Kojo Laing, Robert Browning and Affiliative Literature

Kojo Laing, Robert Browning and Affiliative Literature

Author: Joseph Hankinson

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2022-12-13

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 3031187768

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book compares the Victorian British poet Robert Browning and the twentieth-century Ghanaian poet and novelist Kojo Laing—two writers whose texts frequently foreground multi-scalar transregional cartographies, points of connection and translation, and imaginative kinships between different linguistic and cultural communities. Starting from the numerous and surprising points of connection and resemblance between both authors’ texts, this book puts pressure on critical practices that would keep writers like Laing and Browning separate, positing instead the importance of paying attention to the transnational, cross-cultural, and cross-temporal imaginative relationships texts themselves generate. By comparing two writers whose texts represent different points of view on a number of shared and congruent contexts, this book seeks an original way of understanding the relationship between texts and (post-) colonial contexts, texts and other texts. Browning’s and Laing’s shared tendency to foreground trans- and post-national cartographies of relation and difference, and their similarly translational aesthetics, both demand a probing of the disciplinary separation between ‘English Literature’ and ‘Comparative Literature’, as well as ‘literature’ and ‘comparison’, and a fresh awareness of the ways in which literature itself makes comparisons and affiliations. It also involves a version of ‘world literature’ intent on accentuating the relational worlds (linguistic, imaginative, ethical) that texts themselves generate; a criticism sensitive to the ways in which writers from different times and places can still be seen to overlap.


Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature

Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature

Author: Ato Quayson

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-01-21

Total Pages: 347

ISBN-13: 1108924956

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book examines tragedy and tragic philosophy from the Greeks through Shakespeare to the present day. It explores key themes in the links between suffering and ethics through postcolonial literature. Ato Quayson reconceives how we think of World literature under the singular and fertile rubric of tragedy. He draws from many key works – Oedipus Rex, Philoctetes, Medea, Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear – to establish the main contours of tragedy. Quayson uses Shakespeare's Othello, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Tayeb Salih, Arundhati Roy, Toni Morrison, Samuel Beckett and J.M. Coetzee to qualify and expand the purview and terms by which Western tragedy has long been understood. Drawing on key texts such as The Poetics and The Nicomachean Ethics, and augmenting them with Frantz Fanon and the Akan concept of musuo (taboo), Quayson formulates a supple, insightful new theory of ethical choice and the impediments against it. This is a major book from a leading critic in literary studies.


Poetry, Print, and the Making of Postcolonial Literature

Poetry, Print, and the Making of Postcolonial Literature

Author: Nathan Suhr-Sytsma

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2017-07-10

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 1316739015

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Poetry, Print, and the Making of Postcolonial Literature reveals an intriguing history of relationships among poets and editors from Ireland and Nigeria, as well as Britain and the Caribbean, during the mid-twentieth-century era of decolonization. The book explores what such leading anglophone poets as Seamus Heaney, Christopher Okigbo, and Derek Walcott had in common: 'peripheral' origins and a desire to address transnational publics without expatriating themselves. The book reconstructs how they gained the imprimatur of both local and London-based cultural institutions. It shows, furthermore, how political crises challenged them to reconsider their poetry's publics. Making substantial use of unpublished archival material, Nathan Suhr-Sytsma examines poems in print, often the pages on which they first appeared, in order to chart the transformation of the anglophone literary world. He argues that these poets' achievements cannot be extricated from the transnational networks through which their poems circulated - and which they in turn remade.


Literary Cosmopolitanism in the English Fin de Siècle

Literary Cosmopolitanism in the English Fin de Siècle

Author: Stefano Evangelista

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0198864248

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The fin de siècle witnessed an extensive and heated debate about cosmopolitanism, which transformed readers' attitudes towards national identity, foreign literatures, translation, and the idea of world literature. Focussing on literature written in English, Literary Cosmopolitanism in the English Fin de Siècle offers a critical examination of cosmopolitanism as a distinctive feature of the literary modernity of this important period of transition. No longer conceived purely as an abstract philosophical ideal, cosmopolitanism--or world citizenship--informed the actual, living practices of authors and readers who sought new ways of relating local and global identities in an increasingly interconnected world. The book presents literary cosmopolitanism as a field of debate and controversy. While some writers and readers embraced the creative, imaginative, emotional, and political potentials of world citizenship, hostile critics denounced it as a politically and morally suspect ideal, and stressed instead the responsibilities of literature towards the nation. In this age of empire and rising nationalism, world citizenship came to enshrine a paradox: it simultaneously connoted positions of privilege and marginality, connectivity and non-belonging. Chapters on Oscar Wilde, Lafcadio Hearn, George Egerton, the periodical press, and artificial languages bring to light the variety of literary responses to the idea of world citizenship that proliferated at the turn of the twentieth century. The book interrogates cosmopolitanism as a liberal ideology that celebrates human diversity and as a social identity linked to worldliness; it investigates its effect on gender, ethics, and the emotions. It presents the literature of the fin de siècle as a dynamic space of exchange and mediation, and argues that our own approach to literary studies should become less national in focus.


The Cambridge Companion to the Postcolonial Novel

The Cambridge Companion to the Postcolonial Novel

Author: Ato Quayson

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 335

ISBN-13: 1107132819

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This Companion provides an engaging account of the postcolonial novel, from Joseph Conrad to Jean Rhys. Covering subjects from disability and diaspora to the sublime and the city, this Companion reveals the myriad traditions that have shaped the postcolonial literary landscape.


Runaway Genres

Runaway Genres

Author: Yogita Goyal

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2019-10-29

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 1479832715

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Winner, 2021 René Wellek Prize, given by the American Comparative Literature Association Winner, 2021 Barbara Perkins and George Perkins Award, given by the International Society for the Study of Narrative Honorable Mention, 2020 James Russell Lowell Prize, given by the Modern Language Association Argues that the slave narrative is a new world literary genre In Runaway Genres, Yogita Goyal tracks the emergence of slavery as the defining template through which current forms of human rights abuses are understood. The post-black satire of Paul Beatty and Mat Johnson, modern slave narratives from Sudan to Sierra Leone, and the new Afropolitan diaspora of writers like Teju Cole and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie all are woven into Goyal’s argument for the slave narrative as a new world literary genre, exploring the full complexity of this new ethical globalism. From the humanitarian spectacles of Kony 2012 and #BringBackOurGirls through gothic literature, Runaway Genres unravels, for instance, how and why the African child soldier has now appeared as the afterlife of the Atlantic slave. Goyal argues that in order to fathom forms of freedom and bondage today—from unlawful detention to sex trafficking to the refugee crisis to genocide—we must turn to contemporary literature, which reveals how the literary forms used to tell these stories derive from the antebellum genre of the slave narrative. Exploring the ethics and aesthetics of globalism, the book presents alternative conceptions of human rights, showing that the revival and proliferation of slave narratives offers not just an occasion to revisit the Atlantic past, but also for re-narrating the global present. In reassessing these legacies and their ongoing relation to race and the human, Runaway Genres creates a new map with which to navigate contemporary black diaspora literature.


The Ring and the Book

The Ring and the Book

Author: Robert Browning

Publisher:

Published: 1869

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This is the final of the four volumes published from 1868-1869that make up Robert Browning'sThe Ring and the Book, a long blank-verse poem composed of 12 books and over 20,000 lines. This volume includes the booksThe Pope, GuidoandThe Book and the Ring.


The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Poetry

The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Poetry

Author: Jahan Ramazani

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2017-02-27

Total Pages: 311

ISBN-13: 1107090717

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This Companion is the first to explore postcolonial poetry through regional, historical, political, formal, textual and gender approaches.


Comparative Literature

Comparative Literature

Author: Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek

Publisher: Rodopi

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 9789042005341

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book serves several purposes, all very much needed in today's embattled situation of the humanities and the study of literature. First, in Chapter One, the author proposes that the discipline of Comparative Literature is a most advantageous approach for the study of literature and culture as it is a priori a discipline of cross-disciplinarity and of international dimensions. After a "Manifesto" for a New Comparative Literature, he proceeds to offer several related theoretical frameworks as a composite method for the study of literature and culture he designates and explicates as the "systemic and empirical approach." Following the introduction of the proposed New Comparative Literature, the author applies his method to a wide variety of literary and cultural areas of inquiry such as "Literature and Cultural Participation" where he discusses several aspects of reading and readership (Chapter Two), "Comparative Literature as/and Interdisciplinarity" (Chapter Three) where he deals with theory and application for film and literature and medicine and literature, "Cultures, Peripheralities, and Comparative Literature" (Chapter Four) where he proposes a theoretical designation he terms "inbetween peripherality" for the study of East Central European literatures and cultures as well as ethnic minority writing, "Women's Literature and Men Writing about Women"(Chapter Five) where he analyses texts written by women and texts about women written by men in the theoretical context of Ethical Constructivism, "The Study of Translation and Comparative Literature" (Chapter Six) where after a theoretical introduction he presents a new version of Anton Popovic's dictionary for literary translation as a taxonomy for the study of translation, and "The Study of Literature and the Electronic Age" (Chapter Seven), where he discusses the impact of new technologies on the study of literature and culture. The analyses in their various applications of the proposed New Comparative Literature involve modern and contemporary authors and their works such as Dorothy Richardson, Margit Kaffka, Mircea Cartarescu, Robert Musil, Alfred Döblin, Hermann Hesse, Péter Esterházy, Dezsö Kosztolányi, Michael Ondaatje, Endre Kukorelly, Else Seel, and others.


Triomf

Triomf

Author: Marlene Van Niekerk

Publisher: ABRAMS

Published: 2005-03-29

Total Pages: 426

ISBN-13: 1468302221

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

“A scatologocial black satire . . . Triomf may be the signal Afrikaans novel of the 1990s . . . A daring, vicious and hilarious flight of imagination” (The Washington Post). This is the story of the four inhabitants of 127 Martha Street in the poor white suburb of Triomf. Living on the ruins of old Sophiatown, the freehold township razed to the ground as a so-called “black spot,” they await with trepidation their country’s first democratic elections. It is a date that coincides fatefully with the fortieth birthday of Lambert, the oversexed misfit son of the house. There is also Treppie, master of misrule and family metaphysician; Pop, the angel of peace teetering on the brink of the grave; and Mol, the materfamilias in her eternal housecoat. Pestered on a daily basis by nosy neighbors, National Party canvassers and Jehovah’s Witnesses, defenseless against the big city towering over them like a vengeful dinosaur, they often resort to quoting to each other the only consolation that they know; we still have each other and a roof over our heads. Triomf relentlessly probes Afrikaner history and politics, revealing the bizarre and tragic effect that apartheid had on exactly the white underclass who were most supposed to benefit. It is also a seriously funny investigation of the human endeavor to make sense of life even under the most abject of circumstances. “South Africa as you’ve never seen it: a tale of incest and white trash. Funny, feisty, ferociously clever.” —Gillian Slovo, author of Ten Days “A world-class tragicomic novel, the kind of book that stabs at your heart while it has you rolling on the floor.” —The New York Times Book Review