bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Resignation Open Eyed: On the NovelRickshaw Boyby Lao She
Authors: Moran Thomas 
Published: December 2019

AbstractShu Qingchun (1899–1966), pen name Lao She, is a canonical modern Chinese writer. He was a literary craftsman and a student of world literature influenced by Joseph Conrad. His 1939 novelLuotuo Xiangzi(Camel Xiangzi), translated asRickshaw Boy(2010), is a landmark work of modern Chinese literature and a contribution to the genre of world literature about laborers. It is sometimes read as a critique of individualism and call for collective action, but in the creation of its eponymous protagonist, it is also a defense of the importance of the individual. It is a resigned but masterfully written study of the misery of the urban working poor, not an activist prescription for their liberation, which drew criticism from left‐wing critics in China. The history of the translations ofRickshaw Boyilluminates both the promise and the pitfalls of knowing world literature only through the English language.
World Literature, World War: Revisiting Tayeb Salih's
Season of Migration to the North
Authors: Tageldin Shaden M. 
Published: December 2019

Abstract

Readings of Tayeb Salih's
Season of Migration to the North
privilege the Sudanese novel's intertextuality with Joseph Conrad's
Heart of Darkness
. Largely ignored is the English poem that Mustafa Saʿeed,
Season
's central figure, recites one night, unleashing
Season
's core narrative. Yet that poem – Ford Madox Hueffer's
Antwerp
, which eulogizes Belgium's resistance to the Germans during World War I – upends
Season
's economies of race, history, and language. Hueffer's Belgian children and mothers, awaiting men who never return, evoke not their colonizing compatriots in the Congo but Mustafa and his mother in the Sudan, shadowed by a father and husband who dies in the service of British colonialism. Further, Mustafa's recitation of
Antwerp
recasts as mirror‐images English poetry and Arab‐African orature/literature. If world literature is born of world war,
Season
asks, can Arabic and other African and Asian languages overcome the hegemony of English and re‐dictate world literature anew?
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o: Networks, Literary Activism, and the Production of World Literature
Authors: Wallis Kate 
Published: December 2019

AbstractThis chapter explores Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's significance in world literature through the frame of publishers' networks and literary activism, and argues for the ways in which his work has redefined ideas of “world literary space.” The chapter opens by reading the networks and structures of value made visible through the Nairobi launch ofPetals of Blood– Ngũgĩ's fourth novel published in Heinemann's African Writers Series and his last written in English. Leading on from this, it places Ngũgĩ's critical interventions on world literature, in essay collectionsMoving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms(1993) andGlobalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing(2014), into dialogue with his own Africa‐centered publishing relationships and trajectories. Ultimately, the chapter draws attention to Ngũgĩ's crucial work – visible through his literary production, critical interventions and publishing decisions – in “moving the centre” of world literature away from the West.
Julio Cortázar: Between Aesthetics and Politics: The Travails of a Literary Traveler
Authors: Russek Dan 
Published: December 2019

AbstractThis chapter covers the life and work of Argentine writer Julio Cortázar (1914–1984), including his contributions to the literature of the fantastic, his translations of English and French letters into Spanish, and his role as a cultural mediator between Latin America and Europe. It highlights the importance of Paris, where Cortázar spent three decades, on his writings, the tensions between his early aesthetics and his later embrace of leftist politics, and his travels. It also discusses the cosmopolitan nature of his 1963 magnum opus,Rayuela(Hopscotch), a crucial work of the Boom of Latin American narrative fiction during the 1960s. The chapter charts the itinerary that made Cortázar a figure in postmodern literature and assesses his place in the international Republic of Letters.
R.K. Narayan: The Elusive World of Malgudi
Authors: Grene Nicholas 
Published: December 2019

Abstract

The distinctiveness of R.K. Narayan's contribution to world literature is defined by the capacity of his fiction to provide “detached engagement with worlds beyond our own time and place.” Four of his best novels,
Mr Sampath – The Printer of Malgudi
,
The Financial Expert
,
The Guide
, and
The Man‐Eater of Malgudi
, all set in an imagined Malgudi, illustrate a distinctive India, strange yet recognizably familiar, embedding Hindu myth and fable in a secular modern society.
Ralph Ellison'sInvisible Man: “To Become One, and Yet Many”
Authors: Hill Lena M. 
Published: December 2019

AbstractInInvisible Man, Ralph Ellison engages writers from around the world to contextualize the fictional experience of an individual African American man. This chapter analyzes Ellison's canonical work and places it in conversation with his essays, letters, and other fiction to affirm its place as a modern masterpiece of world literature. In examining the protagonist's recognition that he must probe his cultural history to understand his position as a US citizen, this chapter focuses on Ellison's use of violence in the novel. Ultimately, this study argues that withInvisible ManEllison succeeds in translating the black American experience into a universal template for self‐discovery.
Roberto Bolaño, Solar Anus of World Literature
Authors: Hoyos Héctor 
Published: December 2019

Abstract
This chapter studies the effects of Roberto Bolaño on world literature, notably his politicization of the paradigm. Heuristically, it casts the inclusion of the late Latin American expatriate author into a transnational hypercanon as a Trojan horse maneuver. This phenomenon brought about the reconsideration of Latin American authors (often parodized), a revitalization of global 1968 youth‐politics, and a revision of historical avant‐gardes. Among the latter, Georges Bataille's base materialism, reflected in his motif of the solar anus, plays a particularly important role. Whether in the character Auxilio Lacouture's bathroom‐stall account of the breach in university autonomy that accompanied the Tlatelolco massacre, in the autobiographical character “Belano” (beautiful anus), or in the short story “Silva, the Eye,” the recurrent motif shows how Bolaño sexualizes and abjectifies political events and global transactions. The Chilean's less‐than‐heteronormative take on base materialism and his anti‐systemic appropriation of Wallerstein invites world literature to become politically engaged.
Bridge Essay: Modern Poetry as a Global Phenomenon
Authors: Lupke Christopher 
Published: December 2019

AbstractModernism is the first truly global literary movement in history and thus difficult to encapsulate in ideological or stylistic terms. Throughout the world, foundations of thought and aesthetics were undermined in the late nineteenth century. As a result, in places as far flung as France, Germany, and Great Britain on the one hand, and Japan, China, and Taiwan in East Asia on the other, as well as in Eastern Europe, Latin America, South Asia, and the Middle East, emerging writers everywhere were overturning received forms, contesting received notions of epistemology and morality, and creating poetry anew. In continental Europe, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard leveled devastating critiques upon state religion, metaphysics, and moral philosophy. The implications of this radical philosophical and religious break from established thinking reverberated through literary circles. In Japan, Masaoka Shiki and Yosano Akiko revamped haiku andtanka. In England and the United States, poets rewrote the rulebook for what constituted imagery and prosodic structures. In Chinese, traditional structures such as “regulated verse”shipoetry andcilyrics were largely shunted aside in favor of free verse. These changes came in response to rapid industrialization and urbanization, innovations that made communication around the globe much quicker and easier, and sentiments of alienation and exile throughout the world.
Fernando Pessoa, Singular Modernity, and World Literature
Authors: de Medeiros Paulo 
Published: December 2019

Abstract

Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) wrote using a variety of heteronyms and is widely recognized as the most important Portuguese poet of the twentieth century. After a belated reception he can now be seen as a key figure in European modernism and in world literature. His fragmentary
Book of Disquiet
has been especially influential across various media. Pessoa's writing, directed to the future, is indicative of a modernity that is still in the process of coming.
Yearning for the “West”: Osanai Kaoru and the Concept of Stand‐Alone Dramas in Modern Japan
Authors: Isaka Maki 
Published: December 2019

Abstract

One of the founders of Japanese
shingeki
(“New Theater”), Osanai Kaoru (1881–1928) was a versatile and prolific writer of plays, translations, critical essays, etc., presenting various ideas critical to
shingeki
and modernity. Among them was his notion of dramatic texts (scripts) that were superior to – and independent of – performance. Osanai saw in the “West”
shingeki
's home country and requested that
shingeki
present theatrical productions identical to their original dramatic texts. His concept of “a‐play‐as‐is” presupposes immediacy between texts and stage productions, bypassing performance. This “immediacy” is mediated in multiple ways. Yet not only is it unfeasible to erase “performance” completely from the equation above, Osanai's way of achieving such “immediacy” also involves complicated matters including translation, creation of the self by otherization, negotiation with the past, and a universalist/particularist aporia. This aporia remains productive for our thinking of “world literature.”
“And I Have the Same Restlessness Today”: Vijay Tendulkar ‐ A Connected Reading
Authors: Bhatawadekar Sai 
Published: December 2019

AbstractVijay Tendulkar (1928–2008) was a game‐changing Marathi playwright who brought unprecedented themes and genre experiments to Indian theater. His disturbingly bare depiction of violence and cruelty in power‐ and gender‐relations was both controversial and ground‐breaking. His gritty Hindi screenplays also changed the aesthetics and politics of Indian parallel cinema. In this chapter, I present Tendulkar's work within the concerns of world literature: his universal insights that transcend boundaries, yet linguistic and cultural specificity that grounds him in his region, the continuing circulation, translation, and consumption of his work nation‐ and worldwide, and also his connections to non‐Indian (German) theater. Moreover, I consider Tendulkar's symbiotic and epicentral impact on other artists who went on to establish themselves on the international scene. Finally, to provide a global reader an entry‐point into the vast and shape‐shifting paradigm of world literature, I develop Connected Reading by giving biographical glimpses into Tendulkar's literary obsession and into his reader, in whose global flow Tendulkar is a strong current.
Saʿdallah Wannous: Syria's Premier Political Playwright and Social Critic
Authors: Myers Robert 
Published: December 2019

Abstract

Saʿdallah Wannous, a Syrian playwright (1941–1997), is one of the most significant writers from the Arab world in the twentieth century. His first major play,
An Evening's Entertainment for the Fifth of June
(1968), is a critique of the duplicity of Arab officials during the June 1967 War. A Marxist and Arab nationalist, his principal early theatrical influence was Bertold Brecht. Other plays from this period include
The King's Elephant
(1969) and
The Adventure of the Head of Mamlouk Jabir
(1969). After suffering a breakdown in 1977, he wrote no plays until
The Rape
(1990), an adaptation of an Antonio Buero Vallejo play. In 1992, he was diagnosed with cancer and, from then until his death in 1997, he wrote over half a dozen plays in a variety of styles including
Historical Miniatures
,
Rituals of Signs and Transformations
, and
Drunken Days
. Like Václav Havel and Wole Soyinka, he not only wrote a half‐dozen of the most vital plays in the canon of twentieth‐century world theater, he was also an important political thinker.
Bridge Essay: Literature and Liberalism: An Evolving Symbiosis
Authors: Seigneurie Ken 
Published: December 2019

AbstractLiberalism is a moral and political ideology based on the conviction that a rational, self‐creating individual is the most meaningful unit of social organization and that society should therefore promote freedom, equality, and tolerance among individuals. These ideas are at the heart of modernity and look like the fountain of all that's sweet and good in the modern world, but they are also prone to reification and leveraging in the interests of exploitative ideologies such as imperialism. This chapter argues that literature and especially the realist novel has played a crucial role in managing the tensions between individual and social rights within liberalism. The focus expands to contexts beyond Euro‐North America to the Arab world in the early twentieth century to suggest that a symbiosis between literature and liberalism obtains throughout the world in ways that vary according to translational contexts.
Nadine Gordimer: Between South Africa and the World
Authors: Lewis Simon 
Published: December 2019

Abstract
This chapter attempts to problematize a simplistic view of Nadine Gordimer as literary chronicler of South African history in the apartheid and immediately post‐apartheid eras. Pointing out the tensions in Gordimer's work between her sense of belonging in South Africa or in a world defined by European culture, the chapter suggests that Gordimer has a kind of “split position” vis‐à‐vis her readers, implicating them, no less than apparently apolitical white South Africans, as passive enablers of apartheid, and subsequently as complicit in unthinking middle‐class consumerism that puts the planet at risk. Ultimately, however, the fact that Gordimer physically lived in South Africa throughout the apartheid era right up until her death in 2014 indicates her underlying commitment to the nation of her birth, no matter how problematic her whiteness may have been.
Gnostic Myths
Authors: Edwards Mark 
Published: December 2019

AbstractAfter some brief remarks on the definition of Gnosticism and our sources of information, this chapter sketches five theories which purport to account for its emergence in the Roman world. The seminal myth of Sophia's fall is summarized in the second section, with commentary on its antecedents and probable import; the third section examines variants of the same myth, while the fourth considers others in which erotic themes are more dominant. The chapter concludes with comments on the survival of gnostic themes in the modern era.
The “Dreaded Comparison” Revisited: Animal and Black Human Rights
Authors: Boisseron Bénédicte 
Published: December 2019

AbstractThis chapter looks at the intersection between human and animal rights within the context of the French and Haitian Revolutions. As Napoleon Bonaparte reinstated slavery in the French colonies in 1802, France turned to the question of animal rights as a diversion from, but also a bridge to, the more pressing issue of human rights in the post‐1789 era. TheCode Noirhelps us understand to what extent slave and animal law serve a similar purpose of hiding the overall barbaric nature of the French deemed unfit for the Enlightenment.
The English Lake Poets of the World
Authors: L. Sanchez Juan 
Published: December 2019

AbstractFew writers appear at first glance so fundamentally resistant to the globalizing contexts of world literature as the so‐called English “Lake school” of poets. A designation for a group of writers who first gathered in Bristol in 1795 and later resided in the Lake District in northwest England, the very term itself calls attention to the group's localized attachment to the English landscape and the apparent insularity of their writing. Recent work committed to exploring the “extra‐English tendencies” of Romantic literature, however, have created new critical perspectives for reassessing late eighteenth‐ and early nineteenth‐century British literature as “pervasively global and international in its concerns,” rather than isolated and insular. This chapter explores some of the new areas of research in a field commonly referred to as Global Romanticism in order to discuss the complex engagements of early Romantic writing with geographies around the world, including North America, China, Africa, and Mexico.
The Margins of Literary History: Sagas, Eddic Poetry, and World Literature
Authors: Rikhardsdottir Sif 
Published: December 2019

AbstractThis chapter addresses the relevance of the medieval Nordic genres of the sagas of Icelanders and eddic poetry to a global audience and to the field of world literature. It considers factors such as cultural and historical contingencies and how the gap can be bridged between the modern (international) reader and geographically and temporally distant literary works. It features some recent theoretical approaches to the sagas and the eddic poems along with textual examples of their simultaneous untranslatability and universality. Ultimately, it suggests a mode for reading medieval literature in a global context, featuring the reading experience both as an aesthetic process and as a cultural encounter.
James Joyce‐ing World Literature
Authors: Ito Eishiro 
Published: December 2019

AbstractJames Joyce devoted his life to writing fiction set in Dublin in the fin‐de‐siècle and early twentieth century, incorporating the real people living there at that time as supporting characters. However, with numerous literary and historical allusions and compound‐complex words from an infinite number of languages, he made his native city universal. In comparison with two living writers of world literature, Joyce's novels are conspicuous for their modernity. Kazuo Ishiguro and Joyce place much importance on memories and narrative techniques. Joyce'sUlyssescan be compared with Haruki Murakami's1Q84in many ways, for example the use of a classical framework. Joyce has been a very influential writer and stimulated so many authors and scholars that his works have even generated “the Joyce industry.”
Pentekontaetia
Authors: Sickinger James P. 
Published: December 2019

Abstract

The term
Pentekontaetia
refers to the roughly fifty‐year period between the end of the Persian Wars in 479
bce
and the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War in 431, and to the section of Thucydides’
History of the Peloponnesian War
(1.89–118) that describes those years. Thucydides’ narrative does not provide a comprehensive history of the period but aims to provide an account of the growth of Athenian power leading up to the Peloponnesian War. Hence, his account is selective and sometimes chronologically vague. His picture can be supplemented by later sources and contemporary inscriptions, although they too present interpretive problems.
Persepolis tablets
Authors: Henkelman Wouter F. M. 
Published: December 2019

Abstract

Two archives of clay tablets were excavated at Persepolis, a major Achaemenid residence in southwestern Iran: the Persepolis Fortification archive (PFA), in the northeastern Fortification (1933), and the Persepolis Treasury archive (PTA), in the Treasury building (1936/38). They are a cornerstone of primary evidence on the Persian Empire (ca. 550–330
bce
).
Comitatenses
Authors: Whately Conor 
Published: December 2019

Abstract

Comitatenses
, originally from
comitatus
, the companions of the emperor, were the soldiers who accompanied the Roman emperor; it later meant the regional mobile field armies of the Late Empire, usually based in the interior and under senior generals, consisting of both cavalry and infantry. Although there is a tendency to see the
comitatenses
as a creation of Constantine I on the evidence of Zosimus (Zos. 2.34.1; cf. Aur. Vict.
Caes
. 41.12; John Lydus
Mag
. 2.10, 3.31), it should be understood as the end product of a long process which began in the second century
ce
.
Comites
Authors: Whately Conor 
Published: December 2019

Abstract

Comites
, singular
comes
, literally “counts,” could be a number of things, from officials and commanders to elite cavalry regiments. Originally, the term applied to high‐ranking senators and
equites
who accompanied the emperor, and it was only later that it was applied to military officers, officials, and cavalry regiments. The term seems to have become formalized under Constantine I.
Nea Paphos
Authors: Barker Craig 
Published: December 2019

Abstract

Nea Paphos was the capital city of Cyprus during the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Founded in the late fourth century
bce
, it was closely associated with the sanctuary dedicated to Aphrodite at Palaipaphos. Culturally and architecturally the city demonstrates close ties with Ptolemaic Alexandria in the Hellenistic period and with Rome during the centuries of Roman control of Cyprus. Its geographic position and natural harbor meant the city developed as an important trade center. Archaeological investigations of the city have uncovered a series of public buildings, and significant domestic structures with incredibly well‐preserved figurative mosaics.
Porosity‐ and Graphitization‐Controlled Fabrication of Nanoporous Silicon@Carbon for Lithium Storage and Its Conjugation with MXene for Lithium‐Metal Anode
Authors: An Yongling , Tian Yuan , Wei Hao , Xi Baojuan , Xiong Shenglin , Feng Jinkui , Qian Yitai 
Published: December 2019

AbstractSilicon (Si) and lithium metal are the most favorable anodes for high‐energy‐density lithium‐based batteries. However, large volume expansion and low electrical conductivity restrict commercialization of Si anodes, while dendrite formation prohibits the applications of lithium‐metal anodes. Here, uniform nanoporous Si@carbon (NPSi@C) from commercial alloy and CO2 is fabricated and tested as a stable anode for lithium‐ion batteries (LIBs). The porosity of Si as well as graphitization degree and thickness of the carbon layer can be controlled by adjusting reaction conditions. The rationally designed porosity and carbon layer of NPSi@C can improve electronic conductivity and buffer volume change of Si without destroying the carbon layer or disrupting the solid electrolyte interface layer. The optimized NPSi@C anode shows a stable cyclability with 0.00685% capacity decay per cycle at 5 A g−1 over 2000 cycles for LIBs. The energy storage mechanism is explored by quantitative kinetics analysis and proven to be a capacitance‐battery dual model. Moreover, a novel 2D/3D structure is designed by combining MXene and NPSi@C. As lithiophilic nucleation seeds, NPSi@C can induce uniform Li deposition with buffered volume expansion, which is proven by exploring Li‐metal deposition morphology on Cu foil and MXene@NPSi@C. The practical potential application of NPSi@C and MXene@NPSi@C is evaluated by full cell tests with a Li(Ni0.8Co0.1Mn0.1)O2 cathode.