bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
RETRACTED: CDKL5 promotes proliferation, migration, and chemotherapeutic drug resistance of glioma cells via activation of the PI3K/AKT signaling pathway
Authors: Jiang Zhenfu , Gong Tongtong , Wei Hong
Published: December 2019

Gliomas, the most prevalent cancer in the central nervous system, are characterized by high morbidity and mortality, emphasizing the need to understand their etiology. Here, we report that cyclin‐dependent kinase‐like 5 (CDKL5) is highly expressed in gliomas, and CDKL5 overexpression promotes invasion, proliferation, migration and drug (β‐lapachone) resistance of glioma cells. In vitro, CDKL5 overexpression enhanced invasion, growth and migration of glioma cells, and stimulated the phosphoinositide 3‐kinase (PI3K)/AKT axis. Furthermore, CDKL5 overexpression in vivo promoted glioma proliferation, whereas CDKL5 knockdown had opposing effects. The effect of CDKL5 on drug resistance was eliminated if the PI3K/AKT axis was suppressed, and cisplatin combined with the PI3K/AKT suppressor XL147 remarkably prohibited proliferation in xenografts overexpressing CDKL5. Collectively, our findings suggest that CDKL5 acts through the PI3K/AKT axis in glioma cells, and indicate a possible role for CDKL5 in glioma therapy.
Introduction to World Literature Third Millenniumbceto 600ce
Authors: Denecke Wiebke
Published: December 2019

This chapter sketches major macroregions and spatiotemporal nodes from the third millenniumbceto 600ceand explores literary cultures in terms of their infrastructure, their places, occasions, and genres, and their relationship to knowledge production and transmission. Methodologically, this chapter proposes to move from definitions of “world literature” to a phenomenology of “the world literary” that captures more diverse phenomena (such as, for example, “preception”). It complements world‐systems approaches focused on economic networks by considering the peculiar reception trajectories of written artifacts that require not just connections but human interactive “connectivity.” And it calls to include a critique of antiquity's symbolic capital (its relation to modernisms) and its political capital (origin narratives for rampant nationalisms today) into the study of ancient worlds. Ultimately, the chapter argues that literatures of ancient worlds hold the promise to inspire new methods, concepts, and visions for the global humanities in the twenty‐first century.
TheTaNaKHand the Canons of Alexandria
Authors: Lange Armin
Published: December 2019

The concept of the Jewish Holy Scriptures as a closed and exclusive collection with a standardized text was developed during the reign of Herod the Great (40/37–4bce). While the critical editions and canons of the Alexandrian library provided a catalyst for this process, the resulting Jewish canon and its proto‐Masoretic standard text represent a genuinely Jewish realization of the concept of canon. Instead of a list of the most important Jewish authors, the Jewish canon represents an exclusive collection of Jewish holy writ. The formation of the Jewish canon and its standardized text should thus be understood both as a response to the increasing Greco‐Romanization under Herod's reign and as a document of the cultural impact of that Greco‐Romanization.
Teachings of the Venerable Masters: Laozi and theDaode jing
Authors: Komjathy Louis
Published: December 2019

This chapter examines the legendary Laozi (Lao‐tzu; Master Lao) and theDaode jing(Tao‐te ching; Scripture on the Dao and Inner Power), a key sacred text of the Daoist (Taoist) tradition. Although conventionally attributed to Laozi, theDaode jingis actually a multivocal anthology, containing a variety of historical and textual layers associated with various anonymous elders of the inner cultivation lineages of classical Daoism (so‐called “philosophical Daoism”). As an expression of the earliest Daoist religious community, emerging during the Warring States period (480–222bce), these lineages emphasized apophatic (emptiness‐/stillness‐based) meditation with the goal of mystical union with the Dao (Tao). In addition to covering this historical background and context, the present chapter examines cultural influences, interpretive legacies, and contexts of reception. In the process, attention is given to the factors that led to theDaode jingbeing identified as a “classic of Chinese literature” and of “world literature” by extension, rather than a classical Daoist text and eventually a central Daoist scripture with distinctive Daoist interpretations.
The First Poem:
V
almiki's

R
amayana

and the Literary World of Southern
A
sia
Authors: Goldman Robert P.
Published: December 2019

In terms of its longevity, geographical spread, and pervasive influence on the aesthetics, languages, literatures, cultures, religions, politics, and societies across Asia, the ancient Indian epic, the
Ramayana
(
Rāmāyaṇa
), of the legendary poet‐sage Valmiki (Vālmīki), is equaled perhaps only by the Holy Bible and the Holy Qurʾan. As a specifically
literary
work, however, it is surely unrivaled in this respect. Although the work itself and its innumerable reworkings in the form of poetry, drama, dance, the plastic arts, and cinema are little known in the West, they remain major cultural touchstones in virtually all of the languages of a significant portion of the world's people who inhabit a vast and diverse region stretching from what is today Afghanistan in the west to Bali in the east. In a rapidly globalizing world, the poem and the reasons for its influence need to be better understood by scholars in many fields.
ThePanchatantra: World Literature Before “World Literature”
Authors: Taylor McComas
Published: December 2019

ThePanchatantra(Pañcatantra) is the most famous collection of Indian fables. The oldest written versions are in Sanskrit and date from early in the first millenniumce. The individual narratives that make up the collection are arranged within a frame‐story of an elderly brahmin charged with the education of three young princes. His stories, a mixture of prose and verses drawn from a wide range of authoritative texts, are organized according to five themes – the fivetantrasof the title: sowing dissent, making alliances, infiltrating an enemy, the loss of one's gains, and rash deeds. By the end of the first millennium thePanchatantrahad been translated into Persian and Arabic, and spread thence throughout the Middle East, Asia, and Europe. Before the advent of modern transport and communications, versions were found from Bali to Iceland, and Ethiopia to China.
“I Sing as Love Commands the Tune!”: The Devotional Poetry of Basavanna
Authors: Ben‐Herut Gil
Published: December 2019

Basavanna (twelfth century
ce
) was a prolific poet and the charismatic leader of a devotional community known today as Virashaivas (aka Lingayats) in the Deccan, south India. He composed short lyrical poems called
vachanas
in the Kannada language. In these poems, Basavanna expressed his devotional sentiment, criticized social injustice and discrimination, and promoted religious freedom available to anyone devoted to the god Shiva. Over the past eight centuries the life story of Basavanna and the enormous body of poems associated with him have inspired important social and literary movements throughout South Asia. Moreover, with a steady stream of English translations of Basavanna's poetry, beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing to this day, his lyrical poetry and compelling humanistic vision have won the appreciation of wide audiences outside India as well.
The Arabic
Alexander Romance
: Mirror of a Bold, Clever, and Devout Prince
Authors: Doufikar‐Aerts Faustina
Published: December 2019

In the centuries after his death in 323
bce
Alexander the Great became a major character in world literature. By the dissemination of his legendary biography, the
Alexander Romance
, his fame became part of the world's literary heritage. From the eighth century he also became a prominent figure and a great hero in Arabic literature. In his conquests, quests, and feats presented in epics, poems, narratives, and histories he was a character of authority and great wisdom. Here, a number of lesser known but characteristic cases will be examined, which shed light on his reputation as a warrior, wonder child, missionary explorer, and exemplary king.
Troubadour Lyric in a Global Poetics: Creating Worlds Through Desire
Authors: Galvez Marisa
Published: December 2019

This chapter discusses how troubadour verse established paradigms for world poetry. The art was at once highly local (in its feudal and religious context) and global in the sense of its reach, immediate vitality, and adaptability of its various combinations of meter, themes, and language. This language of courtliness created a coded world of political relations, people, and places; a world that allowed for moral criticism based on a cultivated reflection on the properties of language; for various formulations concerning desire, exile, and poetic craftsmanship. Verse forms such as thesestinaand thealbaoffer models for understanding the place of the troubadours in world poetry from both a diachronic and synchronic perspective. Finally, the works of women troubadours (trobairitz) show how female voices negotiated their status within the homogeneous art form and attest to the complexity and richness of troubadour lyric.
Abu Tammam and Abbasid Modernism
Authors: Fakhreddine Huda J.
Published: December 2019

Abu Tammam, Habib b. Aws was one of the most celebrated and most contentious poets of the Abbasid age. He was born in the town of Jasim near Damascus in modern‐day Syria in 188/804 (or 190/806) and is credited with developing, to the extent of exaggeration, a style in Arabic poetry referred to as the New Style, an innovative poetic style which challenged the established poetic norms. Abu Tammam was at the center of the debates around this “new” poetry of the Abbasid age, described by critics, supporters, and detractors alike as modern, a term which, in this context, connotes novelty but also heresy and transgression. He is considered by many poets and critics to be the father of modernizing movements in Arabic poetry and one of the major inspirations for the Arabic Free Verse movement of the twentieth century.
Kokinshū: A Renaissance of Native Verse
Authors: Thomas Roger
Published: December 2019

TheKokin wakashū– commonly known as theKokinshū– was compiled in 905 as Japan's first imperially commissioned anthology of poetry. It set an enduring standard for subsequent imperial and private collections both in formal aspects of anthologizing and in matters of style. The appearance of theKokinshūmarked a renaissance of native verse after over a century of dominance by continental literary models. Its verses employ a prosody based on syllable count, most being in thetankaform of 5‐7‐5‐7‐7 syllables. Its place on the world literary scene is attested by its genetic connections to continental precedent, by numerous translations – both complete and partial – and by the appearance of various comparative studies.
Conquest and Crusade inThe Epic of the Cid
Authors: Harney Michael
Published: December 2019

TheEpic of the Cidrecounts the exploits and vicissitudes of Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, El Cid (Hispano‐Arabicsîdi, “lord”) in the late eleventh century. Composed around 1200, this anonymous work of historical fiction shows the unjustly exiled hero leading a steadily growing band of followers against both Muslim and Christian adversaries. Contrary to a once‐prevalent and still influential view, the epic Cid is neither a national hero nor a crusader. Patriotism is anachronistic in this context; the Spanish nation state did not yet exist. The epic Cid's worst enemies are Christian courtiers, while one of his best friends is a Muslim lord. The Cid's vassals swear not the crusaders' oath but only a vow of personal allegiance. Apolitical and manipulative, the Cidian epic downplays religion while propagandizing warfare's promise of plunder and upward mobility in the years prior to the decisive battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212.
St. Teresa of Ávila: The Expression of Spanish Spirituality
Authors: Slade Carole
Published: December 2019

This chapter concentrates on the literary and rhetorical qualities of St. Teresa's four book‐length works. InThe Interior Castleshe conquers the inherent ineffability of mystical experience with vivid imagery and figurative language.The Book of Her Life, often identified as the first extended, retrospective autobiography by a woman, explains and defends the experiences that led her to communication with God. A central section of the chapter, St. Teresa and the Problem of Salvation, situates her theology and spiritual experience in the context of dissent and Protestant reforms sparked by Martin Luther (1483–1546). InThe Way of Perfection, written for nuns in her Discalced Carmelite convents, she provides instructions for living in a religious community and a guide to prayer.The Book of Her Foundationsmarshals the features of several literary genres, non‐fictional and fictional, to chronicle her founding of 17 monastic houses under her Discalced Carmelite rule.
Korean
Sijo
and
Kasa
as Boundary Objects
Authors: de Fremery Wayne
Published: December 2019

Sijo
and
kasa
are Korean musical genres also orchestrated in poetic literary modes on paper and, more recently, computer monitors, suggesting diverse material configurations and bodily practices. Time and space – organized by the performing body and the materials of literary expression – are keys to understanding these configurations. We might say that
sijo
index spatial and temporal experience while
kasa
describe it. This chapter proposes that we can think of
sijo
and
kasa
as boundary objects, a term borrowed from science and technology studies. Flexible, structurally similar, and residing between diverse communities,
sijo
and
kasa
suggest the ways that diverse material configurations and bodily practices have been orchestrated through time, as well as some of the boundaries they share with world literature as an object of study.
Mastering a Minor Tradition: Pu Songling and the Chinese Ghost Tale
Authors: Hui Luo
Published: December 2019

Pu Songling's (1640–1715)Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio(Liaozhai zhiyi) is arguably the most read, studied, translated, staged, and filmed ghost story collection in world literature. While acknowledgingLiaozhai zhiyi's now‐unshakeable status as a masterpiece of Chinese literature, this chapter traces the tortuous route of the work's literary and cultural ascension, and argues that much of its cultural relevance and popular appeal derives from its origin as a “minor discourse” rooted in the Chinese tradition ofzhiguai, or records of the strange. Mixing genres and modes, and juxtaposing aesthetic refinement with discursive power, Pu Songling's ghost tales function as a literary construction, a projection of human psychology, an interpolation on religious belief, and a contested field of cultural and ideological debate.
Xu Wei's
Four
Cries
of
a
Gibbon
(Sisheng
yuan)
Authors: Kwa Shiamin
Published: December 2019

Xu Wei (1521–1593) was a calligrapher, painter, poet, and playwright of the late Ming dynasty (1368–1644) in China. Now largely remembered for his work as an artist, Xu Wei was, during his lifetime and especially for generations afterwards, also admired and emulated for his free and expressive style as a poet and dramatist. This chapter introduces Xu Wei's famous collection
Four Cries of a Gibbon
, a set of four plays written about individuals who stand out in history for going against the conventions of society to express themselves. From a wronged citizen seeking justice in the Underworld, to a monk seeking revenge after reincarnation, from Mulan putting on her father's clothes to fight in battle, to Chuntao putting on her father's clothes to take the civil service exams, each of these plays shows how identity is the result of careful crafting.
Four Cries of a Gibbon
challenges readers and viewers to engage a more nuanced notion of what makes a “natural self.”
The
Story
of
Hong
Kiltong
(
Hong
Kiltong
chŏn
) and Its Development into a Hybrid Text
Authors: Kwon Hyuk‐chan
Published: December 2019

The Story of Hong Kiltong
(
Hong Kiltong chŏn
) is a story about a heroic leader of a band of thieves who later establishes his own kingdom with the thieves‐turned‐soldiers on a fictional island. While Hong Kiltong is often noted as the Korean Robin Hood, the story is based upon records and folklore about a historical bandit leader with the same name. The protagonist was born the son of a minister and his concubine, and the story depicts his adventurous struggles to be accepted as a legitimate son of the family and a qualified member of the literati. The protagonist has increasingly been recognized as a symbol of fighting social injustice based on Confucian hierarchy and discrimination based on bloodline.
Hong Kiltong
in modern Korea is being rewritten in various directions as its allegorical value and its role as a vector of modernity have undergone inevitable transformations.
Bridge Essay: Fairy‐Tale Transformations
Authors: da Silva Francisco Vaz
Published: December 2019

What is a fairy tale, where on earth do these tales stem from, and what are fairy tales about? The discussion in this chapter addresses these basic questions, and then considers a long‐standing puzzle: Why are all fairy tales fundamentally similar, although no two variants are ever alike? I argue that answering this question requires heeding fairy‐tale transformations. For this purpose, we watch how the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, and Yasunari Kawabata variously transform one pervasive fairy‐tale image. The main point of this exercise is to suggest that fairy tales hinge on a stable pattern of symbolic transformations, which literary taletellers ply to their own genius (and specific agendas) as they recycle old tales into new stories that keep talking to one another.
Hans Christian Andersen: Literariness and the Circulatory System of World Literature
Authors: Allen Julie K.
Published: December 2019

The literary fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen laid the foundation for the field of children's literature as it developed in Europe and North America over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Through their integration of universal motifs and foregrounding of literariness, Andersen's fairy tales were able to transcend the author's national and regional context to become a global commodity. His tales have been translated into more than 150 languages and adapted for the stage, screen, visual arts, symphony, ballet, comics, and other media. Andersen's stories are known around the world in both their original versions and their many adaptations, making his work truly exemplary of world literature.
Material Inscriptions: Charles Baudelaire and the Poetry of the Modern World
Authors: St. Clair Robert
Published: December 2019

As early as 1924, Paul Valéry suggested that we might think of Baudelaire as not only the poet of the modern world but also one of the key figures in a world literature of modernity. This chapter, on the one hand, seeks to outline the problematics and ambivalence of the question of modernity for Baudelaire and, on the other, proposes to think of poetic form as the core site where the modern world occurs or is produced in Baudelaire's work. It is at the level of poetic form that Baudelaire's work perhaps most fully engages with its world and historical situation.
From Delhi to Isfahan and Beyond: Mirza Ghalib in World Literature
Authors: Farooqi Mehr Afshan
Published: December 2019

Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib was born in Agra in 1797. A precocious child, he began composing verses at the age of nine and had a divan of Urdu poetry by the time he was 19. He wrote poetry in both Urdu and Persian and was also a great prose stylist. Ghalib was a careful, even strict editor of his work and took to publishing long before his peers. His predilection for writing difficult, obscure poetry peppered with complex metaphors produced a unique commentarial tradition that did not extend beyond his work. At the same time, however, British colonialism in India produced definitive changes in the ways literature was produced, circulated, and consumed, and Ghalib responded to the cultural challenge with farsightedness. His imagination sought engagement with a wider community of readers. Ghalib's deliberate switch to composing in Persian gave his works a reach beyond political boundaries and linguistic barriers.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky: A “Novelist of Ideas” for the World
Authors: Burry Alexander
Published: December 2019

This chapter explores the works of Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and his posthumous impact on world literature. It focuses on his influence on twentieth‐century Russian, French, German, British, American, and Japanese literature, tracing these developments back to proto‐modernist elements of Dostoyevsky's works, and his own continual engagement of various literary, political, religious, and autobiographical subtexts.
Herman Melville and the “Harborless Immensities” of World Literature
Authors: Lyons Paul
Published: December 2019

Herman Melville'sMoby‐Dickhas been considered as both a classic of world literature and the Great American Novel. This chapter considers the relation of those statuses, and argues that Melville's works encapsulate tensions and contradictions in the project of world literature, to the degree that it is driven by calls for cosmopolitanism and democratization. Melville's densely allusive texts are approached as attempts both to theorize about the sociopolitical processes of which they are a part and to practice world literature, approximating it in form. The polyphony of his novels is approached as wound into his philosophies of knowledge and his representations of multicultural crews as representative of humanity entering technological modernity. The chapter argues that Melville attempts to work out of an emergent mid‐nineteenth‐century dialectic in which the world shapes America, which in turn shapes the world, and toward ways in which the destructivetelosof world‐integration might be redirected.
Tagore at the Conjunction of World Literature
Authors: Roy Tania
Published: December 2019

This chapter contextualizes aspects of Rabindranath Tagore's literary biography against the tension between “world literature,” understood as a phenomenon of globalized inequality and geopolitical asymmetry, and the field's inclusivist claims to a canon that accommodates the rights of the historically marginalized. The analysis centralizes Tagore's 1907 essay, “Biśbasāhitya” (World literature), which imagines a universal literary space capable of disclosing an extensive account of the properly human, while establishing the specificity of the languages, historical experience, and values of India as integral to such humanism. A virtual neologism for his turn‐of‐the‐century Bengali audience, Tagore'sbiswasāhityanegotiates the disjuncture between a nascent democratizing national culture and the aspirational ideal of cosmopolitan humanism. Navigating distinctions between national and comparative literature with the transnational scope of anticolonial critique, Tagore's philological, rhetorical, and multilingual usages ofbiswasāhityaexceed the outline of a field, indexing, instead, transformations within current inheritances of “self,” “nation,” “world,” and “literature.”
José Martí: The World's Most Popular Poetry, and a Vision for the Americas
Authors: Fountain Anne
Published: December 2019

This chapter begins with a capsule biographical sketch that situates José Martí as an agent of decolonization. It discusses Martí's place in literature, especially Spanish American letters, his transcultural importance, his work in translation, his role in the history of Cuban–US relations, and his vision for US relations with Latin America. It demonstrates the extraordinary international reach of his most popular writing by giving close attention to how two works, a book of poetry,
Simple Verses
(
Versos Sencillos
) and an essay, “Our America” (“Nuestra América”) have come to represent him to an increasingly broad audience.
The Dialectic of Individual and World System: Chen Yingzhen's Move from Existentialism to Marxism
Authors: Lupke Christopher
Published: December 2019

Chen Yingzhen (1937–2016) is one of the most unique figures in modern Chinese and Taiwanese literature. A so‐called “native” Taiwanese of Southern Min heritage, Chen's writing is devoted to the depiction of the local, the ordinary, and in many cases the underclass. Yet unlike other Taiwanese, Chen was dedicated to a Marxist interpretation of Taiwan as a cog in the global system. He boldly courted ostracism from his contemporaries, refusing to join the Taiwan separatist movement. Chen began writing short stories in 1960, first on existential themes, then increasingly as critiques of global capitalism and political oppression. Chen was sentenced to life in imprisonment in 1967, but the sentence was later commuted and he was released in 1975. The key to understanding Chen's literary and critical thinking, and his status as a writer of world literature, is the dialectical nature of his writing: committed to depictions of his own local culture, he nevertheless viewed the conflicts and antagonisms within it as locked in a Manichean struggle with the global forces of economic modernity. One of his other great achievements was publishing the journalRenjian(1985–1989), which through reportage, essay journalism, and photojournalism sought to expose various forms of exploitation in Taiwan.
Léopold Sédar Senghor or the Universal Concert
Authors: Nimrod
Published: December 2019

Francis Abiola Irele defines Négritude as a modality of
the human condition
, a definition that deeply resonates with Senghor's vision, which sets its sights upon the only universal element in our values: emotion. At age 33, Senghor created a scandal when he wrote:
Emotion is Negro, as reason Greek
. He meant that an African lies dormant within each and every human being. This is the origin of our universal ability to dance, our sense of rhythm and color, as well as our intuitive logic, essential complement to discursive logic. The Senghorian universal concert is equivalent to the Kantian sublime.
Pioneers! O Pioneers!: Modern Arabic Literature in the USA
Authors: Hine Alyn
Published: December 2019

In the early twentieth century, a group of Levantine writers working in New York found themselves collaborating as a literary group in order to publish groundbreaking periodicals that showcased their fascination with and visions for modern literature. In doing so, these same writers also produced some of the most important works of poetry, prose, criticism, and drama to emerge on the path toward modern Arabic literature. The periodicals themselves also tell the modern reader a great deal about Syrian and Lebanese political concerns as both writers and readers viewed the changing landscape from abroad. This chapter examines how the experience of being an emigrant in a particular historical, geographical, and cultural setting, that of the early twentieth‐century United States of America, shaped the Levantine writers' attitudes toward both New York and the Arab world, and considers the effects of this unique situation on their writings.
Worlding Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing): Narratives of Frontiers and Crossings
Authors: Huang Nicole
Published: December 2019

Eileen Chang began her bilingual (Chinese and English) writing career in wartime occupied Shanghai and went on to become the most prominent author and public intellectual in the besieged city. She continued to write for another four decades after immigrating to the United States in 1955. Her near‐cult status in Sinophone communities since her initial rise to fame contrasts sharply with the lackluster reception of her postwar writings in the Anglophone world. This chapter situates her between two competing characterizations, the first of which positions her and her early writings securely in Shanghai literature and popular culture of the 1940s, while the second focuses on her postwar journeys and passages, her entanglement with Cold War politics, and her relatively obscure narratives that underscore a generational experience of volatility and rootlessness. In world literature, Chang is best placed alongside fellow twentieth‐century sojourners and fiction writers including Somerset Maugham and Stella Benson.
V.S. Naipaul: Connecting His Past to Those of Other Postcolonial Peoples
Authors: Krishnan Sanjay
Published: December 2019

V.S. Naipaul's critics allege that his success – culminating in the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001 – owes much to his opportunistic denigration of non‐European societies and his defense of European values. Others argue that Naipaul produced insightful and moving portraits of individuals and societies forced to cope with the disorienting effects of the transition to modernity. This chapter provides a contextualized account of Naipaul's artistic and intellectual development and evaluates his achievement in this light.
Wisława Szymborska and the Limits of World Literature
Authors: Cavanagh Clare
Published: December 2019

The work of Nobel Laureate Wisława Szymborska provides an unexpected but revealing point of entry into recent discussions of “world literature.” Poland and Eastern Europe generally too often go missing from such discussions. Szymborska never addresses the question of “world literature” directly, but her writing points to ways in which the poets of Poland, until recently a colonized European nation, alter our perceptions of both European and non‐European writing. More than this: Szymborska's constant engagement with the worlds that lie behind the pale of literature, be they animal, mineral, vegetable, or even extraterrestrial, challenge our notions of world and writing alike.
Forugh Farrokhzad and Her Madness
Authors: Bahmany Leila Rahimi
Published: December 2019

This chapter explores the poetry of Forugh Farrokhzad (1934–1967) and madness. It argues that Farrokhzad's poetry presents the psychic landscape of a female author, a scene tainted by madness. The poems reveal a close affinity between poetic creativity and madness partly by way of a recurrent surging of a mad double trope. The discrepancies between the poet's self‐image and the cultural images of sane womanhood are vividly sketched through grotesque images. Furthermore, the poems expose and critique the social stigma of madness, which aims to de‐authorize women as interpreters of their own experience. Moreover, the poetry unveils stigmatization as a political tool of control and marginalization. Farrokhzad textualizes her madness, giving it a name, projecting it, exteriorizing it, and ultimately healing it through the very act of writing. Her defiance of convention, tradition, and authority best illustrated in her explorations of her madness makes her indeed a modernist.
Kim Tong‐In and the Liberal Self in Modern Korean Literature
Authors: Lee Jae‐Yon
Published: December 2019

Kim Tong‐in (1900–1951) is barely known to the readers of the world, but is an important Korean fiction writer who established the idea of modern literature as art in early twentieth‐century Korea. His desire to create liberal and aesthetic characters in opposition to conformist Confucianism was deeply entrenched in his stories and essays on artists and writers. Not a simple writer and essayist, he had a sensitive command of written language, and developed modernécritureand principles for fiction writing in Korea. Moreover, Kim was a key player in the first modern literary coterie,Ch'angjo(Creation, 1919–1921) which served as a social platform for introducing young writers into the literary scene.Ch'angjo's discussion of romanticism provided a discursive backdrop for Kim to refine his radical image of the writer, the absolute puppeteer of his creatures. To him, the writer's self‐love was a womb for his artistic creation.
Czesław Miłosz in the World: The Will to Transcendence
Authors: Kay Magdalena
Published: December 2019

Czesław Miłosz's nearly mythic life not only affects his position in the global literary landscape but colors his thinking about the dangerous pressure of historicism and the poignant beauty of “eternal” yet evanescent moments. He longs to believe in sacredness, and tries to make us see why we cannot do without such a concept. Perhaps it is no wonder that he has garnered a reputation as a moralist and historical witness even while he strenuously objects to both labels, wishing to be seen as a poet – no more, no less – and a celebrant of the mortal world.
Naguib Mahfouz: A Liberal in a Conservative Society
Authors: Srouji‐Shajrawi Clara
Published: December 2019

The Nobel Laureate (1988) Naguib Mahfouz (Najīb Maḥfūẓ) is represented, via examples from his main works, as a liberal thinker, one passionate for a democratic state for all its citizens, characterized by religious tolerance and freedom of speech. His liberalism is in conflict with the extremist conservative stream of Islam that views women as inferior to men, and looks for a state based on Islamic law (Shariʿa). Mahfouz's openness to other cultures, and his dealing with issues that concern all human beings with a special flavor of locality, make his works transcend the borders of the nation, participate in the exchange of ideas between cultures by means of translation and, thus, gain the appreciation of different nations. Mahfouz's impact on three Egyptian writers of the 1960s shows him not as a source of passive imitation in style and social concerns but rather as the inspiration for further stages in the development of modern Arabic literature.
Chinese Encyclopedism and the Power of Knowledge
Authors: Elman Benjamin
Published: December 2019

Publication of Chinese reference works (leishu) and daily‐use compendia (riyong leishu) during the late imperial period, 1400–1850, drew on earlier “encyclopedic” book collections in China, which literati had valued while preparing for civil examinations. Speculating about the origins and transformation ofgewu(“investigating things”) and related concepts became a key method for acquiring and organizing information in texts. Literati also collected information for some 1350 counties, which officials needed to carry out their official duties. An official could not serve in his home province. In the Mongol period (1280–1368), new types ofleishudeveloped with the steady expansion of printing and popular literacy. A bookish culture reached a broader audience during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) than ever before. Such native collections later became precedents for “early modern”leishuand “modern” nineteenth‐century Western‐style encyclopedias called in Chinese “Baike quanshu,” lit., “complete collection containing hundreds of categories.”
The Popol Wuj: A Colonial Context
Authors: Quiroa Néstor I.
Published: December 2019

The Popol Wuj represents the most studied Mesoamerican indigenous text because of its breadth of detail concerning Maya worldview, religion, cosmology, and society. Regarded as an ethnohistorical treasure, it has been read exclusively as a freestanding, self‐contained text to inquire into a history far removed from when it was actually created. Consequently, the colonial context of the text itself has been omitted, including the central role of Dominican friar Francisco Ximénez as transcriber and translator of its only available copy. This chapter reframes the Popol Wuj within its historical and physical ecclesiastic context, recovering Friar Ximénez's voice within this manuscript. It is argued that his work was first and foremost intended to be a religious treatise in the conversion of the K'iche' to Christianity. This study approaches the Popol Wuj as a colonial product bridging two distinct but constitutive facets of the narrative that until now have been considered separate and unrelated.
Ernest Hemingway: Global American Modernist
Authors: Tyler Lisa
Published: December 2019

This chapter traces Ernest Hemingway's evolution from a Midwestern high school kid to Nobel Prize‐winning author and international celebrity. It examines the formative events of his early adulthood and their impact on his fiction. The distinctive characteristics of Hemingway's innovative literary style are identified and discussed. Hemingway repeatedly acknowledges many of the authors who influenced his writing, and in turn many twentieth‐ and twenty‐first‐century authors from around the world acknowledge his influence on their work. Posthumous publications of his letters and other unpublished materials have sparked continuing interest in his work.
The Global Pilgrimage of Geoffrey Chaucer'sThe Canterbury Tales
Authors: Barrington Candace
Published: December 2019

Chaucer's fourteenth‐centuryThe Canterbury Tales, recognized as the first English literary work consciously engaging with its contemporaneous European tradition, is also an early English literary work to incorporate languages and stories from outside the European sphere. We can see the complexity of this global engagement inThe Squire's Tale. This global engagement, as well as theTales' open‐ended framework, has made it amenable to translation and appropriation into non‐Anglophone cultures. In addition, it provides the twenty‐first century with a potent model for the social body in the wake of new immigrants and refugees bringing that global community to Britain.
Sima Qian and the “Creation” of China
Authors: Durrant Stephen
Published: December 2019

Sima Qian's comprehensive history of early China,
Historical Records
(
Shiji
), exerts enormous influence upon subsequent historical writing in China. The syncretic and comprehensive structure of this history is a textual reflection of the Han Empire, which reached its height during the reign of Han Emperor Wu. Sima Qian, perhaps under the influence of his father Sima Tan, creates a complex structure for historical writing that will influence all subsequent official historiography in China and have impact in Japan and Korea as well.
Historical Records
has also been admired for its literary qualities, which are particularly evident in the “Arrayed Traditions” or “Biographies” section. Since becoming known to Western scholars, certain comparisons with Western categories and institutions have both enriched and in some ways distorted understanding of this great text.
QasidaPoetry: A World unto Itself
Authors: Talib Adam
Published: December 2019

Emerging in late antiquity in Arabic,qasidapoetry became a token of cultural and political prestige in societies across West, South, and Central Asia, North, West, and East Africa, and southern Europe. The form was adapted from Arabic into every language of the Islamicate world, including Persian, Ottoman Turkish, Chagatai, Hebrew, Urdu, Kurdish, Malay, Swahili, Hausa, and many more.
“If the World Be Looking On”: Emily Dickinson beyond Amherst
Authors: Brown Woody
Published: December 2019

Though only 10 of her poems were published during her lifetime, none of which she authorized, Emily Dickinson is now widely recognized as one of the most important and quintessentially American poets of the nineteenth century. Dickinson's reclusive nature, especially after 1865, has given rise to a misreading of the poet and her poetry as solitary, isolated, and unconcerned with the world beyond the Homestead. Scholarship for the last several decades has done much to contradict this narrative, however. In fact, though Dickinson wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “I do not cross my Father's ground to any House or Town,” she wrote almost 1800 poems, many of which she sent to friends and correspondents, and probably far more letters, though only around 1000 have been published. Taken together, Dickinson's poems and letters represent a sustained, though idiosyncratic, engagement with nineteenth‐century literature and culture and a studied disengagement from aspects of public life which were anathema to her, including notoriety, repute, and fame, which she described as “a fickle food / Upon a shifting plate.” Since her death in 1886, Dickinson's corpus has acquired a global readership that would have been unimaginable to the poet who sat in her room in the Homestead carefully binding sheets of her poems into fascicles. Though her sister Lavinia had promised to burn her correspondence at her request, Dickinson left no instructions regarding the trove of manuscripts she left in her room. If she had, the history of poetry would be without what William Dean Howells called “a distinctive addition to the literature of the world” that “could not be left out of any record of it.”
Gregory of Nazianzus
Authors: Simelidis Christos
Published: December 2019

Gregory of Nazianzus (ca. 330–90ce) was a leading theologian of the early Christian church and served briefly as bishop of Constantinople (November 27, 380–June 381).
Boiotian League (Boeotian League)
Authors: Mackil Emily
Published: December 2019

A scholarly term for the ancient Greekethnosorkoinonof the Boiotians, the Boiotian League was a state comprising, at most times, all thepoleiswithin the region of Boiotia. It displays characteristics of federalism, including double citizenship (ofpolisandkoinon), organs of government operative at both the local and regional level, and careful divisions of authority and responsibility between them. It is also rooted in shared rituals and regional economic interests.
Gergithes
Authors: Herda Alexander
Published: December 2019

The Gergithes were an indigenous ethnic group in western Asia Minor. In historical times they appeared in four regions.
Nikias (Nicias)
Authors: Roisman Joseph
Published: December 2019

Nikias, son of Nikeratos, (ca. 470–413bce), was a successful Athenian general during the Peloponnesian War, but ultimately led his city‐state to one of her greatest defeats. Politically, he aspired to succeed Perikles as the first man of Athens, but he lacked the foresight and leadership qualities of his great predecessor. Because he was well intentioned, there was a tragic dimension to his failings, which the historian Thucydides portrayed with sympathy mixed with criticism.
Eurydike (Eurydice), wife of Philip Arrhidaios
Authors: Carney Elizabeth
Published: December 2019

Adea (ca. 336–316
bce
), daughter of Kynnane (Philip II of Macedon's daughter by the Illyrian Audata) and of Amyntas, son of Perdikkas III, took the name “Eurydike” when she married (322/1) Philip III Arrhidaios, the half‐brother of Alexander III, the Great. Often acting for her mentally limited husband, she contended with various regents, sometimes addressing the troops in hopes of wresting control of them from the regents. When, however, she led the Macedonian army out against an army championing Olympias, mother of Alexander III (who was functioning as an advocate for her grandson Alexander IV), the army of Adea Eurydice went over to Olympias who then imprisoned and killed Adea Eurydice and Philip Arrhidaeus. Cassander buried them at Aigai; they could be the royal pair found in Tomb II at Vergina.
Olympias
Authors: Carney Elizabeth
Published: December 2019

Olympias (ca. 373–316 BCE), daughter of Neoptolemos, king of the Molossians, married Philip II of Macedon and had two children: Alexander (the Great) and Cleopatra. During Alexander's absence on campaign in Asia, Olympias remained in close touch with her son, and acted in concert with his policies and in support of her own, often in opposition to Alexander's general Antipater. After Alexander's death, she was actively involved in Macedonian politics until captured and killed by Cassander.
Servius
Authors: Harrison Stephen J.
Published: December 2019

]fo[Servius (called Maurus/Marius Servius Honoratus in some manuscripts, but none of the names apart from thenomenis sure) was an importantgrammaticusand commentator on Latin literary texts active in Rome ca. 400ce; he appears as a youthful character in theSaturnaliaof Macrobius (dramatic date 383/4), and may have been dead by the time theSaturnaliawas actually composed (ca. 430).
Eunapius of Sardis
Authors: Simelidis Christos
Published: December 2019

Eunapius (ca. 348–414
ce
) was a pagan Platonic philosopher, a historian, and a biographer of philosophers and rhetors of the third and fourth centuries.
Fayyum
Authors: Davoli Paola
Published: December 2019

The pseudo‐oasis of el‐Fayyum is a vast region (1,827 sq km) and a governorate in the Western Desert of Egypt. Its capital is Medinet el‐Fayyum, Shedet in the Pharaonic period, Krokodilopolis/Ptolemais Euergetis in the Ptolemaic period, and Arsinoiton Polis in the Roman period. Several archaeological sites from the Middle Kingdom and Graeco‐Roman period are still preserved.
Severus Alexander (Marcus Aurelius Severus Alexander Augustus)
Authors: Imrie Alex
Published: December 2019

Marcus Aurelius Severus Alexander Augustus (208–235ce) was the final emperor of the Severan dynasty (193–235). He was raised to the purple as a teenager, following the assassination of Elagabalus. Contrary to his short‐lived predecessors, Severus Alexander's thirteen‐year reign was, for the most part, a period of stability. Contemporary and later writers, however, focus largely on the influence exerted by his mother, and on the military crises he faced at the end of his life.
Hamilcar Barca
Authors: Hoyos Dexter
Published: December 2019

Hamilcar nicknamed Barca crushed the great Mercenary and Libyan Revolt against Carthage (241–237
bce
), became effective master of the state, and from 237
bce
to his death on campaign in winter 229/8 imposed Carthaginian rule over most of southern Spain, a new empire that re‐energized Carthage and enabled a lasting dominance in politics and warfare by his son‐in‐law Hasdrubal and then his eldest son Hannibal.
Conflagration
Authors: Salles Ricardo
Published: December 2019

According to the ancient concept of conflagration (in Greek:
ekpurosis
), the cosmos, or universe, will be totally consumed by fire. This concept often goes along with that of cosmic rebirth or reconstitution (
palingenesia
): once the fire of the conflagration is exhausted, a new cosmogony begins and gives rise to a new cosmos, identical to the present one. In addition, these two processes are cyclical. The new cosmos will also undergo a conflagration, and will be followed by a new reconstitution and so on
ad infinitum
. According to the latest interpretations, these concepts go back to the Presocratic
H
eraclitus in the early fifth century
bce
and probably, earlier still, to
A
naximander of
M
iletos in the early sixth century (references below). But it is to the Stoics that we owe the full development of a systematic doctrine.
Vettius Valens
Authors: Greenbaum Dorian Gieseler
Published: December 2019

The nine books of the
Anthologies
of Vettius Valens (
fl
. ca. 150–70
ce
) are probably the most extensive books of astrological technique and practice preserved from antiquity. Though Valens does not have the fame of his near contemporary Claudius Ptolemy, his treatises are equally important for our understanding of the practice of astrology in the second century
ce
. Ptolemy's and Valens' approaches to astrology were very different; where Ptolemy emphasized theory and physical causation, Valens focused on practice, and on astrology as divinely revealed doctrine.
Letters, letter writing, Greece and Rome
Authors: Cribiore Raffaella
Published: December 2019

It is not easy to define precisely the epistolary genre, and the ancient theorists' classifications are far from satisfactory. In general, a letter is a piece of writing from sender(s) to recipient(s), the former being physically separated from the latter. Contrary to what one expects, letters sent in antiquity were secure enough. Letters were also embedded in literature.
ME (Sumerian term)
Authors: Brisch Nicole
Published: December 2019

The term ME designates an enigmatic concept related to religious beliefs and practices in ancient Mesopotamia.