fiction’s exclusion from daily concerns—and challenge this assumption. Rather than mark these fictions as peripheral, the framing effects of their genres, styles, and of the places where we experience them—theaters and museums, for example—afford communities the cognitive time and space to reconsider and revise. An extended consideration of The Spanish Tragedy, Titus Andronicus, and Hamlet in the context of judicial instability in early modern London suggests how the balances and imbalances of fiction, seen as scaled-up versions of life-sustaining homeostasis, might just enable restorative and revisionary thinking.

Postcolonial historical fiction offers readers valuable resources for thinking the prehistory of our present. The genre’s treatment of colonialism as geographically omnivorous yet temporally “out of joint” with itself gives it a special purchase on the continuities between the colonial era and our own. These features also enable the genre to distill from our colonial pasts the evanescent, utopian intimations of a properly postcolonial future. Critique and Utopia in Postcolonial Historical Fiction arrives at these insights by juxtaposing novels from the Atlantic world with books from the Indian subcontinent. Attending to the links across these regions, Forter develops luminous readings of novels by Patrick Chamoiseau, J. G. Farrell, Amitav Ghosh, Marlon James, Hari Kunzru, Toni Morrison, Marlene van Niekerk, Arundhati Roy, Kamila Shamsie, and Barry Unsworth. He shows how these works not only transform our understanding of the colonial past and the futures that might issue from it, but also contribute to pressing debates in postcolonial theory—debates about the politics of literary forms, the links between cycles of capital accumulation and the emergence of new genres, the meaning of “working through” traumas in the postcolonial context, the relationship between colonial and panoptical power, the continued salience of hybridity and mimicry for the study of colonialism, and the tension between national liberation struggles and transnational forms of solidarity. Beautifully written and meticulously theorized, Critique and Utopia in Postcolonial Historical Fiction will be of interest to students of world literature, Marxist critics, postcolonial theorists, and thinkers of the utopian.

Pairing the two concepts of diaspora and modernism, Allison Schachter formulates a novel approach to modernist studies and diasporic cultural production. Diasporic Modernisms illuminates the formal and historical aspects of displaced Jewish writers—including S. Y. Abramovitsh, Yosef Chaim Brenner, Dovid Bergelson, Leah Goldberg, Gabreil Preil, and Kadia Molodowsky—who grappled with statelessness and the uncertain status of Yiddish and Hebrew. Schachter examines how the relationships between migrant writers and dispersed readers were registered in the innovative practices of modernist prose fiction, capturing the aesthetic conditioned by diaspora, spanning from 1894 to 1974. This literary culture developed in the wake of Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires’ decline, when Jewish writers and readers immigrated to new centers of modern Jewish culture, including Odessa, Jerusalem, Berlin, Tel Aviv, and New York. Offering the first comparative literary history of Hebrew and Yiddish modernist prose, Diasporic Modernisms argues that these two literary histories can no longer be separated by nationalist and monolingual histories. Instead, the book illuminates how these two literary languages continue to animate each other, even after the creation of a Jewish state, with Hebrew as its national language.

This book advances a new concept of the “Asian diaspora” that creates links between Asian American, Asian Canadian, and Asian Australian identities. Drawing from comparable studies of the black diaspora, it traces the histories of colonialism, immigration, and exclusion shared by these three populations. The work of Asian poets in each of these three countries offers a rich terrain for understanding how Asian identities emerge at the intersection of national and transnational flows, with the poets’ thematic and formal choices reflecting the varied pressures of social and cultural histories, as well as the influence of Asian writers in other national locations. Diasporic Poetics argues that racialized and nationally bounded “Asian” identities often emerge from transnational political solidarities, from Third World struggles against colonialism to the global influence of the American civil rights movement. Indeed, I show that Asian writers disclaim national belonging as often as they claim it, placing Asian diasporic writers at a critical distance from the national spaces within which they write. As the first full-length study to compare Asian American, Asian Canadian, and Asian Australian writers, the book offers the historical and cultural contexts necessary to understand the distinctive development of Asian writing in each country, while also offering close analysis of the work of writers such as Janice Mirikitani, Fred Wah, Ouyang Yu, Myung Mi Kim, and Cathy Park Hong.

This book studies the documentary impulse that plays a central role in twentieth-century French literature. Focusing on nonfiction narratives, it analyzes the use of documents—pieces of textual or visual evidence incorporated into the literary work to relay and interrogate reality. It traces the emergence of an enduring concern with factual reference in texts that engage with current events or the historical archive. Writers idealize the document as a fragment of raw reality, but also reveal its constructed and mediated nature and integrate it as a voice within a larger composition. This ambivalent documentary imagination, present in works by Gide, Breton, Aragon, Yourcenar, Duras, and Modiano (among others), shapes the relationship of literature to visual media, testimonial discourses, and self-representation. Far from turning away from realism in the twentieth century, French literature often turns to the document as a site of both modernist experiment and engagement with the world.