This book examines the translations carried out by Italian novelist Beppe Fenoglio, one of the most important Italian writers of the twentieth century. It stems from the acknowledgement that Beppe Fenoglio’s translations have not been examined in the political, cultural and ideological context in which they were produced, but have been dismissed as a purely linguistic exercise. The author examines Fenoglio’s translations as culturally and ideologically informed artistic expressions, in which Fenoglio was able to give voice to his dissent towards the mainstream ideology and poetics of his times, often choosing authors and characters with whom he identified, such as Shakespeare, Milton and Marlowe. The interaction between the theories of Translation Studies, Literary Theory and Adaptation Studies foregrounds the centrality of the role of the translator, showing how Fenoglio’s ideology and poetics were clearly visible both in the selection of the texts he translated and in his translation strategies.

This book addresses one of the most important theories to arise in recent American literary scholarship. Developed over the past two decades, Sacvan Bercovitch’s ideas about the relationship of American cultural institutions to voices of dissent have repeatedly posed challenges to pervasive assumptions about American culture and the methods used by cultural critics and literary historians. The contributors to this book respond to different aspects of Bercovitch’s ideas by exploring a wide range of scholarly disciplines, including American, Chicano, Amerindian, African-American, Asian-American, feminist, comparatist, philosophical, legal, and critical studies. In addition to essays that focus on the theoretical backgrounds and implications of Bercovitch’s concepts, this book interrogates the uses of those concepts in the study of American literatures. Works by a variety of American writers are analyzed: the Colonial poet Phillis Wheatly; nineteenth-century writers Hawthorne and Melville; modernists Pound and Eliot; contemporary authors John Barth, Norman Mailer, Arturo Islas, and John Yau; and philosophers William James and Stanley Cavell. This book offers new directions to students of American culture, while it participates in the ongoing reassessment of American cultural and literary scholarship.

The burgeoning use of modern literary theory and cultural criticism in recent biblical studies has led to stimulating--but often bewildering--new readings of the Bible. This book, argued from a perspective shaped by postmodernism, is at once an accessible guide to and an engagement with various methods, theories, and critical practices transforming biblical scholarship today. Written by a collective of cutting-edge scholars--with each page the work of multiple hands--The Postmodern Bible deliberately breaks with the individualist model of authorship that has traditionally dominated scholarship in the humanities and is itself an illustration of the postmodern transformation of biblical studies for which it argues. The book introduces, illustrates, and critiques seven prominent strategies of reading. Several of these interpretive strategies--rhetorical criticism, structuralism and narratology, reader-response criticism, and feminist criticism--have been instrumental in the transformation of biblical studies up to now. Many--feminist and womanist criticism, ideological criticism, poststructuralism, and psychoanalytic criticism--hold promise for the continued transformation of these studies in the future. Focusing on readings from both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, this volume illuminates the current multidisciplinary debates emerging from postmodernism by exposing the still highly contested epistemological, political, and ethical positions in the field of biblical studies.

This book presents an interpretation of Maurice Scève’s lyric sequence Délie, object de plus haulte vertu (Lyon, 1544) in literary relation to the Vita nuova, Commedia, and other works of Dante Alighieri. Dante’s subtle influence on Scève is elucidated in depth for the first time, augmenting the allusions in Délie to the Canzoniere of Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca). Scève’s sequence of dense, epigrammatic dizains is considered to be an early example, prior to the Pléiade poets, of French Renaissance imitation of Petrarch’s vernacular poetry, in a time when imitatio was an established literary practice, signifying the poet’s participation in a tradition. While the Canzoniere is an important source for Scève’s Délie, both works are part of a poetic lineage that includes Occitan troubadours, Guinizzelli, Cavalcanti, and Dante. The book situates Dante as a relevant predecessor and source for Scève, and examines anew the Petrarchan label for Délie. Compelling poetic affinities emerge between Dante and Scève that do not correlate with Petrarch.

"Bibliography of ethical criticism": p. 505-534. Presents arguments for the relocation of ethics to the center of literature, examining periods, genres, and particular works.

Literary Networks and Dissenting Irish Print Culture examines the origins of Irish labouring-class poetry produced in the liminal space of revolutionary Ulster (1790-1815), where religious dissent fostered a unique and distinctive cultural identity.

Wittgenstein wrote that "philosophy ought really to be written only as a form of poetry." American poetry has long engaged questions about subject and object, self and environment, reality and imagination, real and ideal that have dominated the Western philosophical tradition since the Enlightenment. Kristen Case's book argues that American poets from Emerson to Susan Howe have responded to the central problems of Western philosophy by performing, in language, the continually shifting relation between mind and world. Pragmatism, recognizing the futility of philosophy's attempt to fix the mind/world relation, announces the insights that these poets enact. Pursuing the flights of pragmatist thinking into poetry and poetics, Case traces an epistemology that emerges from American writing, including that of Emerson, Marianne Moore, William James, and Charles Olson. Here mind and world are understood as inseparable, and the human being is regarded as, in Thoreau's terms, "part and parcel of Nature." Case presents a new picture of twentieth-century American poetry that disrupts our sense of the schools and lineages of modern and postmodern poetics, arguing that literary history is most accurately figured as a living field rather than a line. This book will be of particular interest to scholars and students of pragmatism, transcendentalism, and twentieth-century American poetry. Kristen Case is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Maine at Farmington.

In Retrospect and Review an international team of scholars explore East German literature, and the circumstances of its production, in the last phase of the German Democratic Republic's existence. The provocative claim of the novelist, playwright and essayist Christoph Hein, 'Ich nehme außerdem für mich in Anspruch [...] elfmal das Ende der DDR beschrieben zu haben, ' serves as the starting-point for the twenty-three contributors to the volume, who consider the many and varied ways in which Hein and his fellow writers signalled and diagnosed the demise of the GDR. The fraught relationship between the state and its intellectuals inevitably forms a consistent theme in the studies of writers as diverse as Anna Seghers and Kito Lorenc, Christa Wolf and Jurek Becker, or Irmtraud Morgner and Heiner Müller. However, the process of 'retrospect and review' also reveals the innovative and independent-minded character of the culture of the GDR's later years. Several contributors trace the emergence of a strong and distinctive women's writing which increasingly and subversively imposed itself on the hitherho patriarchal literary landscape of the GDR. And in the literature of the 1970s and 1980s experimental narrative strategies take on a political role as a counter-discourse to a stubbornly inflexible political order.

What were the boundaries between 'official' and 'subversive', 'orthodox' and 'dissenting' critical practices in the Middle Ages? Placing medieval critical and intellectual discourses within their cultural and ideological frameworks, Criticism and Dissent in the Middle Ages examines conflicts of gender, violence, academic freedom, hermeneutical authority, sacramentalism and heresy among so-called official as well as dissenting critical orders. Pedagogies, theories of grammar and rhetoric, poetics and hermeneutics, academic 'sciences', clerical professionalism, literacy, visual images, theology, and textual cultures of heresy are all considered. This 1996 collection of essays by major scholars examines medieval critical discourse, theories of textuality and interpretation, and representations of learning and knowledge - as contesting and contested institutional practices within and between Latin and vernacular cultures.

The Still Performance examines the poetry of five postmodern American poets: Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashberry, Adrienne Rich, W.S. Merwin, and Charles Wright. McCorkle devotes a chapter to each one of these five poets and provides an extensive overview of their poetics. The author concludes that postmodern poetry, and these poets in particular, are engaged in various but overlapping reappraisals of modernism. More importantly, he asserts the necessity of critical inquiry bound to the persistent act of self-examination.