bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The First Poem:
V
almiki's

R
amayana

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

Abstract

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

AbstractThePanchatantra(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

Abstract

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

Abstract

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

AbstractThis 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

AbstractAbu 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.
Conquest and Crusade inThe Epic of the Cid
Authors: Harney Michael 
Published: December 2019

AbstractTheEpic 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.
The
Story
of
Hong
Kiltong
(
Hong
Kiltong
chŏn
) and Its Development into a Hybrid Text
Authors: Kwon Hyuk‐chan 
Published: December 2019

Abstract

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

AbstractWhat 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

AbstractThe 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

AbstractAs 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

Abstract
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

AbstractThis 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

AbstractHerman 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

AbstractThis 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

Abstract

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

AbstractChen 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

Abstract

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

AbstractIn 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

AbstractEileen 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

AbstractV.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

Abstract
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

AbstractThis 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

AbstractKim 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

AbstractCzesław 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.