Mini-Monographs in Literary and Cultural Studies – serie

This book comprehensively explores the space of literary tourism and how literature can introduce, promote, and contribute to the awareness of cultural landmarks.Aimed not only at literature enthusiasts, but also at those who love to travel along less beaten paths, In the Poets’ Footsteps: Literature, Tourism, and Promotion tells the story of literary tourism between the beginning of the 1800s and today. Giovanni Capecchi surveys the methods most used today, namely printed and online literary guides, that offer a wide panorama of writers' homes and evaluates literary festivals as events capable of giving cultural and economic opportunities to the territories that host them.Rich in examples and "case studies", capable of linking literature and economics, the book is itself a journey: a trip to real or imaginary locations, in the footsteps of poets, to discover places that have hosted and inspired great writers.After its success in Italy, where the second edition is about to be published, this book is now being released simultaneously in English and in Spanish.

L’infini culturel est autour de nous, mais, comme l’horizon, il tend à fuir sous nos yeux. Il est sur les murs investis par le street art ; ou dans les toiles d’araignée auxquelles Tomás Saraceno a rendu hommage ; ou dans les timbres-poste qui, comme savaient Walter Benjamin et Italo Calvino, sont des fenêtres ouvertes sur le monde. Quelles que soient ses manifestations, l’infini nous engage à considérer l’extraordinaire diversité de la planète. Face à lui, que faire, en littérature ? Rester humble, par exemple, et formuler des hypothèses adéquates. Tenter de déjouer les asymétries qui empêchent les uns et les autres de s’exprimer partout dans de bonnes conditions. Revoir les fondements de la world literature et se mettre en résonance avec une culture authentiquement planétaire. Cultural infinity surrounds us; but, just like the horizon, it tends to run away right in front of our eyes. It might appear on walls full of street art; in the spider webs deeply esteemed by Tomás Saraceno; in postage stamps which, as Walter Benjamin and Italo Calvino acknowledged, are open windows on the world.Whatever its manifestations, the infinite dares us to consider the extraordinary diversity of the planet. In front of such a challenge, what can we do with literature? Stay humble, for example, and formulate adequate hypotheses. Try to reduce the asymmetries that prevent us from expressing ourselves everywhere in good conditions. Build the foundations of world literature and resonate with an authentically global culture.

Using Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation and Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s The Secret History of Costaguana, this book asks you to serve as the jury on euro-modernism, specifically the canonical texts Camus’s The Stranger and Conrad’s Nostromo. The book reveals the extent to which euro-modernist aesthetics was culpable in rationalising colonialism.

The Jewish Vanguard brings to light a spirited cultural moment when Jewish writers and artists were at the forefront of the avant-garde. Blending literary theory, cultural history, and Jewish studies, this book reveals how these figures reimagined identity, politics, and tradition through radical artistic and intellectual experimentation. From mystical thought to progressive utopias, their ideas resonated far beyond their immediate circles, even as their contributions have been marginalised in mainstream narratives. Featuring original archival research and fresh case studies, The Jewish Vanguard offers a compelling new perspective on Jewish participation on the early 20th-century cultural arena, challenging conventional views and opening new paths in avant-garde and cultural studies.

Si les contes de Perrault suscitent un nombre incalculable d’analyses et de commentaires depuis leur parution, le vêtement y reçoit relativement peu d’attention. Or, des robes de Peau d’Âne, utilisées pour exercer une pression incestueuse, aux têtes couronnées puis décapitées des petites ogresses dans Le Petit Poucet révélant une critique politique acerbe, le thème vestimentaire est loin d'y être anodin. Sans être le dernier travail littéraire de Perrault, le recueil de contes constitue cependant son ouvrage-testament dans lequel l'auteur livre ses messages les plus subversifs et ses constats les plus amers sur les maux de son temps. À travers le vêtement, l'académicien dénonce l’immoralité des possesseurs de pouvoir, le sadisme masculin, les impostures bourgeoises, la cupidité des élites et jusqu'au système politique de son temps.While Perrault's tales have sparked countless analyses and commentaries since their publication, clothing has received relatively little attention therein. Yet, from the dresses of Donkeyskin, used to exert incestuous pressure, to the crowned and decapitated heads of the little ogres in "Hop-o'-My-Thumb," revealing a sharp political critique, the theme of clothing is far from inconsequential. While not Perrault's final literary work, the collection of tales nevertheless serves as his magnum opus, in which the author delivers his most subversive messages and bitter observations about the ills of his time. Through clothing, the academician denounces the immorality of those in power, male sadism, bourgeois deceptions, the greed of the elite, and even the political system of his era.

Experimental translation has been surging in popularity recently—with avant-garde translation at the combative forefront. But how to do it? How to read it?Translator, Touretter plays on the Italian dictum traduttore, traditore—“translator, traitor”—to mobilize the affective intensity of Tourettic tics as a practical guide to making and reading avant-garde translations. It smashes the theoretical literature on the sublime from Longinus to Kant into Motherless Brooklyn, both the 1999 novel by Jonathan Lethem and its 2019 screen adaptation by Edward Norton, in order to generate out of their collision a series of models—visual, aural/oral, and kinesthetic—for avant-garde literary translation.

Exploring the metamorphoses of the body in the eighteenth-century Robinsonade as a crucial aspect of the genre’s ideologies, Castaway Bodies offers focused readings of intriguing, yet often forgotten, novels: Peter Longueville’s The English Hermit (1727), Robert Paltock’s Peter Wilkins (1751) and The Female American (1767) by an anonymous author. The book shows that by rewriting the myths of the New Adam, the Androgyne and the Amazon, respectively, these novels went beyond, though not completely counter to, the politics of conquest and mastery that are typically associated with the Robinsonade. It argues that even if these narratives could still be read as colonial fantasies, they opened a space for more consistent rejections of the imperial agenda in contemporary castaway fiction.

This casebook edition comprises critical essays about and an English translation of La Diabolique Tragédie. Each essay is an example of what Peter Barry has called ‘Crisis Critique,’ the commentaries ranging from the psychoanalytical, to the feminist, the historicist and the religious. A ‘poème en prose’ dating from the start of the nineteenth century, La Diabolique Tragédie was first published in 2011. It was the work of a forger whose (unrealized) endgame was for the text to be presented to the public of the day as an authentic work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The critical essays represent a series of impressions of different types of literary critics, which – the author hopes – will prove a good match for the forger’s ‘mock Rousseau.’