Comparative Cultural Studies – serie

This collection of papers follows the objectives of and work published in CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture: A WWWeb Journal, namely, the publishing of new work in comparative literature, cultural studies, and comparative cultural studies. CLCWeb also maintains an online Library with extensive and selected bibliographies, an international directory of scholars in the field, and pertinent web links, and operates a moderated listserv for news and announcements. The present volume is the first annual of the journal. The theme is Comparative Literature and Comparative Cultural Studies, selected from articles published in volumes 1999 and 2000 of the journal. The selection of papers for the present volume is with focus on theories and histories of comparative literature and the emerging field of comparative cultural studies.

The history of exile literature is as old as the history of writing itself. Despite this vast and varied literary tradition, criticism of exile writing has tended to analyze these works according to a binary logic, where exile either produces creative freedom or it traps the writer in restrictive nostalgia. The Dialectics of Exile: Nation, Time, Language and Space in Hispanic Literatures offers a theory of exile writing that accounts for the persistence of these dual impulses and for the ways that they often co-exist within the same literary works.Focusing on writers working in the latter part of the twentieth century who were exiled during a historical moment of increasing globalization, transnational economics, and the theoretical shifts of postmodernism, Sophia A. McClennen proposes that exile literature is best understood as a series of dialectic tensions about cultural identity. Through comparative analysis of Juan Goytisolo (Spain), Ariel Dorfman (Chile) and Cristina Peri Rossi (Uruguay), this book explores how these writers represent exile identity. Each chapter addresses dilemmas central to debates over cultural identity such as nationalism versus globalization, time as historical or cyclical, language as representationally accurate or disconnected from reality, and social space as utopic or dystopic. McClennen demonstrates how the complex writing of these three authors functions as an alternative discourse of cultural identity that not only challenges official versions imposed by authoritarian regimes, but also tests the limits of much cultural criticism.

In The New Woman in Early Twentieth-century Chinese Fiction, Jin Feng discusses representations of women in May Fourth fiction, issues of gender, modernity, individualism, subjectivity, and narrative strategy. In this thought-provoking book about a crucial period of Chinese literature, Feng argues that male writers such as Lu Xun, Yu Dafu, Ba Jin, and Mao Dun created fictional women as mirror images of their own political inadequacy, but that at the same time this was also an egocentric ploy to affirm and highlight the modernity of the male author. This gender-biased attitude was translated into reality when women writers emerged. Whereas unfair, gender-biased criticism all but stifled the creative output of Bing Xin, Fang Yuanjun, and Lu Yin, Ding Ling's dogged attention to narrative strategy allowed her to maintain subjectivity and independence in her writings; that is until all writers were forced to write for the collective.

The genesis of Comparative Cultural Studies and Latin America stems from the contributors' conviction that, given its vitality and excellence, Latin American literature deserves a more prominent place in comparative literature publications, curricula, and disciplinary discussions. The editors introduce the volume by first arguing that there still exists, in some quarters, a lingering bias against literature written in Spanish and Portuguese. Secondly, the authors assert that by embracing Latin American literature and culture more enthusiastically, comparative literature would find itself reinvigorated, placed into productive discourse with a host of issues, languages, literatures, and cultures that have too long been paid scant academic attention. Following an introduction by the editors, the volume contains papers by Gene H. Bell-Villada on the question of canon, by Gordon Brotherston and Lúcia de Sá on the First Peoples of the Americas and their literature, by Elizabeth Coonrod Martínez on the Latin American novel of the 1920s, by Román de la Campa on Latin American Studies, by Earl E. Fitz on Spanish American and Brazilian literature, by Roberto González Echevarría on Latin American and comparative literature, by Sophia A. McClennen on comparative literature and Latin American Studies, by Alberto Moreiras on Borges, by Julio Ortega on the critical debate about Latin American cultural studies, by Christina Marie Tourino on Cuban Americas in New York City, by Mario J. Valdés on the comparative history of literary cultures in Latin America, and by Lois Parkinson Zamora on comparative literature and globalization. The volume also contains a bibliography of scholarship in comparative Latin American culture and literature and biographical abstracts of the contributors to the volume.

The hypothesis of Paolo Bartoloni's book is based on the belief that a substantial and innovative discussion of the philosophical notions of immanence and potentiality is not only overdue but also necessary to address the social, political, cultural, and ethical aporia confronting us today. The phenomenon of globalisation with its countless sub-narratives such as mobility, migration, security, authenticity, and inauthenticity can be thought and contextualised through a close reading and articulation of immanence and potentiality. The author provides a tangible and workable philosophical and cultural discourse within which to present an alternative understanding of subjectivity by engaging in a theoretical discussion with the philosophical discourse on potentiality and immanence, of which the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben are among the most advanced and innovative examples to date. Secondly, Bartoloni presents a virtual insight into the potential immanent subject and community through exploring a radically new interpretation of exile, translation, and temporality. Finally, the author shows how the experience of potentiality and immanence, and their ontological statuses have been explored and realised in literature through a close reading and articulation of a series of selected texts, especially works by Giorgio Caproni and Maurice Blanchot. The methodology of the study is interdisciplinary, ranging across literary theory, postmodern cultural analysis, hermeneutics, and comparative culture analysis.

The papers in this volume of the Purdue University Press series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies represent recent scholarship about Booker Prize Winner Michael Ondaatje's oeuvre by scholars working in English-Canadian literature and culture. Contributors to the volume are Victoria Cook, Mariene Goldman, and Sandeep Sanghera with papers on Anil's Ghost, Beverley Curran, Stephanie M. Hilger, Hsuan Hsu, and Steven Totosy on The English Patient, Gien Lowry and Winfried Siemerling on In the Skin of a Lion, Jon Saklofske on Coming Through Slaughter, and Eluned Summers-Bremner on Ondaatje's poetry. The papers in the volume are followed by a selected bibliography of scholarship about Ondaatje's oeuvre (Steven Totosy), a list of Ondaatje's works, and the bio-profiles of the contributors to the volume. With the objective to render appreciation of both Ondaatje's writing and thought about his writing, the critical work presented in the volume will prove useful to general readers, critics, and scholars alike

Fojas's book is a study about the aporia between cosmopolitanism as a sign of justice and cosmopolitanism as the consumption and display of international luxury items and cultural production. Turn of the century Pan-American cosmopolitanism described international aesthetic culture and fashion drawn from major world cities, but it was also implicitly political, it held a promise of justice in the acceptance and coexistence of difference. Being cosmopolitan was an orientation towards the cosmopolis in a search for models of tolerance and openness for different lifestyles, ways of being, and gender and sexual identities. Fojas engages the work of Guatemalan Enrique Gomez Carrillo, the travel writings from the Chicago World's Fair of Cuban Aurelia Castillo de Gonzalez, the Venezuelan journal Cosmopoils, and Rodo's infamous Ariel, all of which share a common principle of the practical application of cosmopolitanism. These figures grapple with cosmopolitanism, sometimes conceptualizing new models of hospitality and sometimes failing, nonetheless keeping the broken promise of utopist spaces and their imagined cities.

The volume fills a gap in scholarship about Imre Kertesz, whose work to date is largely unknown in the English-speaking world. The papers' authors are scholars from the US, Canada, the UK, Hungary, Germany, and New Zealand. In addition to the papers, the volume contains a bibliography of Kertesz's works including translations, and a bibliography of studies in several languages about his work.

Reisinger examines contemporary French society's relationship with violence in an era of increased media dominance. The study's innovative and interdisciplinary approach integrates media, cinema, and literary studies to analyze how crime news functions as a site of discursive struggle. By situating these crime stories in a larger historical and political context, she analyzes how media and politicians use the crime story as a tool for upholding the dominant ideology.

Philippe Codde provides a comparative cultural analysis of the unprecedented success of the Jewish novel in the postwar United States by situating the process and event in the context of three closely-related American cultural movements: the popularity in the US of French philosophical and literary existentialism the increasing visibility of the Holocaust in US-American life, and the advent of radical theology. Codde argues that the literary repertoire of the postwar Jewish novel consists of an amalgam of these cultural elements that were making their mark in the political, religious, and philosophical systems of the United States at the time, and that this explains, in part, the Jewish novel's sweeping success in the American literary system.

Chabot Davis analyzes contemporary texts that bond together two seemingly antithetical sensibilities: the sentimental and the postmodern. Ranging across multiple media and offering a methodological union of textual analysis and reception study, Chabot Davis presents case studies of audience responses. Chabot Davis argues that sentimental postmodernism deepened leftist political engagement by moving audiences to identify emotionally with people across the divisions of gender, sexual identity, race, and ethnicity. This study questions the critical equation of postmodernism with apocalyptic nihilism and political apathy. The book also challenges the assumption that sentimentality and sympathy are inherently conservative and imperialistic.

In his book Nation and Region in Modern American and European Fiction, Thomas O. Beebee analyzes fictional texts as a "discursive territoriality" that shape readers' notions of (and ambivalence about) national and regional belonging. Several canonical works of literary fiction have provided their readers with verbal maps that in their depictions of boundary spaces construct indirect images of national territory and geography.Beebee analyzes comparatively in their historical and cultural diversity in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's, Nikolai Gogol's, and Ivan Turgenev's competing geographies of Russia and its empire, Euclides da Cunha's ambivalent nomination of the sertanejo (backlander) as the ""bedrock of the Brazilian race,"" William Faulkner's and Jose Lin do Rego's cultural memories of the plantation, Jose Maria Arguedas's novelistic ethnogeographies of Andean culture, Juan Benet's construction of region as both metaphor and metonym for Francoist Spain, and the ""u-topian"" North American (US and Canada) desert landscapes of Mary Austin, Nicole Brossard, and Joy Harjo.

Marko Juvan's History and Poetics of Intertextuality is a revised and updated translation of his 2000 book "Intertekstualnost" (Intertextuality). In his book, Juvan argues that while intertextuality is constitutive of all textuality it may be foregrounded in certain literary works, genres, or styles (e.g., parody or allusion as forms of citationality). He surveys the field in order to ground the poetics of intertextuality in the history of its idea from Kristeva to New Historicism and citationality from Genette's late structuralism to text theory. In humanities scholarship literary studies have transformed the notion of intertextuality from its transgressive content into a detailed descriptive methodology. However, by bringing citationality into focus, they also stressed that literature is an autopoetic system, living on cultural memory, and interacting with other social discourses. The poetics of intertextuality proposed here, based mainly on semiotics, elucidates factors determining the socio-historically elusive border between general intertextuality and citationality (encyclopaedic literary competence, paratext, etc.) and explores modes of intertextual representation, stressing that pre-texts evoked or re-written in post-texts figure as interpretants of the latter and vice versa. Intertextual derivations and references, which have become common in literary culture, are finally explained as intertextual figures and genres.

Comparative Central European Holocaust Studies contains select papers on various topics of culture and literature in Central and EastEurope from Canadian and U.S. conferences. Organized by the editor, Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek, the work presented in this volume is based on 1) the notion of the existence and the describability and analysis of a culture (including history, literature, society, and the arts) specific of/to the region designated as Central Europe, 2) the relevance of a field designated as Central European Holocaust studies, and 3) the relevance, in the study of culture, of the comparative and contextual approach designated as comparative cultural studies. Based on the (contested) notion of the existence of a specific culturalcontext of the region defined as "Central Europe," contributors tothe volume discuss the following topics: comparative cultural studies as a theoretical framework forthe study of Central and East European culture(s) (Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek),modernism in Central European literature (Andrea Fábry), Central EuropeanHolocaust poetry (Zsuzsanna Ozsváth), gender in Central European literature andfilm (Anikó Imre), Austroslovakism in the work of Slovak writer Anton Hykisch(Peter Petro), Kundera and the identity of Central Europe (Hana Pichova),public intellectuals in Central Europe after 1989 (Katherine Arens),contemporary Austrian and Hungarian cinema (Catherine Portuges), the notion ofperipherality in contemporary East European culture (Roumiana Deltcheva), andCentral European Jewish family history in the film Sunshine (Susan RubinSuleiman). The volume also includes a bibliography for the study of Central Europeanculture (Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek).

Recent decades have witnessed diverse incarnations and bold sequences of Shakespeare on screen and stage. Hollywood films and a century of Asian readings of plays such as Hamlet and Macbeth are now conjoining in cyberspace, making a world of difference to how we experience Shakespeare. Shakespeare in Hollywood, Asia, and Cyberspace shows readers how ideas of Asia operate in Shakespeare performances and how Asian and Anglo-European forms of cultural production combine to transcend the mode of inquiry that focuses on fidelity. The result is a new creativity that finds expression in different cultural and virtual locations, including recent films and MMOGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Games). The papers in the volume provide a background for these modern developments, showing the history of how Shakespeare became a signifier against which Asian and Western cultures defined—and continue to define—themselves. Authors in the first part of the collection examine culture and gender in Hollywood Shakespearean film and complement the second part in which the history of Shakespearean readings and stagings in China, Indonesia, Cambodia, Japan, Okinawa, Taiwan, Malaya, Korea, and Hong Kong are discussed. Papers in the third part of the volume analyze the transformation of the idea of Shakespeare in cyberspace, a rapidly expanding world of new rewritings of both Shakespeare and Asia. Together, the three sections of this comparative study demonstrate how Asian cultures and Shakespeare affect each other and how the combination of Asian and Anglo-European modes of representation are determining the future of how we see Shakespeare's plays.

Gombrowicz, Polish Modernism, and the Subversion of Form provides a new and comprehensive account of the writing and thought of the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz. While Gombrowicz is probably the key Polish modernist writer, with a stature in his native Poland equivalent to that of Joyce or Beckett in the English language, he remains little known in English. As well as providing a commentary on his novels, plays, and short stories, this book sets Gombrowicz's writing in the context of contemporary cultural theory. The author performs a detailed examination of Gombrowicz's major literary and theatrical work, showing how his conception of form is highly resonant with contemporary, postmodern theories of identity. This book is the essential companion to one of Eastern Europe's most important literary figures whose work, banned by the Nazis and suppressed by Poland's Communist government, has only recently become well known in the West.

Written in the context of critical dialogues about the war on terror and the global crisis in human rights violations, authors of the collected volume Representing Humanity in an Age of Terror - edited by Sophia A. McClennen and Henry James Morello - ask a series of questions: What definitions of humanity account for the persistence of human rights violations? How do we define terror, and how do we understand the ways that terror affects the representation of those that both suffer and profit from it? Why is it that the representation of terror often depends on a distorted (for example, racist, fascist, xenophobic, essentialist, and eliminationist) representation of human beings? And, most importantly, can representation, especially forms of art, rescue humanity from the forces of terror, or does it run the risk of making it possible? The authors of the volume's articles discuss aspects of terror with regard to human rights events across the globe, but especially in the United States, Latin America, and Europe. Their discussion and reflection demonstrate that the need to question continuously and to engage in permanent critique does not contradict the need to seek answers, to advocate social change, and to intervene critically.

Berlin, Budapest, Prague, and Warsaw are cities indelibly marked by more than forty years of Soviet influence. Urban Cultures in (Post)Colonial Central Europe explores the ways in which these major urban centres have redefined their identities in the last two decades. The author suggests that they are both Central European and (post) colonial spaces and that the locations of their (post)coloniality can be found predominantly in communicative and media processes and their results in architecture, film, literature, and new media. Agata Anna Lisiak analyzes Berlin, Budapest, Prague, and Warsaw as (post) colonial cities because their politics, cultures, societies, and economies have been shaped by two centres of power: the Soviet Union as the former colonizer, whose influence remains visible predominantly in architecture, infrastructure, social relations, and mentalities, and the Western culture and the Western and/or global capital as the current colonizer, whose impact extends over virtually all spheres of urban life. The cities discussed are not exclusively postcolonial or solely colonial: they are 'in-between' the two predicaments and, hence, are best described as (post) colonial. The (post)colonial and 'in-between peripheral' identities and locations of the Central European capitals complement each other, and their analysis provides a relevant perspective on the transformation processes that have been shaping the region after 1989.

This book is a historical-textual study about transformations of the aesthetics of the sublime"the literary and aesthetic quality of greatness under duress"from early English Romanticism to the New Poetry Movement in twentieth-century China. Zheng sets up the former and the latter as distinct but historically analogous moments and argues that both the European Romantic reinvention of the sublime and its later Chinese transformation represent cultural movements built on the excessive and capacious nature of the sublime to counter their shared sense of historical crisis. The author further postulates, through critical analysis several works, that these aesthetic practices of modernity suggest a deliberate historical hyperbolization of literary agency. Such an agency is in turn constructed imaginatively and affectively as a means to redress different cultures' traumatic encounter with modernity. The volume will be of interest to scholars including undergraduate and graduate students of Romanticism, philosophy, history, English literature, Chinese literature, comparative literature, and (comparative) cultural studies.

In this volume, Hui Zou analyzes historical, architectural, visual, literary, and philosophical perspectives on the Western-styled garden that formed part of the great Yuanming Yuan complex in Beijing, constructed during the Qing dynasty. Designed and built in the late eighteenth century by Italian and French Jesuits, the garden described in this book was a wonderland of multistoried buildings, fountains, labyrinths, and geometrical hills. It even included an open-air theater. Through detailed examination of historical literature and representations, Zou analyzes the ways in which the Jesuits accommodated their design within the Chinese cultural context. He shows how an especially important element of their approach was the application of a linear perspective to create the jing, the Chinese concept of the bounded bright view of a garden scene. Hui Zou's book demonstrates how Jesuit metaphysics fused with Chinese cosmology and broadens our understanding of cultural and religious encounters in early Chinese modernity.

The studies presented in the collected volume Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies -- edited by Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek and Louise O. Vasvári -- are intended as an addition to scholarship in (comparative) cultural studies. More specifically, the articles represent scholarship about Central and East European culture with special attention to Hungarian culture, literature, cinema, new media, and other areas of cultural expression. On the landscape of scholarship in Central and East Europe (including Hungary), cultural studies has acquired at best spotty interest and studies in the volume aim at forging interest in the field. The volume's articles are in five parts: part one, """"History Theory and Methodology of Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies,"""" include studies on the prehistory of multicultural and multilingual Central Europe, where vernacular literatures were first institutionalized for developing a sense of national identity. Part two, """"Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies and Literature and Culture"""" is about the re-evaluation of canonical works, as well as Jewish studies which has been explored inadequately in Central European scholarship. Part three, """"Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies and Other Arts,"""" includes articles on race, jazz, operetta, and art, fin-de-siècle architecture, communist-era female fashion, and cinema. In part four, """"Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies and Gender,"""" articles are about aspects of gender and sex(uality) with examples from fin-de-siècle transvestism, current media depictions of heterodox sexualities, and gendered language in the workplace. The volume's last section, part five, """"Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies of Contemporary Hungary,"""" includes articles about post-1989 issues of race and ethnic relations, citizenship and public life, and new media.

This exploration of class, feminism, and cultural identity (including issues of race, nation, colonialism, and economic imperialism) focuses on the work of four writers: the Mozambican Mia Couto, the Portuguese José Saramago, the Brazilian Clarice Lispector and the South African J. M. Coetzee. In the first section, the author discusses the political aspects of Couto’s collection of short stories Contos do nascer da terra (Stories of the Birth of the Land) and Saramago’s novel O ano da morte de Ricardo Reis (The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis). The second section explores similar themes in Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K and Lispector’s A hora da estrela (The Hour of the Star). Marques argues that these four writers are political in the sense that they bring to the forefront issues pertaining to the power of literature to represent, misrepresent, and debate matter related to different subaltern subjects: the postcolonial subject, the poor subject (the ""poor other""), and the female subject. She also discusses the ""ahuman other"" in the context of the subjectivity of the natural world, the dead, and the unborn, and shows how these aspects are present in all the different societies addressed and point to the mystical dimension that permeates most societies. With regard to Couto's work, this ""ahuman other"" is approached mostly through a discussion of the holistic, animist values and epistemologies that inform and guide Mozambican traditional societies, while in further analyses the notion is approached via discussions on phenomenology, elementality, and divinity following the philosophies of Lévinas and Irigaray and mystical consciousness in Zen Buddhism and the psychology of Jung.

Drawing from Anglo-American, Asian American, and Asian literature as well as J-horror and manga, Chinese cinema and Internet, and the Korean Wave, Sheng-mei Ma's Asian Diaspora and East-West Modernity probes into the conjoinedness of West and East, of modernity's illusion and nothing's infinitude. Suspended on the stylistic tightrope between research and poetry, critical analysis and intuition, Asian Diaspora restores affect and heart to the experience of diaspora in between East and West, at-homeness and exilic attrition. Diaspora, by definition, stems as much from socioeconomic and collective displacement as it points to emotional reaction. This book thus challenges the fossilized conceptualizations in area studies, ontology, and modernism. The book's first two chapters trace the Asian pursuit of modernity into nothing, as embodied in horror film and the gaming motif in transpacific literature and film. Chapters three through eight focus on the borderlands of East and West, the edges of humanity and meaning. Ma examines how loss occasions a revisualization of Asia in children's books, how Asian diasporic passing signifies, paradoxically, both "born again" and demise of the "old" self, how East turns "yEast" or the agent of self-fashioning for Anglo-America, Asia, and Asian America, how the construct of "bugman" distinguishes modern West's and East's self-image, how the extreme human condition of "non-person" permeates the Korean Wave, and how manga artists are drawn to wartime Japan. The final two chapters interrogate the West's death-bound yet enlightening Orientalism in Anglo-American literature and China's own schizophrenic split, evidenced in the 2008 Olympic Games.

Text and Image in Modern European Culture is a collection of essays that are transnational and interdisciplinary in scope. Employing a range of innovative comparative approaches to reassess and undermine traditional boundaries between art forms and national cultures, the contributors shed new light on the relations between literature and the visual arts in Europe after 1850. Following tenets of comparative cultural studies, work presented in this volume explores international creative dialogues between writers and visual artists, ekphrasis in literature, literature and design (fashion, architecture), hybrid texts (visual poetry, surrealist pocket museums, poetic photo-texts), and text and image relations under the impact of modern technologies (avant-garde experiments, digital poetry). The discussion encompasses pivotal fin de siècle, modernist, and postmodernist works and movements in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Russia, and Spain. A selected bibliography of work published in the field is also included. The volume will appeal to scholars of comparative literature, art history, and visual studies, and includes contributions appropriate for supplementary reading in senior undergraduate and graduate seminars.

While a large amount of scholarship about Milan Kundera's work exists, in Liisa Steinby's opinion, his work has not been studied within the context of (European) modernity as a sociohistorical and a cultural concept. Of course, he is considered to be a modernist writer (some call him even a postmodernist), but what the broader concept of modernity intellectually, historically, socially, and culturally means for him and how this is expressed in his texts has not been thoroughly examined. Steinby's book fills this vacuum by analysing Kundera's novels from the viewpoint of his understanding of the existential problems in the culture of modernity. In addition, his relation to those modernist novelists from the first half of the twentieth century who are most important for him is scrutinised in detail. Steinby’s Kundera and Modernity is intended for students of modernism in literary and (comparative) cultural studies, as well as those interested in European and Central European studies.Key Points:Offers new insights into the work of the popular modern writer Milan Kundera.Expands the reader’s understanding of the meaning of the concept of “modernity.”Widens the literature available in English about Central European culture.

Why are twentieth-century novelists from former British colonies in the Americas preoccupied with British Romantic poetry? In Romantic Revisions, Lauren Rule Maxwell examines five novels—Kincaid's Lucy, Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, McCarthy's Blood Meridian, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and Harris's Palace of the Peacock—that contain crucial scenes engaging British Romantic poetry. Each work adapts figures from British Romantic poetry and translates them into an American context. Kincaid relies on the repeated image of the daffodil, Atwood displaces Lucy, McCarthy upends the American arcadia, Fitzgerald heaps Keatsian images of excess, and Harris transforms the albatross. In her close readings, Maxwell suggests that the novels reframe Romantic poetry to allegorically confront empire, revealing how subjectivity is shaped by considerations of place and power. Returning to British Romantic poetry allows the novels to extend the Romantic poetics of landscape that traditionally considered the British subject’s relation to place. By recasting Romantic poetics in the Americas, these novels show how negotiations of identity and power are defined by the legacies of British imperialism, illustrating that these nations, their peoples, and their works of art are truly postcolonial. While many postcolonial scholars and critics have dismissed the idea that Romantic poetry can be used to critique colonialism, Maxwell suggests that, on the contrary, it has provided contemporary writers across the Americas with a means of charting the literary and cultural legacies of British imperialism in the New World. The poems of the British Romantics offer postcolonial writers particularly rich material, Maxwell argues, because they characterize British influence at the height of the British empire. In explaining how the novels adapt figures from British Romantic poetry, Romantic Revisions provides scholars and students working in postcolonial studies, Romanticism, and English-language literature with a new look at politics of location in the Americas.

In this English translation and revision of her acclaimed German-language book, Elke Sturm-Trigonakis expands on Goethe's notion of Weltliteratur (1827) to propose that, owing to globalisation, literature is undergoing a profound change in process, content, and linguistic practice. Rather than producing texts for a primarily national readership, modern writers can collate diverse cultural, literary, and linguistic traditions to create new modes of expression that she designates as ""hybrid texts."" The author introduces an innovative framework to analyse these new forms of expression that is based on comparative cultural studies and its methodology of contextual (systemic and empirical) approaches to the study of literature and culture, including the concepts of the macro- and micro-systems of culture and literature. To illustrate her proposition, Sturm-Trigonakis discusses selected literary texts which that exhibit characteristics of linguistic and cultural hybridity, the concept of ""in-between,"" and transculturality and thus are located in a space of a ""new world literature."" Examples include Gastarbeiterliteratur (""migrant literature"") by authors such as Chiellino, Shami, and Atabay. The book is important reading for philologists, linguists, sociologists, and other scholars interested in the cultural and linguistic impact of globalisation on literature and culture. The German edition of this volume was originally published as Global playing in der Literatur. Ein Versuch über die Neue Weltliteratur (2007), and it has been translated in collaboration with the author by Athanasia Margoni and Maria Kaisar.

In 2012 the Swedish Academy announced that Mo Yan had received the Nobel Prize in Literature for his work that “with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history, and the contemporary.” The announcement marked the first time a resident of mainland China had ever received the award. This is the first English-language study of the Chinese writer’s work and influence, featuring essays from scholars in a range of disciplines, from both China and the United States. Its introduction, twelve articles, and epilogue aim to deepen and widen critical discussions of both a specific literary author and the globalisation of Chinese literature more generally. The book takes the “root-seeking” movement with which Mo Yan’s works are associated as a metaphor for its organisational structure. The four articles of “Part I: Leaves” focus on Mo Yan’s works as world literature, exploring the long shadow his works have cast globally. Howard Goldblatt, Mo Yan’s English translator, explores the difficulties and rewards of interpreting his work, while subsequent articles cover issues such as censorship and the “performativity” associated with being a global author. “Part II: Trunk” explores the nativist core of Mo Yan’s works. Through careful comparative treatment of related historical events, the five articles in this section show how specific literary works intermingle with China’s national and international politics, its mid-twentieth-century visual culture, and its rich religious and literary conventions, including humor. The three articles in “Part III: Roots” delve into the theoretical and practical extensions of Mo Yan’s works, uncovering the vibrant critical and cultural systems that ground Eastern and Western literatures and cultures. Mo Yan in Context concludes with an epilogue by sociologist Fenggang Yang, offering a personal and globally aware reflection on the recognition Mo Yan’s works have received at this historical juncture.

In Transcultural Writers and Novels in the Age of Global Mobility, Arianna Dagnino analyzes a new type of literature emerging from artists’ increased movement and cultural flows spawned by globalization. This ""transcultural"" literature is produced by authors who write across cultural and national boundaries and who transcend in their lives and creative production the borders of a single culture. Dagnino's book contains a creative rendition of interviews conducted with five internationally renowned writers—Inez Baranay, Brian Castro, Alberto Manguel, Tim Parks, and Ilija Trojanow—and a critical exegesis reflecting on thematical, critical, and stylistical aspects.By studying the selected authors’ corpus of work, life experiences, and cultural orientations, Dagnino explores the implicit, often subconscious, process of cultural and imaginative metamorphosis that leads transcultural writers and their fictionalized characters beyond ethnic, national, racial, or religious loci of identity and identity formation. Drawing on the theoretical framework of comparative cultural studies, she offers insight into transcultural writing related to belonging, hybridity, cultural errancy, the ""Other,"" worldviews, translingualism, deterritorialization, neonomadism, as well as genre, thematic patterns, and narrative techniques. Dagnino also outlines the implications of transcultural writing within the wider context of world literature(s) and identifies some of the main traits that characterize “transcultural novels.”“Starting from the idea that we live in an age of increasing interconnectedness, the book focuses on the biographical experiences and literary outputs of a group of culturally mobile writers it defines as transcultural. The text combines a wide-ranging and systematic theoretical approach to transcultural literature with a section in which the author recounts imaginatively the in-depth interviews she had with five authors. The work is a significant contribution to scholarship, for it increases our theoretical awareness of today’s literary developments, providing us with critical tools that enable us to approach literary texts with an innovative perspective.” Maurizio Ascari, Università di Bologna.