E. S. Shaffer – författare

Comparative Criticism is an annual journal of comparative literature and cultural studies that has gained an international reputation since its inception in 1979. It contains major articles on literary theory and criticism; on a wide range of comparative topics; and on interdisciplinary debates. It includes translations of literary, scholarly and critical works; substantial reviews of important books in the field; and bibliographies on specialist themes for the year, on individual writers, and on comparative literary studies in Britain and Ireland. This volume was first published in 1981.

Comparative Criticism is an annual journal of comparative literature and cultural studies that has gained an international reputation since its inception in 1979. It contains major articles on literary theory and criticism; on a wide range of comparative topics; and on interdisciplinary debates. It includes translations of literary, scholarly and critical works; substantial reviews of important books in the field; and bibliographies on specialist themes for the year, on individual writers, and on comparative literary studies in Britain and Ireland.

Comparative Criticism is an annual journal of comparative literature and cultural studies that has gained an international reputation since its inception in 1979. It contains major articles on literary theory and criticism; on a wide range of comparative topics; and on interdisciplinary debates. It includes translations of literary, scholarly and critical works; substantial reviews of important books in the field; and bibliographies on specialist themes for the year, on individual writers, and on comparative literary studies in Britain and Ireland.

Dr Schaffer outlines the development of the mythological school of European Biblical criticism, especially its German origins and its reception in England, and studies the influence of this movement in the work of specific writers: Coleridge Hölderlin, Browning, and George Eliot. The 'higher criticism' treated sacred scripture as literature and as history, as the product of its time, and the highest expression of a developing group consciousness; it challenged current views on the authorship and dating of the Pentateuch and the Gospels, on inspiration, prophecy, and canonicity, and formulated a new apologetics closely linked with the growth of Romantic aesthetics. The importance of this study is that it shows that readings of specific literary texts can intersect with general movements of thought and action through the scrutiny of a clearly defined intellectual discipline, here the higher criticism, which developed as a particular expression of the larger trends in the history of the period. Dr Shaffer throws light on individual works of literature, the formation between England and Germany, and the bases of European Romanticism.

Comparative Criticism is an annual journal of comparative literature and cultural studies that has gained an international reputation since its inception in 1979. It contains major articles on literary theory and criticism; on a wide range of comparative topics; and on interdisciplinary debates. It includes translations of literary, scholarly and critical works; substantial reviews of important books in the field; and bibliographies on specialist themes for the year, on individual writers, and on comparative literary studies in Britain and Ireland. This book was first published in 1986.

The ninth volume of this annual journal is concerned with the theme of 'Cultural perceptions and literary values', and continues the consideration of the relations of European with non-European literatures begun in volume 8. Among others, Indian art and its reception in the West is taken as a paradigm case for the interpretation of works of art. Victor Turner, an anthropologist who contributed a great deal to the understanding of the role of ritual in African societies, in 'social drama' and in the theatre, is represented by a posthumous essay displaying his characteristic verve, boldness, and innovative power. The crucial case of magic as 'alien wisdom' is considered, as is the exportation of the 'Faust theme', as represented in Spanish sources, to South America, and the case for its absorption into native Indian drama. This volume brings the series of special bibliographies on the history of comparative literary studies in the UK up to 1965, within a decade of the beginning of our annual bibliographies (1975) in volume 1. It also contains the annual bibliography of comparative literature, covering 1984.

This volume explores a theme that has become central in our time, as 'the death of God' is widely seen to be succeeded by 'the death of Man'. Our contributors set forth its urgency in a variety of contexts. Among these, Peter Stern gives the paradigmatic history of the bereft, damaged, and repudiated self in German philosophy and literature from Kleist to Ernst Jilnger. In 'Not I' Michael Edwards pursues the theological and psychological consequences of a self without substance. Peter France supplies a witty account of the marriage of self and commerce more at home in the eighteenth-century tradition of British empiricism, and the challenge of Rousseau's refusal of the terms of commerce. Raman Selden explores views of the self from the Romantics to the poststructuralists. Roger Cardinal probes the secret diary: is the genre a contradiction in terms? Stephen Bann explores the representations of Narcissus in recent psychoanalytic theory. Other contributors include Pierre Dupuy, David James, Julie Scott Meisami, Gregory Blue,Mark Ogden and A. D. Nuttall.

Topics covered in this volume include literary Chinese as a language for science, the history and principles of scientific translation in Europe, the theatrical panorama in the 19th century and its roots in optical theory and experiment, and an alternative perspective on Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Performance models have received increasing attention in the theoretical move towards open texts. Conceptions of open, reader-based or audience-based texts have paralleled the questioning of rational, authority-driven modes of knowledge. Literary theory's stress on performance leads back, paradoxically, to the exploration of practical knowledge. This volume contains the annual bibliography of comparative literature for the year 1989. It contains numerous intriguing articles. Michael Robinson's leading article examines the mutually defining properties of (female) gender and performance in the nineteenth century, whilst Drew Milne examines the challenge to Aristotle's theory of tragedy made by Augusto Boal's 'Theatre of the Oppressed' in Latin America. A rich variety of performance media and genres is presented in this volume. The important Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov is being performed again in new productions in Russia; Lesley Milne reports on The White Guard in Moscow and Kiev, and Patrick Miles translates the previously censored scenes of the play.

In Volume 15, 'The Communities of Europe', we mark the gradual approach to European unity by looking at Europe's intransigent variety. Various topics are explored: Henry Gifford looks at the place of the writer in European culture, whilst the encounter of Europe with one of its 'others', North America, is probed with gusto by Armin Paul Frank. Malcolm Bowie explores intellectual frontiers in his speculations on the uses of Lacanian psychoanalysis for the arts; and Harold Fisch pursues the nature of interpretation itself as a mode of community. The editor brings up to date the report of the state of Comparative Literature in Britain given in volume 1 (1979). The winners of the British Comparative Literature Association Translation Competition (1991) for European Community languages are published here, as are the winners of the Special Prizes for Chinese and for Hebrew, Yiddish, or writing in any language on a Jewish theme.

Revolutions and Censorship, first published in 1994, is concerned not only with recent momentous changes in the political landscape of Europe and their reverberations in the arts, but with the perennial problems of outside control which writers and artists face. The fall of the Iron Curtain, and the internal collapse of the Soviet Union have opened the floodgates of recovery of lost or secret documents, such as Lunacharsky's Letter to Stalin on the censorship of Mikhail Bulgakov, and of suppressed and censored work, whether by classics like Chekhov, whose bowdlerized letters are here restored to their intimate frankness by Donald Rayfield, or by modem writers such as Yevgeni Shvarts, whose full-length satirical play The Shadow Alan Myers here translates, or David Bergelson, shot in the Lubianka prison on his sixty-eighth birthday, whose fine story 'Remnants' is translated and introduced by Golda Werman (commended in the 1991 BCLA Translation Competition). Peter France details the difficulties of translating the dissident Chuvash poet Gennady Aygi. Julek Neumann describes at first hand the 'indirect censorship' of the Czech theatre during the years up to 1989.

This volume treats conceptions of the fin-de-sièle as they were affected and characterized by the work of Walter Pater, the leading nineteenth-century English art critic after Ruskin, essayist and novelist, and major influence on the temper and style of the 'aesthetic' and 'decadent' movements. Many subjects are explored: Denis Donoghue recreates the sceptical spirit of Pater for our time and Wolfgang Iser with the 'translatability' of Paterian discourse in the current context of interpretation theory. On the larger European scene David Carrier treats the decisive role of Baudelaire in the movement towards Modernism in writing and painting, and the subterranean forms in which he was imported. The first publication of an important work, believed lost, of Pater's major disciple, the twentieth-century art critic Adrian Stokes, is also featured in this volume. Some translation is included, and finally,The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney, displays the changing forms of the traditional elegy through the fin-de-sièle to the present.

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.

Comparative Criticism, first published in 2000, addresses itself to the questions of literary theory and criticism, to comparative studies in terms of theme, genre movement and influence, and to interdisciplinary perspectives. Articles include: Afloat on the Sea of Stories: World tales, English Literature, and geopolitical aesthetics; Classics and the comparison of adjacent literatures: some Pakistani perspectives; Performance Literature: the traditional Japanese theatre as model; 'Am I in that name?' Women's writing as cultural translation in early modern China; stabat mater: reflections on a theme in German-Jewish and Palestinian-Arab poetry. The winning entries in the 1999 BCLA/BCLT translation competition are also published.