In this work of impressive scholarship, Sheldon Pollock explores the remarkable rise and fall of Sanskrit, India's ancient language, as a vehicle of poetry and polity. He traces the two great moments ...of its transformation: the first around the beginning of the Common Era, when Sanskrit, long a sacred language, was reinvented as a code for literary and political expression, the start of an amazing career that saw Sanskrit literary culture spread from Afghanistan to Java. The second moment occurred around the beginning of the second millennium, when local speech forms challenged and eventually replaced Sanskrit in both the literary and political arenas. Drawing striking parallels, chronologically as well as structurally, with the rise of Latin literature and the Roman empire, and with the new vernacular literatures and nation-states of late-medieval Europe,The Language of the Gods in the World of Menasks whether these very different histories challenge current theories of culture and power and suggest new possibilities for practice.
A grand synthesis of unprecedented scope,Literary Cultures in Historyis the first comprehensive history of the rich literary traditions of South Asia. Together these traditions are unmatched in their ...combination of antiquity, continuity, and multicultural complexity, and are a unique resource for understanding the development of language and imagination over time. In this unparalleled volume, an international team of renowned scholars considers fifteen South Asian literary traditions-including Hindi, Indian-English, Persian, Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Urdu-in their full historical and cultural variety. The volume is united by a twofold theoretical aim: to understand South Asia by looking at it through the lens of its literary cultures and to rethink the practice of literary history by incorporating non-Western categories and processes. The questions these seventeen essays ask are accordingly broad, ranging from the character of cosmopolitan and vernacular traditions to the impact of colonialism and independence, indigenous literary and aesthetic theory, and modes of performance. A sophisticated assimilation of perspectives from experts in anthropology, political science, history, literary studies, and religion, the book makes a landmark contribution to historical cultural studies and to literary theory in addition to the new perspectives it offers on what literature has meant in South Asia. (Available in South Asia from Oxford University Press--India)
This book describes a major literary culture caught in the act of becoming minor. In 1939, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary, "Civilisation has shrunk." Her words captured not only the onset of World ...War II, but also a longer-term reversal of national fortune. The first comprehensive account of modernism and imperialism in England,A Shrinking Islandtracks the joint eclipse of modernist aesthetics and British power from the literary experiments of the 1930s through the rise of cultural studies in the 1950s.
Jed Esty explores the effects of declining empire on modernist form--and on the very meaning of Englishness. He ranges from canonical figures (T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf) to influential midcentury intellectuals (J. M. Keynes and J.R.R. Tolkien), from cultural studies pioneers (Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson) to postwar migrant writers (George Lamming and Doris Lessing). Focusing on writing that converts the potential energy of the contracting British state into the language of insular integrity, he argues that an anthropological ethos of cultural holism came home to roost in late-imperial England. Esty's interpretation challenges popular myths about the death of English literature. It portrays the survivors of the modernist generation not as aesthetic dinosaurs, but as participants in the transition from empire to welfare state, from metropolitan art to national culture. Mixing literary criticism with postcolonial theory, his account of London modernism's end-stages and after-lives provides a fresh take on major works while redrawing the lines between modernism and postmodernism.
This book examines the place of literature in the Reformation, considering both how arguments about biblical meaning and literary interpretation influenced the new theology, and how developments in ...theology in turn influenced literary practices. Part One focuses on Northern Europe, reconsidering the relationship between Renaissance humanism (especially Erasmus) and religious ideas (especially Luther). Parts Two and Three examine Tudor and early Stuart England. Part Two describes the rise of vernacular theology and Protestant culture in relation to fundamental changes in the understanding of the English language. Part Three studies English religious poetry (including Donne, Herbert, and, in an Epilogue, Milton) in the wake of these changes. Bringing together genres and styles of writing that are normally kept apart (poems, sermons, treatises, commentaries), the author offers a re-evaluation of the literary production of this intensely verbal and controversial period.
The 1780s and 1790s were a critical era for communities of colour in the new United States of America. Even Thomas Jefferson observed that in the aftermath of the American Revolution, 'the spirit of ...the master is abating, that of the slave rising from the dust.' This book explores the means by which the very first Black and Indian authors rose up to transform their communities and the course of American literary history. It argues that the origins of modern African-American and American Indian literatures emerged at the revolutionary crossroads of religion and racial formation as early Black and Indian authors reinvented American evangelicalism and created new postslavery communities, new categories of racial identification, and new literary traditions.
Postcolonial Witnessing argues that the suffering engendered by colonialism needs to be acknowledged more fully, on its own terms, in its own terms, and in relation to traumatic First World histories ...if trauma theory is to have any hope of redeeming its promise of cross-cultural ethical engagement.
"It's about Indigenous literatures and underscores their significance to Indigenous peoples in the realm of the political, the creative, and the intellectual. It challenges readers to examine their ...assumptions about Indigenous literatures and at the same time asserts the emotional connections of our shared humanity and the transformative power of story."--
Through other continents Dimock, Wai Chee; Dimock, Wai Chee
2006., 20081020, 2008, 2006, 2009, c2006., 2007-01-01
eBook
What we call American literature is quite often a shorthand, a simplified name for an extended tangle of relations." This is the argument of Through Other Continents, Wai Chee Dimock’s sustained ...effort to read American literature as a subset of world literature. Inspired by an unorthodox archive--ranging from epic traditions in Akkadian and Sanskrit to folk art, paintings by Veronese and Tiepolo, and the music of the Grateful Dead--Dimock constructs a long history of the world, a history she calls "deep time." The civilizations of Mesopotamia, India, Egypt, China, and West Africa, as well as Europe, leave their mark on American literature, which looks dramatically different when it is removed from a strictly national or English-language context. Key authors such as Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Ezra Pound, Robert Lowell, Gary Snyder, Leslie Silko, Gloria Naylor, and Gerald Vizenor are transformed in this light. Emerson emerges as a translator of Islamic culture; Henry James’s novels become long-distance kin to Gilgamesh; and Black English loses its ungrammaticalness when reclassified as a creole tongue, meshing the input from Africa, Europe, and the Americas.
This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by the University of Graz and the Department of Health, ...Care, and Science of the Office of the Regional Government of Styria, Austria. Bringing together insights from masculinity studies and age studies, this volume focuses on the gendered and relational perspectives in cultural representations of Alzheimer’s disease. Combining a comparative and interdisciplinary approach, the authors analyse the interrelations between masculinities and representations of dementia from a wide range of cultural contexts to explore it as an intensely gendered and cultural disease. They examine memoir, film, poetry and prose fiction, and look at work from a wide range of authors, including Anne Carson, Jonathan Franzen and Philip Roth, to provide new insights into established narratives of dementia and explore the complex ways that the disease resists representation and narration and questions traditional views of selfhood and human development.
Classical material was traditionally used to express colonial authority, but it was also appropriated by imperial subjects to become first a means of challenging colonialism, and then a rich field ...for creating cultural identities which blend the old and the new. Nobel prize winners such as Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney have rewritten classical material in their own cultural idioms, while public sculpture in southern Africa draws on Greek and Roman motifs in order to represent histories of African resistance and liberation. These developments are explored in this collection of essays by scholars who debate the relationship between the culture of Greece and Rome, and the changes that have followed the end of colonial empires.