Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu frequently claimed that literature conveyed proto-sociological knowledge. However, he hardly ever referred to naturalist Émile Zola in his extensive oeuvre. This volume explores the relationship between Bourdieu and Zola. Reconstructing Zola’s proto-sociology in Les Rougon-Macquart (1871–1893) makes it possible to identify in Zola a literary predecessor to Bourdieu’s sociological approach.

By the end of modern times, the solitary man had become a destitute and infirm man, though curable with the balms of sociability; today, the "hyperconnected" condition of the contemporary men is quite the opposite: their infirmity a new and more dangerous one.

The paradox of the solitude of the poet, who distances himself from everyone to be able to speak to everyone, is one of the myths par excellence of Italian literature. In Solitudes, Giorgio Ficara pens the stories of great solitary poets from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century: Petrarch, lost in an unattainable dream of inner peace and solitary life; Tasso, alone in the small circle of creation; Alfieri, who yearns to be alone amidst the voices of the world; Foscolo on his lonely way to the heliconic peaks; Leopardi, whose effective solitude of the poet-philosopher faces the divine solitude of nature; D'Annunzio, alone in front of a necklace that breaks. For all of them, solitude "in the end is destiny itself, the necessity to which one is subject at the acme of poetic expression". Over the centuries, this intellectual legacy of solitary life has become one of the many ways in which Italy deeply influenced European literature and culture at large.

As they disrupted not only territorial organization but also conceptions of the city and urbanity, the Parisian banlieues have not left literature indifferent. This study analyzes the appearance of the banlieues in the French novel between 1820 and 1950. At the beginning of the 19th century, writers brought the city into the realm of literature, as space, character and text: how did they, a century later, perceive and write about the suburbs?

With renowned female rappers such as Ana Tijoux, Rebeca Lane or Gata Cattana, a new way of understanding rap as an anti-patriarchal, political and literary discourse has emerged in the Spanish-speaking world. Drawing on various disciplines, this study seeks to contextualize feminist rap as a theoretical and aesthetic discourse by women and analyze its potential and challenges in today's globalized society.

This study analyzes the socioeconomic perspective of subjects migrating from the Global South in contemporary narrative works in Romance languages and the influence of the publication context on their literary portrayals. It inquires into the status of the subaltern characters and their role as intermediaries, revealing the diverse, dialectical and postcolonial tensions between reception and production, reality and fiction, North and South.

This volume examines the previously overlooked connections between historical manifestations of magic and their performance in the theater between 1600 and 1685. A comparison of Spanish and French theater culture reveals synchronous divergences in the way that magic was dealt with in various dramatic genres, shedding light on the development of magical thinking during the epistemological upheavals of the seventeenth century.

Through an historical and philological lens, this book explores passages from Dante’s Commedia which reveal elements inspired byprocessions, pageants, liturgical drama, psalm singing, or dance performance. The sacred poem finds influence in medieval theories of the performing arts as well as actual performances which Dante would have seen in churches or town squares. Dante’s Performance opens a new perspective from which to consider the Commedia: Dante expected his contemporary readers to recognize references to and echoes of psalms, sacred plays, and performative practices. Twenty-first-century readers are tasked with reconstructing a cultural framework which allows us to grasp those same textual references.

From the dramatization of the harrowing of hell in Inferno IX, to Beatrice’s celebratory return on top of Mount Purgatory, to the songs of the blessed, this study connects Dante’s language to coeval theoretical and practical texts about performance.

If hell is "the Middle Age’s theatrum diaboli," purgatory stages a performed purification through songs and acting, while paradise offers the spectacle of blessed spirits within the heavenly spheres as an aid to human understanding (Par. IV 28–39).

This book explores the emergence of literary history and criticism in the Americas during the 18th century, focusing on natural history as a matrix for literary history and criticism, the geopolitical functions of literary criticism in the periodical press, and the recovery of manuscripts as a residual product of modernity.

The study questions the epistemological conflicts provoked by the manuscript status of a considerable part of 18th-century scholarship, in which the projects of an American modernity appear subjugated by and yet resilient to the power of the European printing press.

This intermedial and comparatist study analyzes eating disorder narratives in contemporary film and in the narrative literature of European, North African, and American novels. As different as these narratives may be, eating disorders function again and again as objects of projection for hierarchical social orders, making social grievances legible on the (female) body.

This study examines the crime of femicide in the Latin American context in the novels of Diego Zúñiga (Chile), Laura Restrepo (Colombia), and Fernanda Melchor (Mexico). It reveals how these literary texts shed light on the systematic and intersectional dimensions of femicide and its impunity. Analyses of the novels draw out the ambivalences of juristic frameworks and legal practice.

US-Caribbean diaspora literatures of the 2000s constitute social spaces as spaces of diaspora. This volume looks at the literary production of space in works by Ernesto Quiñónez, Achy Obejas, Edwidge Danticat, and Junot Díaz to identify how these literatures perform the complex task of positioning themselves, their writers, and their ethnic communities between the US and the Caribbean, and between de- and reterritorialization.

Mario Vargas Llosa’s intellectual transformations, from socialism to pragmatism, and liberalism, are reflected in his political and historical fiction. From Sartrean anti-authoritarianism in La ciudad y los perros to an increasingly liberal world view in Cinco esquinas, El héroe discreto, or Travesuras de la niña mala, this monograph documents the Peruvian Nobel Prize winner’s philosophical and literary journey.

This book explores the concept of rewriting in literary discourse through the work of Cuban author Reinaldo Arenas. Examining both published novels and unpublished manuscripts, the study considers the multifaceted character of Arenas' rewriting practice, the interrelationships between its various dimensions, the broad spectrum of textual reworking that Arenas' work reveals, and the role of empathy in the rewriting process.

From the nineteenth century to the present, literary entanglements between Latin America and East Central Europe have been socio-politically and culturally diverse, but never random. The Iron Curtain, in particular, forced both regions to negotiate transatlantic «elective affinities», to take a stance in relation to the West, and to position themselves within world literature. As a result, the intellectual fields and creative productions of these regions have critically engaged with notions such as «post-imperial», «marginal», or «peripheral».

In this edited volume, scholars from Germany, Brazil, Czech Republic, Hungary, Mexico, Poland, Slovenia, and Spain cross the globe from South to East and back to uncover transcultural and transareal convivialities. Their papers explore literary history, poetics, intellectual networks, and aesthetic theory, while discussing new key concepts in global literary history.

This volume explores the immanent reflexivity of gestures as forms of material knowledge creation, i.e., an aesthetic epistemology that processes its performances at the intersection of body and media. To this end, the operative aesthetics of images, texts, and other media are explored with a view to capturing their specific gestures.

Social inequality is one of the burning issues of our time. Literature has always dealt with this on the level of form and on the level of content, which has received little attention so far. The contributions gathered in this volume respond in particular to recent trends in French and Latin American narratives and filmmaking, in which the representation of social worlds has once again become problematic.

Drawing on the concept of de/lirio—which articulates a series of disorders in the first-person literary enunciation, on the one hand, and the psychopathological characterization of this first person, on the other hand—the study explores the deviant lyric of Mario Levrero and Alberto Laiseca and shows how they respond productively to aesthetic, ethical and ontological problems of the turn of the millennium, in the Río de la Plata and beyond.

Figures emerge from movement. We live and think in figures. This monograph pursues the literary, theological, and philosophical traces of the concept of figura in comparative constellations from antiquity to modernity, starting with Erich Auerbach, developing them into a method of literary-philosophical figuralogy and opening up a compendium of connections between conceptual history and literary theory.

In narrative studies, the topic of unreliable narration plays a central role. But when exactly is a narrator "unreliable"? This edited volume investigates unreliable narrators in selected case studies from French, Spanish, and Latin American literature in order to sound out historical perspectives on narrative strategies, looking at a range of texts that goes beyond canonical examples.

This study examines the literary discourse about forms of violence in French society at the beginning of the twenty-first century. How and why does French contemporary literature tell stories about the now historical, violent traumas of the twentieth century, the terrorism of the twenty-first century, racism and classicism, femicide and homophobia, and the structural violence of unemployment and poverty?

On the basis of José Martí: Part I. Apostle – Poet – Revolutionary: A History of his Reception (1991), this second part develops an understanding of the specific conditions that allowed José Martí to become a great thinker of globalization. It thus paints a vivid picture of this forward-thinking poet of Hispano-American Modernismo that goes beyond the conventional patterns and positions that can be found in Martí research.

Dante, the pilgrim, is the image of an author who stubbornly looks ahead, seeking and building the "Great Beyond" (Manguel). Following in his footsteps is therefore not a return to the past, going à rebours, but a commitment to the future, to exploring the potential of humanity to "transhumanise".

This dynamic of self-transcendence in Dante’s humanism (Ossola), which claims for European civilisation a vocation for universalism (Ferroni), is analysed in the volume at three crucial moments: Firstly, the establishment of an emancipatory relationship between author and reader (Ascoli), in which authorship is authority and not power; secondly, the conception of vision as a learning process and horizon of eschatological overcoming (Mendonça); finally, the relationship with the past, which is never purely monumental, but ethically and intertextually dynamic, in an original rewriting of the original scriptural, medieval, and classical culture (Nasti, Bolzoni, Bartolomei).

A second group of contributions is dedicated to the reconstruction of Dante’s presence in Portuguese literature (Almeida, Espírito Santo, Figueiredo, Marnoto, Vaz de Carvalho): they attest to the innovative impact of Dante’s work even in literary traditions more distant from it.

This monograph studies the development of Venezuelan theater in the 70s, characterized by psychological, physical as well as verbal violence and cruelty. Throughout the decade, violence pervaded not only drama, but every sphere of social, political and cultural life in Venezuela. While these dramaturgies of violence disrupted the aesthetic field in many ways, they also interpreted the development of Venezuelan society.

This book argues that political concerns, inseparable from Dante’s biography, permeate his entire corpus, emerging at the intersection of the multiple fields of knowledge he explores, from the liberal arts to law, philosophy, and theology. It also shows that Dante, by elucidating the natural integration of the humanities with the sciences, continues to be a source of provocative insights and inspirations on how to be political beings today.　

Preceded by an introductory chapter focused on politics and education, the essays collected in the volume offer a range of close textual and contextual readings of Dante’s life and works grouped in four parts: 1. The Self and History, 2. Visions of the World: Cosmology and Utopia, 3. From the Language of Politics to the Language of Theology, 4. Instances of Political Reception in Asia and South America. The different disciplinary angles adopted by the contributors include history, economics, jurisprudence, linguistics, ethics, metaphysics, theology, cosmology, social thought, ecology, education, and the performing and visual arts.

The collection addresses a specialized audience of Dante scholars, medievalists, historians, political philosophers and scientists, reception scholars, and legal and cultural historians.

The volume offers a panorama of Romance-language migration literature (Castilian, Catalan, Galician) in 21^st-century Spain, with special attention being paid to writers from Africa and the Middle East. It includes a comprehensive review of current research in the field, with the critical analysis of a systemized corpus of authors and works providing a solid base for future investigation.

This book offers the first panoramic study on the development and characteristics of the literary-journalistic genre of spectator periodicals in Hispanic America and Brazil. After contextualizing these publications within the emancipation processes of 19^th-century American Enlightenment, it explores the new coexistence modes and esthetics they disseminated.

This study examines the form and reception of mystical writing in poetry by Anna de Noailles (France, 1876–1933), Ernestna de Champourcin (Spain 1905–1999), and Antonia Pozzi (Italy, 1912–1938) from the perspective of current transsecular approaches, cultural studies mysticism research, and feminist literary studies, making original links to (neo-)vitalist philosophy.

This study takes a comprehensive look at the aesthetics and oeuvre of Juana Borrero y Pierra (1877–1896), one of the most important and yet little-known representatives of Cuban Modernismo. Her aesthetics of the wholeness of art and life unfolds in the artist’s poems, literary love letters, drawings, paintings, and literary prose, produced in the light of late Cuban modernism.

"Tu marches vers Auteuil tu veux aller chez toi à pied / Dormir parmi tes fétiches d’Océanie et de Guinée [...]" – this study follows the clues in the final verses of Apollinaire’s poem Zone, which has become near iconic for the avant-garde, rediscovering Apollinaire’s aesthetics and the poets with whom he was acquainted – Cendrars, Reverdy, Soffici, and Marinetti – against the backdrop of the primitivism discourse in the early 20^th century.

This volume brings together studies on poetics, poetic arts, and other metapoetic texts by contemporary women poets from Spanish America. The fundamental contribution of the book lies in the valorization of the metapoetic and self-reflexive element in poetry written by women, since research on the topic has focused primarily, until today, on male authors.

It seems like no hero could have been more predestined for an epic than Columbus. And yet, he did not become the focus of epic poetry in France until after 1750. This volume shows how, in this new variation on heroic poetry, familiar ancient and early modern epic motifs interacted with historic events, the fabulous, and contemporary faibles. Columbus was sometimes the emissary of Enlightenment knowledge, sometimes the bearer of Christian values.

Against the backdrop of the historic experience of colonialism, this study examines how three novels by the contemporary authors Boubacar Boris Diop (Senegal) and Mia Couto (Mosambique) measure violence literarily. Their writing reflects upon the way that violence inscribes itself into time, bodies, and language in the long term. Moreover, the analyses reveal the extent to which Diop’s and Couto’s texts understand narrative as a mode of critique.

The French interwar period sees a complete aesthetic renewal: both the novels of the 1929-born ‘populist’ literary movement and the talking films of the time seek to dive into the daily lives of employees and workers in order to give them more visibility. The present study explores this new populist aesthetics and the powerful working class imaginary it succeeded in building.

This study reveals the implications of literary historiography when it is instrumentalized to control how the past is perceived, of which Le Brésil littéraire (1863) is a paradigmatic example. This volume by the Austrian civil servant Ferdinand Wolf supported an ideology that furthered the claims of both the Brazilian and the Habsburg imperial regime under the cloak of scholarship.

This study offers a new perspective in cultural studies on French chanson by combining approaches native to genre and myth theory and relating them to chanson. For the first time, chanson is described as a modern myth.

This edited volume, which features essays from prominent German, Brazilian, and Portuguese scholars, deals with the personal relations and intensive intellectual collaboration between Joao Guimaraes Rosa (1908–1967) and his German translator Curt Meyer-Clason (1910–2012), a special case of German–Brazilian cultural exchange.

Short form literature is highly popular across the world today. In the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa, and Oceania, they have long held a predominant place. This study uses the example of aphorisms and proverbs to illustrate the diversity of literary, cultural, and ethnographic functions of small literary forms in former French, Spanish, and Portuguese colonies.

The correspondence between physical features and the character of a person, which was the matrix for the natural sciences of the 19^th century, is today a basis for lifestyle norms, and even for psychological and medical diagnostics. This volume historically and systematically examines the biopolitical performativity of physiognomic practices, their mediality, and the knowledge of life implied in the aesthetics of texts and media.

The ongoing war on drugs has left deep marks on Latin America and the entire world. It intervenes in the imagination and affective states of every social stratum, as literature graphically reveals. This study analyzes and interprets recognized and lesser-known works of Spanish prose fiction and provides a first outline of the genre of narcoprose.

Knowledge of the colonial Other represents a real challenge in the final work of the French Enlightenment: Diderot’s and d’Alembert’s Encyclopedia (1751–1772). This knowledge is a challenge for the self-positioning of European philosophy, for the rational categories of European knowledge, and especially for encyclopedic construction and narration.

Roberto Bolaño is generally regarded as the first classic of 21^st-century world literature. His work pursues a radical intertextual poetics. This book studies the aesthetic and political dimensions of that work and of the numerous references to Latin American, Spanish, French, German, and English-language literature, thereby opening up a new perspective on the complexity of Bolaño’s writing.

In the 19^th century, biological knowledge fascinated writers, who found it the source of a new poetry, of an imaginary beyond positivist logic, but also of a renewal of textual forms. This volume studies the processes of translation, transmission, and transposition of this knowledge as they manifest themselves in the field of French literature.

This volume is devoted to the literature and art created in Paris in 1917–1962. The starting point is Vilém Flusser’s conviction that migration and cultural innovation are closely interlinked. In addition to the languages of Romania, the essays in this volume take into account Arabic, Hebrew, German, Russian, and Polish literature. This comparative approach discloses unique perspectives.

This study interprets the writings of Mexican Nobel Prize laureate Octavio Paz as an open dialectics staged in poetic form and offers new perspectives on his works. By highlighting Paz’s convergence with the Frankfurt School, it offers a key to his thinking about history. Tracing the outlines of his writing against the horizon of the global fault lines of the 20^th century, this book makes it relevant to the conflicts of the 21^st century.

Until now, the theory metaphor “affect economy” has been interpreted to mean the disciplinary power of the economy over the affects, and in this context, the metaphor became key to the function of literature in modernity. However, the underlying paradox of the juxtaposition suggests a substantially more dynamic reading: shouldn’t we also think about the affect of economy, which potentially opens up another, speculative poetics of modernity?

Comment redonner un sens au mot humanisme? This question, which Jean Beaufret addressed to Martin Heidegger in 1946, exemplifies the crisis of the concept of humanism in the post-war era. Using the examples of the French and Spanish genres of utopia and tragedy, this study shows how the question has been answered.

In the past decades, with the decline of the Grand Narratives and the subsequent need for new historical and political orientation, literary studies have been reflecting on the role of literature in the world. Together with Jacques Rancière—and in dialogue with Althusser, Foucault, or Fischer-Lichte—the present volume analyzes this political turn of literary studies.

At the core of this book lies the relation between Power (as socio-political phenomenon) and the novel (as literary discourse). It shows that, in a society facing the excess of power in its various forms, novelistic fiction mediates knowledge about societal Power structures and uses specific strategies to subvert and denounce them.

The first part of the study is theoretical: it presents some of the most prominent theories of Power, from Plato, Machiavelli, Nietzsche to Weber, Dahl, Lukes, Parsons, Bourdieu or Foucault. After offering a critical approach to the concepts of Power defined in the social, political and philosophical fields, it articulates the relations of Power imprinted in literary discourse within a typology of four categories.

In the second part of the book, this taxonomy of Power is applied to four key novels in the context of Romanian "literary crossroads", showing how novelistic fiction not only assume a critical and subversive position against the excess of Power, but also unveils our fragility when experiencing History.

The Iberian Peninsula links two oceans and thus, several continents of the world. This fact, too long overlooked by Romance language scholars, raises philological, aesthetic, and cultural questions that go beyond the confines of the 21^st century. The study suggests a new reading of the history Romance language scholarship and of 17^th century canonical texts.

This is the first comprehensive study by German-speaking Portuguese scholars on Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen (1919–2004), one of the most acclaimed Portuguese poets of the 20^th century. It presents a re-evaluation of her work as a political poetry of the putative a-political.

In this study, which compares vastly different text corpora, early modern texts on natural philosophy and literature are juxtaposed against modern gender studies. This daring venture is based on the hypothesis that these two text corpora pursue analogous interests and strategies, both striving to create holistic models for the interplay between matter and spirit and the use rhetorical figures for the purpose of generating knowledge.

This book proposes that there is no better, no more complex way to access a community, a society, an era and its cultures than through literature. For millennia, literature from a wide variety of geocultural areas has gathered knowledge about life, about survival, and about living together, without either falling into discursive or disciplinary specializations or functioning as a regulatory mechanism for cultural knowledge. Literature is able to offer its readers knowledge through direct participation in the form of step-by-step intellectual and affective experiences. Through this ability, it can reach and affect audiences across great spatial and temporal distances. Literature – what different times and cultures have been able to understand as such in a broad sense – has always been characterized by its transareal and transcultural origins and effects. It is the product of many logics, and it teaches us to think polylogically rather than monologically. Literature is an experiment in living, and living in a state of experimentation.

About the author

Ottmar Ette has been Chair of Romance Literature at the University of Potsdam, Germany, since 1995. He is Honorary Member of the Modern Language Association of America (MLA) (elected in 2014), member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (elected in 2013), and regular member of the Academia Europaea (since 2010).

In "traumatized space," psychoanalysis and the spatial sciences converge. Europe emerges as a real and simultaneously phantasmic landscape of concentration camps. Literature unsettles all representations of this landscape. In stories of entrapment and exclusion with no way out, ruptures occur. The mission of philology is to validate such moments as being authentically literary without thereby transforming them into signs of salvation.

Molière, often considered the ‘godfather of Arab theatre’, was first introduced to the Arab world in 1847 by Marun Naqqaš and his adaptation of The Miser. Since then, Molière has never ceased to influence Arab dramaturgy. Discussing a series of plays by authors from Lebanon, Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco, this study aims at defining Molière’s role in the development of a national Arab theatre.

Considéré souvent comme le «parrain du théâtre arabe», Molière arrive dans le monde arabe grâce à une adaptation de L’Avare par le libanais Marun Naqqaš (1847): à partir de ce moment, la dramaturgie arabe ne cessera plus de puiser à son répertoire. À travers un corpus de pièces provenant du Liban, de l’Egypte, de la Tunisie et du Maroc, ce travail entend définir la place de Molière dans la genèse d’un théâtre national arabe.

The early modern and modern cultural world in the West would be unthinkable without Petrarch and Boccaccio. Despite this fact, there is still no scholarly contribution entirely devoted to analysing their intellectual revolution. Internationally renowned scholars are invited to discuss and rethink the historical, intellectual, and literary roles of Petrarch and Boccaccio between the great model of Dante’s encyclopedia and the ideas of a double or multifaceted culture in the era of Italian Renaissance Humanism. In his lyrical poems and Latin treatises, Petrarch created a cultural pattern that was both Christian and Classical, exercising immense influence on the Western World in the centuries to come. Boccaccio translated this pattern into his own vernacular narratives and erudite works, ultimately claiming as his own achievement the reconstructed unity of the Ancient Greek and Latin world in his contemporary age. The volume reconsiders Petrarch’s and Boccaccio’s heritages from different perspectives (philosophy, theology, history, philology, paleography, literature, theory), and investigates how these heritages shaped the cultural transition between the end of the Middle Ages and the early modern era, as well as European identity.

Literary works by Romani authors offer rare and intimate insights into the lifeworld of Europe’s largest minority. Until now, literary scholarship has largely ignored such internal perspectives on Romani life. This book attempts to close the research gap and provides a comprehensive analysis of the works of Romani authors in France, seen from the perspective of how collective memory develops in a diaspora society.

Humboldt’s American journey occupies a central place in his work. Three conceptual tropes (Essay, Tableau, Atlas) offer new insights into the Humboldtian model of knowledge as developed in Voyage aux regions équinoxales du Nouveau Continent.

German and French concepts of nation were often defined antithetically – through an idealized contrast between the “nation state” and the “cultural nation.” This study undertakes a political, linguistic, and literary historical reconstruction of the significance of language and literature in the construction of national identity since the early modern period, revealing that this process was far more complex than previously thought.

In his book Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, first published in 1946, Erich Auerbach sought to examine the emergence of literary realism from a pan-European perspective. Life Worlds is linked to Auerbach’s work in that it seeks to formulate a literary history of all Europeans. However, while Auerbach pursued a question that is immanent to literature, this work views the history of literature as a process of literary modernization that is related to history in general.

This study, focusing on Latin American literature, discusses the motif of a variety of worlds as a key concept of the modern novel in terms of genre, culture, and fiction theory: the world of the modern novel is always already in contact with another one. This concept, developed against the backdrop of (literary) history, goes hand in hand with the theoretical assumption that modern novel forms have brought about a turn in genre theory. Differently from genuine poetics, genre theory is always also concerned with and contingent on a certain history/back story.

Every moment represents eternity – Goethe’s words poignantly capture the nuances and special complexity of the term “moment.” It can refer to such varied notions as ecstasy, empty presence, and epiphany. This volume examines the semantic richness of the “moment” using paradigmatic examples from Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Brazilian poetry from their beginnings to the modern era.

This volume takes the view that globalization is not a recent phenomenon, but instead an enduring process, marked by four periods of accelerated change. The Early Modern period in European historiography is linked to our present experience of globalization by way of the diverse global trends that took place during the Age of Modernity. The literatures of the world provide a visceral understanding of what can only be understood from the perspectives of multiple logics – namely, the life of our planet and its inhabitants. The wisdom of literature cannot be replaced by any other kind of knowledge: it is life’s wisdom about life.

This analysis of the kaleidoscopic world of the 19th-century Caribbean and the literary and cultural transfers that took place during that time offers completely new insights into early processes of cultural globalization. Racist discourses, established models of “white” abolitionists, the politics of memory, and the previously ignored importance of the Haitian revolution come together to form an amalgam that challenges the traditional notion of a purely Western modernity.

The cultural philosopher Oswald Spengler was the first universal historian of the 20th century. His work The Decline of the West was devoted to analyzing eight “high cultures” ‑ the Classical and Western, the Indian, Babylonian, Chinese, Egyptian, Arab and Mexican cultures (although Mexican culture was only touched on briefly). Spengler’s as yet unpublished literary debut Montezuma. Ein Trauerspiel [Montezuma. A Tragedy] (1897) sheds new light on Spengler's interest in old Mexico, the country that paradoxically became the exception and the first cornerstone of his cultural morphology.

This book is the first German-language study of the complete works of Max Aub (1903–1972). It aims to analyze a representative selection of his works and make it accessible to a broad academic readership. Another focus lies on Aub’s complete works as an example of the generation of Spanish authors born around 1900 who mostly published their first works in the context of the avant-garde movements of the 1920s.

Europe? That is an invention of poets, Heinrich Mann said, referring to a relationship which has existed for centuries: the relationship between European literature and Europe as its theme. Empire, civilization, United States, regulatory force or peace project - especially in the 19th and 20th centuries the most diverse ideas of Europe were formulated and discussed in literary works. From their exemplary analysis of the works of nine authors, the study develops an understanding of the special relationship between literature and Europe.

The end of the world, wide open spaces, wind, gigantic dimensions and weird characters ‑ these are widespread associations with the southernmost region of the American continent. At the same time, Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego have fascinated travellers and writers from time immemorial. However, the wildly romantic imaginations of the adventurers are counter-balanced by the memory of the violence of the history of settlement in the region. The author uses contemporary narrative texts to test the stereotypes mentioned and analyse the relations between Europe and South America represented in them.

This study demonstrates that autobiographies are far more than individual life-stories. Autobiographies of couples in particular testify to the interfaces of togetherness in life and writing. They provide a marvellous opportunity to examine the life and writing of couples as a duet and to perceive relational dimensions of life in creative artistic processes as an ethical and aesthetic factor. The present study traces the complex relational network of autobiographies using the example of the well-known Spanish writing couple of María Teresa León and Rafael Alberti. María Teresa Quirós Fernández reveals how, beyond the individual characters of the autobiographies, there is a web spun between both authors and their texts in their autobiographical writings which provides space for a stereophonic autobiography.

Literary short forms, whose history is as old as Western culture, have undergone an enormously dynamic development in the second half of the twentieth century, especially in Romance literatures. This book examines this development through surveying numerous examples from Spanish, French, and Portuguese literature. The investigation of compact forms exposes fundamental literary operations - with nano-philology, it's about the entirety.

The subject of this study is the understanding of literature displayed by important French and Italian authors from Castiglione and Montaigne to Chateaubriand and Alfieri, who as members of the high aristocracy refused to adopt institutionalized auctorial roles. As 'the last witness of feudal mores' Frangois-Reni de Chateaubriand experienced the decline of the aristocratic way of life at first hand and engaged with this phenomenon in his works. In Romanticism, which he himself helped to establish, the aristocracy is transformed from the subject to the object of literature, thus becoming a fiction in its own right.

The study is the first to engage in a detailed examination of imagery in the works of the Milanese engineer, philosopher, and writer Carlo Emilio Gadda (1893-1973). It explores different kinds of imagery in Gadda's letters, in his texts on poetology, literary criticism, and art criticism, and in his novels »La cognizione del dolore« and »Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana«. Gadda's style is notable for its elaborate descriptions and springs from radical epistemological skepticism. In his writing, he ranges from the satirical distortion of reality to the a-mimetic literary work of art.

Human beings remember and have a memory. But what happens when memories figure in literary narrative? Narratological and poetological ideas on memory, history, and identity are brought together in this study to form a new approach to the problem: mnemonic writing is understood as archeology of the self. The ambitious novels by the French author Jean Rouaud (* 1952) employ all the resources of the post-modernist narrative repertory and humorously combine these central anthropological categories to weave a complex tapestry of the French past that poses existential issues and draws upon primal human experiences.

L'Homme se souvient et il a une mémoire. Mais qu'est-ce qu'il se passe quand il s'agit de raconter ses souvenirs dans un récit littéraire? Des réflexions narratologiques et poétologiques sur la problématique de la mémoire, l'histoire et l'identité sont ici mises ensemble afin d'établir une approche de critique littéraire. L'oeuvre romanesque de Jean Rouaud (* 1952), romancier français ambitieux qui vise à réaliser un style proprement personnel, montre toutes les astuces de l'esthétique et de la poétique postmodernes. Dans ses oeuvres, l'écrivain explore les trois catégories anthropologiques centrales tout en les combinant avec une écriture pleine d'humour et d'ironie. Il compose ainsi un tableau complexe de l'histoire de la France qui répond à des questions existentielles et met en scène des expériences primordiales de l'Homme.

This study examines the construction of national identity in the First World War as exemplified by representative French war novels. Central to the textual interpretation is the question of the connection between identity and (self-)demarcation. It transpires that the function of the image of the enemy as a constitutive factor in identity formation needs to be relativized. With reference to the hitherto neglected reception of war literature, it is possible to explain the special status accorded by the French public to writers active at the war front, who are compared here for the first time with civilian writers.

This book looks at the Franco-Jewish novel in the first few decades after the Second World War. Beginning with Elie Wiesel's autobiographical narrative »La Nuit« (1958) there is discussion of a total of seven novels and stories by Ashkenazi and Sephardi writers. Central to the study's concerns is an inquiry into the existence of a specifically Jewish sub-genre within the overall range of the modern French novel.

Maurice Barrès (1862--1923), forgotten as a writer, but still remembered as a nationalist, is discussed here for the first time in terms of his three-tiered construction of identity and the response it aroused in two different national contexts. With reference to his literary works and political activities, the study demonstrates how, in the face of the crisis triggered by 1870/71, Barrès (who had moved to Paris from his native Lorraine) mapped out a wide-ranging identity concept encompassing self, region, and nation. The analysis of the hitherto neglected reception accorded to him in Germany indicates the way in which, from 1905, Barrès was taken there as a negative model, a 'bone of contention' generating counter-concepts of identity on the German side.

The study discusses J.M.G. Le Clézio's (*1940) travel writings from the period 1985-1995 (»Le chercheur d'or«, »Voyage à Rodrigues«, »La quarantaine«) as a project geared to poetological self-enactment. Initiatory structure and écriture are analogous processes that bring the writing self to the limits of awareness and language. Taking its methodological bearings from the literary theories of C.G. Jung and Gaston Bachelard, and drawing upon dream discourses from Romanticism and Surrealism, the analysis of figures and imagery reveals that doppelgänger and elemental natural spaces are poetic projections of the origin of the text.

The book examines enactments of jealousy in French narrative literature from the latter half of the 17th century. It studies the relative status of the subject in the texts selected and the functions performed by engagement with it, the approach to the phenomenon, narrative strategies employed, and the way in which, in some cases, jealousy is the actual product of the writing. Other significant issues are the extent to which subjectivity is constituted via engagement with jealousy, the forms of subjectivity involved, and the literary techniques used to model it.

In Barbey d'Aurevilly's (1808-1889) literary works the dandy takes on an important role not merely as protagonist but also as narrator. The properties that characterize him and his antibourgeois revolt also define the aesthetic principles and narrative structures of Barbey's text. In spite of this subtle revolt against middle-class values as well as against traditional strategies of textual production, the author's dandies do not challenge the bourgeois concept of gender polarity that shaped nineteenth-century French society.

The highly ambivalent relationship of the Renaissance to antiquity can best be illustrated with reference to Rome. Oscillating between euphoria and melancholy, humanist thought revolved around Rome as the centre of all its hopes. Francesco Petrarca's (1304-1374) vision was a rebirth of Rome, while Joachim du Bellay (1522-1560) was preoccupied with finally laying it to rest together with all it stood for. In a sophisticated intertextual dovetailing of writings from antiquity, Du Bellay pits against Petrarch's restauratio not translatio but the religious schema of grace. In the name of Marguerite, poetry redeems us from the curse of history that bears the name of Rome.

The study draws on Pierre Bourdieu's literary field theory and recent French historiography on intellectualism to submit the literary field in France in the decade after the First World War to as exhaustive an analysis as possible. The major debates of this period on national and/or international commitment, Catholicism, and the generation conflict collide with the notion of literary autonomy gaining greater momentum in the course of the 1920s. At the heart of these controversies are authors such as Jacques Rivière, André Gide, Philippe Soupault, Jean Cocteau, and Jacques Maritain.

The works of Annie Ernaux (b. 1940, Prix Renaudot 1983) have been a source of ongoing controversy. Their central concern is the autobiographically inspired motif of self-improvement via education. This study is the first to essay a comprehensive appreciation extending from analyses of individual works to a synoptic overview revealing the multi-faceted quality of the oeuvre as a whole. The works themselves display a number of highly remarkable characteristics, notably the unusual degree to which content is mirrored by form. The social criticism implicit in the description of social improvement as a radically stigmatic experience denying the upwardly mobile individual any kind of self-affirming identity is echoed at the textual level by a diatribe against a bourgeois ideal of literature which by virtue of its smoothly coherent surface features is bound to play down the searing conflicts experienced by an individual moving up to higher social status.

The ten case studies on the phenomenon of the literary riposte centre largely on French authors of the 17th and 18th centuries but also extends to Italian and Spanish writers and writers of the 20th century, including examples from French-speaking Canada, Latin America and the Caribbean.

Naturalism is one of the last white patches on the historical map of Spanish literature. Up to now it was mainly the reference to the idealistically oriented history of ideas in Spain, and notably krausismo, that discouraged an 'ordinance survey' in any greater depth. But in Spain as elsewhere, as this study is the first to show, the naturalist literary debates, naturalist poetics and literary works were marked by a system of reference that was receptive to positivist and scientific influences: krausopositivismo. This phenomenon here supplies the dispositif for a structured analysis of naturalist literature in Spain, which as an epoch displays a very different profile from its counterpart in France.

The complex debates on the relationship between science and literature in the 19th century are marked by numerous misprisions on the part of scholars and authors alike. The study shows how Auguste Comte, Hippolyte Taine, and Ernest Renan attempted to compensate for scientific deficits by literary means. Vice versa, Honoré de Balzac, the brothers Goncourt, and Emile Zola attempted in their theoretical writings to use reconceptualizations and innovative presentation methods to confer specifically scientific qualities on the way their novels could be read and experienced. Paradoxically, at the end of the discussion aesthetic autonomy and artistic subjectivity stand affirmed.

As an early form of committed literature for the masses, the romanzo storico risorgimentale between 1820 and 1870 held up the heroic past of the country to a wide Italian readership. In a melodramatic and stylized form it offered contemporary audiences historical figures and action models by means of which they were enable to experience themselves as Italians and as part of a national community welded together by destiny. Alessandro Manzoni's novel »I promessi sposi« (1827) also qualifies for treatment from this specific historical vantage, though with its dialectic and reflective description of history it has qualities that far exceed the normal run of romanzi storici risorgimentali.

Between 1981, when the 60-year-old author won the prestigious Premio Campiello with his first novel »Diceria dell'untore«, and his death in 1996, Bufalino published novels, short stories, plays, poems, aphorisms, essays, anthologies, and various works on his native Sicily. The appeal and success of this motley list of works stems from the specific situation Bufalino found himself in, oscillating in his life and in his works between a congenital collective Sicilian identity and a personal identity of European dimensions gained by voracious reading, and constantly reflecting both these poles in his writing.

Italian litterati of the Ottocento coined the phrase 'Babylo minima' to refer to Milan (in analogy to the 'Babylo maxima', Paris), thus underlining the special role played by Milan in ottocento Italy and also alluding to the specific problems of Italian urban literature. In the 19th century Milan developed into a metropolis of genuinely European dimensions. So far, however, the Italian literature of the Ottocento has been flatly denied any urban dimension whatsoever. The study centres around the specific development of Italian urban literature in the 19th century and the special role played by the reception of French literature, notably that of a naturalist persuasion. Drawing upon the discussion of the 'urban' phenomenon in literary criticism, the study also points to structural and stylistic features in the Italian literature of the period heralding the advent of modernism.

The problematic connection between avant-garde and fascism is looked at in the present study for the first time with specific reference to Spanish literature. Inquiry into the reactionary visage of modernism opens up a perspective on a forgotten sector of narrative prose (Giménez Caballero, Borrás, Ximénez de Sandoval, Ros, Obregón). Without indulging in reductionist theorizing, the study draws upon texts by these authors to delineate the ideological functionalization of certain elements of avant-garde discourse. On the content plane this development is traceable in the portrayal of identity problems and the depiction of relations between individual and society. The volume closes with remarks on various aspects of the fascist >aestheticization< of things political.

The study focuses on the confusion created by Romain Gary`s (1914-1980) adoption of a pseudonym in the years 1974-1980 and the specific issues for literary studies by the disparate reception accorded to the novels published in that period under the name of Romain Gary and Emile Ajar respectively. Alongside the poetological relationship between the two series of texts, Poier-Bernhard discusses more general theoretical questions such as the constitution of literary irony, the significance of an author's name, pseudonymity and heteronymity. In so doing he draws upon numerous texts from other literatures, thus enriching the study with a comparative dimension. The work also takes up the discussion on autobiography as a genre and attempts to provide a fundamental clarification of the concept serving as a basis for a precise delineation of autobiography as a text variety.

Against the backdrop of discussion on spatial experience in the early modern age the author compares the portrayal of perception and perspective in Cervantes' novellas with that evidenced in other Spanish novellas of the 16th and 17th centuries. The focus here is an innovative one, concentrating on the spatial perspectivization of perception and the act of perception itself. From this vantage the author is able to cast light on what Hatzfeld called the "mysterious perspective effect" of Cervantes' texts. In contrast to an opposition between engaño and desengaño (illusion and disillusion) the novellas are shown to operate around a contextualized, subject-related and dynamically developed epistemology and concept of truth. This places them at odds with what Maravall calls the 'guided nature' of Spanish Baroque society. The study provides numerous impulses for a new approach to Cervantes, the 'Golden Age' and novella production and narrative theory from the early modern age up to today.

The evolution of ever more sophisticated communication technologies sharpens our perception of the complex relationship between media-specific techniques and cultural innovation. Contemplation of François Rabelais' novel in terms of the pragmatic situation in which it originated and the media available to its author restores to it the quality of historical difference progressively masked by the role it has played as a touchstones in the generation of modern theories of narrative literature. The study also breaks new ground in the methods it employs. Drawing upon categories of research into oral and written traditions developed in the context of cultural studies, it elaborates a dynamic model which takes the example of "Gargantua" as a basis for a detailed description of Rabelais' status on the contemporary book market and his literary strategy vis-à-vis the lay written culture of the time and the reading and writing conventions operative within that culture. The study is also significant in resolving a central problem in Rabelais` research. Pointing up for the first time the eminent importance of ars memorativa in Rabelais` literary approach, it provides the key to the otherwise apparently inexplicable construction of the 'abbaye de Thélème'.

Das wissenschaftliche Interesse galt bisher fast ausschließlich der Romanschriftstellerin Madeleine de Scudéry, der Preziösen und ihrem literarischen Salon. Mit diesem Band wird eine nahezu vollständige Sammlung ihres lyrischen Werks vorgelegt und die Autorin in ihren unterschiedlichen Funktionen als Panegyrikin, Liebeslyrikerin, Salon- und Gelegenheitsdichterin vorgestellt. - Ausgehend von unterschiedlichen Selbstbestimmungsversuchen intellektueller Frauen im Grand Siècle, ihren begrenzten Entfaltungsmöglichkeiten innerhalb des Kulturbetriebs, ihrer condition féminine zwischen Selbstbewußtsein und Selbstverleugnung, wird die Frage nach einem 'weiblichen Schreiben' im Umkreis von Preziosität und lyrischen Gattungstraditionen gestellt. Der aus neueren Theorien (Gender Studies) entwickelte Differenzbegriff erweist sich dabei als sinnvolles Kriterium, topisches und konventionelles Textmaterial in seinen Feinstrukturen neu lesbar zu machen und individuelle Handschriften zu entdecken.

Mit der Absage an den offiziellen Wertekanon und die gängigen Weiblichkeitsmodelle, aber auch der Subversion herrschender Diskurse ist die Alterität der Scudéryschen Lyrik postuliert. Die längst fällige Berücksichtigung des Beitrags der Preziösen bei der Begriffsbestimmung von préciosité und poésie précieuse läßt die bedingte Tauglichkeit dieser Etiketten erkennen und den Begriff einer poésie des précieuses notwendig erscheinen. Mit der hier vorgelegten Neudefinition der Scudéryschen Ethik und Ästhetik (dé-brutaliser) läßt sich diese poésie des précieuses auch als poésie précieuse dekonstruierende poésie dé-précieuse lesen.

Die vorliegende Untersuchung behandelt die von 1945/46 bis 1962 erschienenen Romane Claude Simons (* 1913). Ihr liegt ein fiktiver Dialog zwischen dem nouveau romancier und Jean-Paul Sartre zugrunde. Dabei folgt sie einem mehrschichtigen Erkenntnisinteresse: (1) Das genuin literaturwissenschaftliche Anliegen ist die Interpretation der Romane Simons nach den Prämissen einer ideologiekritischen Hermeneutik. (2) Seit den 40er Jahren stehen in Frankreich Literatur, Literaturtheorie und Philosophie in einer besonders engen Beziehung zueinander. Diese soll anhand der zu interpretierenden Werke konkretisiert werden. (3) Schließlich versteht sich die Untersuchung als Beitrag zur literaturwissenschaftlichen Methodologie. Sie will versuchen, Wege aufzuzeigen, wie unterschiedliche, ja konkurrierende Diskurse - z.B. der Psychoanalyse und der Tiefenpsychologie - innerhalb eines Werkes oder einer Gruppe von Werken sinnvoll zu einer stringenten Interpretation zusammengeführt werden können. Den Auftakt bildet die Rekonstruktion der Genese eines existentialistischen Diskurses, die auf frühe Schriften von Sartre und Emmanuel Lévinas zurückgreift. Der Ansatz widerspricht nicht kategorisch einer 'postmodernen' Lektüre der Romane Simons, die dem dekonstruktivistischen Interpretationsparadigma der Differentialität folgt oder nach der Partikularität einer écriture simonienne forscht. Die Möglichkeit einer solchen Lektüre ist bereits in nuce mit der dem französischen Poststrukturalismus und dem nouveau roman gemeinen Absetzung vom französischen Existentialismus angelegt. Eine 'postmoderne' bzw. 'differentielle' Annäherung an die Romane Simons soll daher aus der Kontinuität des Oeuvres heraus vorbereitet werden. Simon bedient sich in Anlehnung an Rousset eines 'mißbrauchten' (Adorno) Barockbegriffs und verleiht seinen Romanen einen emblematischen Charakter, der auf eine mögliche 'differentielle' Lesart verweist. Den Abschluß der Untersuchung bildet ein Epilog zu den "Cinq Notes sur Claude Simon" von Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

Maurice Blanchot a exercé une influence indiscutable dans les débats littéraires de l'après-guerre. L'analyse de son oeuvre accentue sa présence aux discussions structuralistes, poststructuralistes et déconstructivistes.

Die Studie gilt dem System der Ideale Don Quijotes. Wenn in der weitverstreuten Cervantes-Literatur über Don Quijotes Ideale im allgemeinen viele scharfsinnige Bemerkungen gemacht und einzelnen dieser Ideale Spezialstudien gewidmet wurden, so gab es jedoch bislang keine Darstellung der Ideale in ihrer inneren Kohärenz und in ihrem inneren Zusammenhang. Diese Forschungslücke soll hier mit Hilfe eines historischen und thematologischen Methodenansatzes und unter Aufarbeitung der umfangreichen einschlägigen Sekundärliteratur geschlossen werden.