bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Gilgamesh: A Cultural Seismograph
Authors: Ziolkowski Theodore 
Published: December 2019

AbstractThis chapter traces the reception of the ancient epic of Gilgamesh from its rediscovery in 1872 to the present. A recapitulation of the standard version is followed by an account of its rediscovery. Initially fascinating for its biblical associations, it incited the turn‐of‐the‐century Babel/Bible controversy and soon caught the attention of thinkers like Freud and Jung. Between the two world wars the epic, translated into many languages, began to gain worldwide popularity and frequent mention among writers like Rilke, Hesse, and Thomas Mann. After World War II this popularity led to imaginative adaptations in literature, music, and art that reflected such cultural trends as feminism, gay pride, and ecology. Historical novels imposed modern issues on the fictional past while others detected an analogy for contemporary problems in the Middle East. In recent decades Gilgamesh has had a more pervasive cultural impact than other biblical or mythological heroes.
Heliodorus'Aithiopika: The Birth of the Novel
Authors: Konstan David 
Published: December 2019

AbstractHeliodorus' novel,Aithiopika, is one of five surviving Greek novels. Although English‐speaking critics had generally demoted the ancient novels to the status of “romance,” in contrast with the modern bourgeois novel said to have arisen in the eighteenth century, these ancient prose narratives of love are in fact fully realized novels. What is more, they display a rich sense of character and character development, even though some critics have called this aspect into question. As the longest and most complex of the Greek novels, Heliodorus'Aithiopikahas an especially rich narrative structure and depiction of character. It is no wonder that Sir Philip Sidney placed it in the same class as Homer'sIliadandOdyssey.
Renewal in and through Landscape: The Great Medieval Chinese Poet Xie Lingyun
Authors: Goh Meow Hui 
Published: December 2019

AbstractThough hailed as the first master of landscape poetry, Xie Lingyun (385–433) is not as widely read as other major poets of premodern China. His eventful life and difficult personality were not viewed with approval by traditional critics, and his allusion‐laden language taxed readers. But the revival of interest in Xie Lingyun and his works in recent scholarship promises new understanding: his integration of embodied experience and book knowledge through poetic language reveals his art to be highly pragmatic – one employed for resolvingreallife issues. Read in light of current environmental problems, his poetics gains the potential for renewing our connection to nature and to each other. Once we allow ourselves to be slowed by his intricate sensibility, his elegant diction, and his rich references, we will be transported to mountains and rivers, hearing their voices. He is one of the earliest poet‐explorers of the natural landscape in world literature, preceding more well‐known nature poets such as William Wordsworth and Matsuo Bashō, and he is vital to our shared human heritage.
Bridge Essay: The Cuneiform World: A Difficult Text Network
Authors: Weeden Mark 
Published: December 2019

AbstractThe cuneiform world does not know authors in the popular modern understanding of the word as a creator of textex nihilo. At the same time it is difficult to delineate evidence for text networks in the same way as for the medieval world, due to the fact that the social contexts of the cuneiform inscription of literature were usually scholarly rather than popular. Scholarly networks can, but do not have to, encourage greater uniformity of textual transmission.
Image, Imagined, and Imagination in
Silappadikaram
Authors: Rao H. Kalpana 
Published: December 2019

Abstract

Silappadikaram
(
Śilappadikāram
, The jeweled anklet) is a Tamil text from the early centuries of the Common Era which is believed to be a composition of Jain values and has been idealized as a classic work of the Tamil culture as well as a text that embodies the model of an idyllic womanhood. The aim of this chapter is to look beyond these specific cultural definitions and visualize how the classic could be interpreted as a materialization of literature into various platforms. This classic work of Tamil literature implicitly questions the nature of genre, narrator, frame narrative, audience or readership, and artistic representation. The work thus offers a worldview that is expansive.
Love, Politics, and the Premodern Theater: Perspectives on Kalidasa's
Shakuntala
Authors: Culp Amanda 
Published: December 2019

Abstract

This chapter examines the historical context, major themes, and distinctive theatricality of the premodern Indian play
The Abhijnanashakuntalam
(
Abhijñānaśākuntalam
), often translated as
The Recognition of Shakuntala
, or simply
Shakuntala
(
Śakuntalā
). Written by the Sanskrit poet Kalidasa (Kālidāsa) in the late fourth/early fifth century
ce
,
Shakuntala
dramatizes the romance, separation, and reunion of its eponymous heroine and King Dushyanta (Duṣyanta) of Hastinapura (Hastināpura). While much has been written regarding the play's literary merits, such focus obscures the specificity of the theater culture for which Kalidasa wrote. Reading the play alongside other dramatic works by Kalidasa, as well as the dramaturgical treatise known as the
Natyashastra
(
Nātyaśāstra
), this chapter foregrounds the traces of premodern Indian theater culture preserved by the play, claiming it as a critical work of world theater as well as world literature.
Walls of Inclusivity: Dante'sDivine Comedyand World Literature
Authors: Kumar Akash 
Published: December 2019

AbstractThis chapter considers the issues of vernacularizing that emerge in Dante'sDivine Comedy, specifically in the vein of hybrid language, cultural difference, and moments of heterodoxy that open the text out to the realm of world literature. Its approach is balanced between an analysis of Dante's vernacular translation that combines different languages together and a consideration of the cultural other within theComedy. Somewhat contrary to its status as a medieval Christian vision, I sustain that theComedy's celebration of cultural difference and its forging of a new vernacular language set it apart as a global text that continues to provoke new insights into intercultural relations.
Babri Mosque, Bollywood, and Gender:Ramcharitmanasas World Literature
Authors: Tiwari Bhavya 
Published: December 2019

AbstractFrom Bollywood to medieval literary traditions, from contemporary literary festivals to the divisive politics on the Indian subcontinent,Ramcharitmanas(Rāmacaritamānasa) captures the imagination of South Asians and beyond. A.K. Ramanujan, a poet and scholar, once said that no one ever readsRamayana(Rāmāyana) for the first time in South Asia; they all know it. Yet, each Ramkatha (Rāmkātha, story of Rama) differs from the others. Composed in the Avadhi language in 1574 Tulsidas's (Tulsidāsa)Ramcharitmanaspresents a strong case to be studied as world literature in the local and global traditions. This chapter focuses onRamcharitmanas's textual history, its afterlife in Bollywood, its haunting presence in the backdrop of the demolition of Babri mosque, and the debates it generates in contemporary Indian literature and literary festivals. The chapter concludes with remarks on the roleRamcharitmanascould play in the debates on world literature and comparative literature.
Bridge Essay: Wisdom and Mysticism: On Transcendence and Literariness
Authors: Yamini‐Hamedani Azadeh 
Published: December 2019

AbstractMysticism, in many respects, is concerned with facing and overcoming limitations, be it the limitations of language or the entrapments of the self. Practices meant to invoke mystical experience, from rituals of devotion and meditation to asceticism and chanting, are all attempts in transcendence. Transcendence can spark creativity and literariness as it points out the futility of given categories and concepts. Because words come into being by differentiating, because language is rooted in concepts and categories, using language to paint a state of unity proves to be an interesting challenge. This challenge has given mystics an awareness of language as a struggle for translation.
Bridge Essay: War and the Worlding of Story
Authors: Ouyang Wen‐chin 
Published: December 2019

AbstractThe chapter examines war as a paradoxical site of both carnage and exuberant cultural exchange. People, ideas, and stories circulate across “enemy” lines when the conquerors and conquered are forced to live in intimate proximity. The chapter concentrates on the love‐at‐a‐time‐of‐war motif in premodern Chinese and Arabic literatures, arguing that the encounter with the cultural other serves as a mechanism for family making and empire building. Attending to stories fromXue Dingshan, theDhat al‐Himma(Dhāt al‐Himma) Arabic epic, and al‐Tanukhi's (al‐Tanūkhī's) (d. 994)Relief After Hardship, this chapter suggests that war drives the process of worlding.
Wolfram von Eschenbach'sParzival: A Complex Reshaping and Expansion of a Source
Authors: Meyer Evelyn 
Published: December 2019

AbstractWolfram von Eschenbach'sParzivalis based on Chrétien de Troyes's unfinishedPerceval, le Conte du Graal, but is not merely a translation of the source text. Wolfram works with his source and reshapes it in significant ways, thus making his narrative style, content, and message far more complex by infusing them with his own vast learning and by taking the common narrative structure of medieval Romances, the double cycle, and multiplying it throughout the narrative. At the same time, Wolfram links this structural complexity to his thematic interests about the Orient and the Christian West, the secular Arthurian and the spiritual Grail realm, the story's two main heroes, Parzival and Gawan, Christianity and heathendom, and the peoples of black and white races. Wolfram weighs in on contemporary issues throughout his narrative, sometimes critically, sometimes favorably, but always reshaping contemporary discourses.
TheTale of the Heike: War Narrative and the Boundaries of Literature in Medieval and ModernJapan
Authors: Selinger Vyjayanthi Ratnam 
Published: December 2019

AbstractTheTale of the Heikewas pivotal in shaping the historical memory of the Genpei War of 1180–1185 in Japan. Circulating both orally and textually, it reached broad segments of the population unhindered by the constraints of literacy. Performance genres took up key episodes, enhancing its cultural currency as historical narrative. In the late sixteenth century, a simplified form of the narrative was printed by the Jesuit press in Japan as a primer on Japanese history and language, an episode that reveals how texts are transformed through the translingual demands of missionary encounters. Lionized as Japan's own “epic” by early twentieth‐century intellectuals anxious to give Japan a heroic past, it was reread again in postwar Japan as an early democratic text about the overthrow of aristocratic order. TheTale of the Heikeis a dynamic text of world literature that, through its reception history, raises provocative questions about how “literariness” is construed in national, comparative, and cross‐regional frames.
Mechthild von Magdeburg and the Mystical Poetry ofThe Flowing Light of the Godhead
Authors: Poor Sara S. 
Published: December 2019

AbstractThis chapter examinesThe Flowing Light of the Godhead(Das fließende Licht der Gottheit) by Mechthild von Magdeburg at the intersection of its various modes of circulation (translation, copying, and anthologization) in the centuries following Mechthild's death (c. 1282). This examination reveals a situation in which the transmission beyond the cultural boundaries in which the book was produced resulted not in world literature status, but rather in obscurity. Second, the chapter focuses on close readings of two chapters from the book in order to demonstrate how its literary qualities relate to its subsequent path back into the world literature sphere in more recent times.
ChristinedePizan: A Literary Champion of MedievalEurope
Authors: McWebb Christine 
Published: December 2019

AbstractIn this chapter, I outline Christine de Pizan's intellectual and professional trajectory as a female writer of the French late Middle Ages. I pay particular attention to her use of rhetoric and language, her development from a writer of lyrical poetry to a recognized author writing sociopolitically engaged prose, and the construction of allegory in her prose works.
The Glory and the End of the Heroic World in theNibelungenlied
Authors: Classen Albrecht 
Published: December 2019

AbstractThe Middle High GermanNibelungenliedwas copied down around 1200 and has always been recognized as one of the canonical texts of medieval German literature. As a heroic epic, however, it also enjoys the status of a contribution to world literature, being a powerful representative of its genre, certainly on the same level as the Old EnglishBeowulf, the IcelandicNjál's Saga, the Old FrenchChanson de Roland, or the Old SpanishEpic of the Cid. Although thematically unique compared to those texts, readers throughout the past 200 years have recognized that this epic poem deals with fundamental questions pertaining to human life in its tragic dimension, a common element in all world literature.
Rabelais'sGargantuaandPantagruel: The Navel of a World
Authors: Demonet Marie‐Luce 
Published: December 2019

AbstractRabelais is the master of the French humanist novel. In his work, he combined the fantastic imagination of oriental legends, of Indo‐European myths, of classical antiquity and Renaissance scholarship, using a vernacular French stuffed with linguistic borrowings and inventions. His curiosity went far beyond his native country, and he played with the art of transforming actual history and places into shareable worlds of fiction.
Gu Hongming's Journey from British Malaya, via Europe, to China and the Confucian Classics
Authors: Groppe Alison M. 
Published: December 2019

Abstract
In his day, Gu Hongming achieved international fame as a “Chinese sage” by producing English translations of the Confucian classics and essays promoting classical Chinese civilization and critiquing modern European and American societies. In Gu's China, however, where most intellectuals prized “learning from the West” and denounced Chinese tradition, he was often dismissed as an eccentric conservative. Meanwhile, though in his essays Gu valorized Chinese philosophy and critiqued the West, he did so by quoting authors like Goethe, Carlyle, Emerson, and Matthew Arnold. This chapter highlights Gu's influence from and contributions to world literature by focusing on his globally circulated translations and translation strategies. His literary accomplishments are best understood in light of his experiences growing up as a British colonial subject in Malaya, studying abroad in Scotland and Europe, and only starting to learn Chinese in his twenties as part of a strategic effort to embrace a Chinese identity.
Bridge Essay: Intimate Life and Romanticism
Authors: Mehigan Tim 
Published: December 2019

Abstract
Romanticism elevated the inner life of the human being to importance. The vehicle for that elevation was “poesie,” its object was the heroic journey of the poet in search of inner fulfillment and harmony. This chapter discusses key exponents of Romantic notions, with a focus on Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Keats in the English tradition, Rousseau in the French tradition, and Goethe, Schiller, and Kant in the German tradition. It discusses the importance of the idea of nature and how it was conscripted in the service of disclosure of inner states. Alluding to problems that confronted the Romantic appropriation of nature, the separation between the English and German tradition that arose as a result of these problems is also given importance. The chapter concludes by describing the unusual partnership between literature and philosophy brought forth in the post‐Kantian discussion in Germany – one of Romanticism's most significant and enduring legacies.
Henrik Ibsen: Critique from Within
Authors: Helland Frode 
Published: December 2019

Abstract

Henrik Ibsen, born in Norway in 1828, became a leading European dramatist in his own lifetime, and has since then become part of the global theater repertoire. The plays most often performed internationally are his realist dramas, from
Pillars of Society
(1877) to
When We Dead Awaken
(1899), in addition to
Peer Gynt
(1867). Ibsen's realist plays are modern and still felt as contemporary. This chapter starts by charting some of Ibsen's international success through the database IbsenStage, then delves into the social background and social class central in his plays. It continues with a discussion of the political significance of Ibsen's focus on the bourgeoisie and its intimate sphere, the role of women in his plays, and the new requirements for the actor posed by his characters. In conclusion, the chapter discusses some more complicating issues pertaining to language and the (self‐)critique of art.
The Boy Who Came from a Peach and the Girl with a Bowl on Her Head: The Many Faces of Japanese Fairy Tales
Authors: Nüffer Laura K. 
Published: December 2019

Abstract

Japanese fairy tales (
mukashibanashi
) display a diversity of themes and narrative patterns resisting broad generalization. Much of the Japanese fairy‐tale repertoire is rooted in transregional folkloric traditions, and although continental Asia made the greatest contribution to this repertoire, many Japanese fairy tales have Western cognates. However, Japanese fairy tales are set apart from Western fairy tales by their tolerance of transgressions of the animal–human boundary (epitomized by the motif of
irui kon'in
, or marriage between an animal and a human) and their tendency to conclude with the protagonist returning to his or her original circumstances. The modern Japanese fairy‐tale repertoire includes Western fairy tales imported in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, while the oldest Japanese fairy tales can be traced to mythohistorical chronicles from the eighth century. Historical investigation reveals that iconic fairy tales such as “Momotarō” and “Urashimatarō” have transformed significantly over time and lack a stable, singular message.
Charles Dickens: Transnational Responses and Cultural Imaginaries
Authors: Lee Klaudia Hiu Yen 
Published: December 2019

AbstractIn this chapter, I first discuss the rise of interest in Charles Dickens's worldwide presence and relate it to the “global” turn in Dickens scholarship and Victorian studies more generally. I then draw upon existing research on related topics and my own study on the publication and circulation of Dickensian texts in early twentieth‐century China and Hong Kong in order to explore how diverse creative and critical responses to his work in specific sociocultural contexts at particular moments of history contribute to his international stature. It places particular emphasis on the ways in which the realism that Dickens's works purportedly embody – such as his portrayal of the urban experience and his engagement with contemporary social issues – have become a source of imagination and, at times, inspiration for those who confront the question of modernity – in its various manifestations – in their own space and time.
“But Women Feel Just as Men Do”: Gender Rights in Nineteenth‐Century World Literature
Authors: Chavez Julia McCord 
Published: December 2019

AbstractThis chapter highlights thematic threads in nineteenth‐century world literature that suggest a shared global interest in “the Woman Question” and gender equality. It explores gender rights in nineteenth‐century literature from Europe, North and South America, the Arab world, India, Japan, and China, using a telescopic pattern to discuss rights that affected women as individuals, as members of families, and as political entities. The chapter begins with rights relating to personal agency, including educational reform and access to work, then expands one level to consider literary responses to patriarchal family structures that were sanctioned both socially and legally. The frame expands once more to consider women writers' roles in political advocacy and the work of nation building. In keeping with contemporary feminist practices, the chapter closes with a reflection on intersectionality and tensions that emerge in nineteenth‐century literature due to colonial and imperial contexts.
Performing Narratives: Slave Narratives on the World Stage
Authors: Morse Heidi 
Published: December 2019

AbstractSlave narratives emerged on the world literary stage in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in response to the human rights violations of the transatlantic slave trade. Tracing the trajectory of slave narrative scholarship from questions of authorship, authenticity, and literacy acquisition to the prioritization of transatlantic and hemispheric studies in the wake of Paul Gilroy'sThe Black Atlantic(1993) to the rise of comparative media studies, this chapter offers an introduction to major avenues for reframing slave narratives as world literature. Innovative readings of the narratives of Frederick Douglass, Olaudah Equiano, Sojourner Truth, William and Ellen Craft, and Henry Box Brown offer case studies of transatlantic book tours, rhetorical self‐fashioning, and “performing narratives,” or the way that slave narrators paired their autobiographical texts with visual and aural performances of race, gender, and freedom.
Bridge Essay: From Decolonization to Decoloniality
Authors: Singh Amardeep 
Published: December 2019

Abstract
The movements against European colonialism that emerged in the twentieth century in numerous societies around the world led to a diverse set of discourses around decolonization. These are discussed here in three phases: the first phase (from 1900 to 1945) explores the emergence of anticolonial thinking amongst nationalist writers and political figures. The second phase explores decolonization at the level of the nation‐state and narrative form. The final phase considers the post‐1990 turn toward “decoloniality” as a mode of analysis and a concept in world literature.
Aimé Césaire in the Era of Black Lives Matter
Authors: Ekotto Frieda 
Published: December 2019

AbstractThis chapter reads Aimé Césaire's work as a continuation of the struggle for the dignity of black people around the world. As a Francophone philosopher and poet, Césaire is a member of an important global lineage of black intellectuals. Together with James Baldwin, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, and Claudia Rankine, Césaire's work offers the historical background needed to understand black lives in the second decade of the twentieth century, and particularly the Black Lives Matter movement. These thinkers first articulated enduring questions about the black condition in the world and established why there will not be peace as long as black lives continue to be crushed and their dignity ignored.
Bridge Essay: Home‐Bodies: Exiles, Migration, and Diaspora in the World Literary Engagement
Authors: Celis Abigail E. 
Published: December 2019

AbstractThis chapter reflects on the qualitative traits that differentiate between lived experiences of exile, migration, and diaspora. The three are typically understood forms of displacement mobility that are experienced by many peoples and cultures and thus provide a common ground for world literary engagement. In that sense, they contribute to the production of world literature while also world‐ing national literatures. I trace how exilic, migratory, and diasporic narratives function as genres in world literature, and consider the critical purchase of the three terms as analytical lenses for the reading of world literature. However, while as genres and as analytical concepts they do provide avenues for investigating transnational practices and mobility, I argue that emplacement and embodiment are equally (in)formative elements of exile, migration, and diaspora.