Bücher der Reihe Literary & Cultural Theory

Breathing Earth: The Polyphonic Lyric of Robert Bringhurst examines the innovative poems for multiple voices composed by the Canadian poet by drawing on the main insights of biosemiotics, ecophilosophy and material ecocriticism.

The book presents the poetics of European litanic verse (genre structure, versification, rhetorical figures), with a particular focus on the space-time matrix within which the litanic world is depicted. Examples are mostly taken from Latin, English, French, German, Iberian, Italian, Scandinavian and Slavic poetry from Antiquity to Early Modernity.

The third volume describes the development of litanic verse from the troubadour poetry and Old French religious verse up to World War II. The analyses concern the stylistic devices such as enumeration, parallelism, anaphora, and epiphora used by Rutebeuf, Joachim du Bellay, Jean de La Ceppede, Francis Jammes, Paul Claudel, among others.

This book traces a history of litanic verse in Italian poetry including considerations on musical and performative aspects of certain lyric genres (lauda, sonnet and ode or canzonetta). The analysis concerns the development of litanic verse in Italian poetry, from the thirteenth to the beginning of the twentieth century.

The book consists of nine chapters devoted to representations of melancholia in 19th-century art and literature. The book not only provides a survey of images and modes of behaviour of 19th-century individuals, but also discusses the meanings of melancholia as they appeared in European culture over time.

This book represents an attempt to capture different links between modern literature and music. The author focuses on realisations by Philippe Sollers, Paul Celan, Umberto Saba, Karol Hubert Rostworowski, Stanislaw Baranczak, Stephane Mallarme and Paul Hindemith.

The book investigates relations between the 'East' and 'West' from the Enlightenment until the present times. On the basis of a selection of American, British and Turkish literature, Orientalist painting, and Western opera works, the study proposes an innovative, more nuanced reading of post/colonial phenomena and their socio-cultural implications.

A comparative history of litanic verse in various European regions. The essays on the origin of the Litany are followed by a consideration of litanic verse in Latin poetry and in the Iberian (Castilian, Catalan, Galician, Portuguese), Slavic and Central European literatures (Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Hungarian, Polish, Serbian, Russian).

The author describes and discusses 20th century literary theory and its appeal to scientific methodology. The book focuses on the appeal to scientific methods and epistemology, the status and nature of literary meaning and the role of authorial intention in interpretation.

The book addresses influences and affinities in the context of the history of ideas, literary theory and criticism. It brings together American Transcendentalism, Negritude, African religions and philosophy.

A comparative history of litanic verse in various European regions. The verse reflects the religious, social and political history of Europe. The articles address poetry from medieval to modern times, focusing on the literatures of Protestant countries (Great Britain, Denmark, Germany, Norway) and Austrian poetry.

The book analyses a mode of apophasis in contemporary theoretical discourse. It explores the relationship between negative theology and Jacques Derrida's textual practice, as well as the similarities between apophasis and the trope of transgression in the works of Maurice Blanchot, George Bataille or Michel Foucault.

The book is primarily shaped as an introduction to fictional worlds theory. It critically examines all the scholarly sources regarding the theory, its inspiration and application: namely logic, semantics, aesthetics, and linguistics, as well as intertextuality, transduction, and fictional and historical narration.

The book is largely concerned with the history of Western culture of speed that forms the framework within which the phenomenon of slow living is placed. A comprehensive analysis of practices and representations of deceleration in everyday life - slow travel, slow London and slow lit - suggests the rise of a post-slow stage in the history of speed.

The book offers a novel attempt at recapitulating Gombrowicz's aesthetics in the postmodern Anglo-American context. It intends to fill, if partially, some lacunae on the map of Gombrowicz's Translation Studies and to inspire further debates on the related aspects of postmodern existentialism of his works.

This collection assembles a number of chapters engaging different strands of Heidegger's philosophy to explore issues relevant to contemporary media studies. Principal Heideggerian concepts have been drawn upon to explore photography, audiovisual production culture, the selfie phenomenon, and social media activism in the cultures of the West.

Body, Letter, and Voice

Contemporary materialism, in its varied configurations, persistently challenges claims that the body can be relegated to a subservient position when compared to reason. In most pertinent colonial and postcolonial studies the body is seen as a text, upon and by means of which signs of difference are instituted. Yet, to be able to test and appreciate to what extent the postcolonial body was and remains today a battleground for discursive control, it is helpful to start with the awareness of the somatics of the traveller himself ¿ his agreement to and with his own person or lack thereof vis-à-vis other bodies, his translation of the somatic into the semantic. The traveller¿s body, when rendered in writing, becomes a symbolic construct which enters into a relation with the represented world, and the nature of this multifaceted, troubled alliance ¿ if alliance it is ¿ forms the main theme of this book.

The contributions in this volume examine literary and other texts as well as cultural and political discourses in relation to issues of identity formation and dis-formation, of self and society and of the socially local within the global. All these issues come into play through the exploration of the fantasmatic space of mutual mis-recognition and mythmaking between coloniser and colonised, between ¿Africä and ¿Europe¿.

This book analyzes Mo Yan's writings as well as other scholarly interpretations of his writings. The author stakes out a Marxist approach to theorizing the class ideology that underwrites what Mo Yan says he "knows" of the "nebulous terrain" where one supposedly experiences moments of "transcending" or going "beyond" class and politics.

The book presents the various viewpoints that poetics, literary history and Western rhetoric have adopted throughout Western history. The aim of poetics is to render the specificity of the literary discourse. Rhetoric places emphasis on the verbal effects of discourses and literary history examines the temporal succession of the literary systems.

The book's argument revolves around the notion of apocalypse as metaphor, narrating a paradigmatic change in the discourse of postmodern identity. Drawing from science fiction studies, literary and cultural theory as well as popular cinema, it proposes a post-apocalyptic reading of late-capitalist culture.

Walter Benjamin is one of the most important figures of modern culture. The authors focus within this book on Benjamin as a philosopher, but also as a writer. Philosophical and philological readings are accompanied by essays presenting his biography.

A Culture of Recycling / Recycling Culture?

This book is the result of a shared conviction of the necessity to advance the international discourse on criticism. It positions itself within contemporary considerations of the theory and practice of criticism and presents texts by Polish scholars (e.g. literary critical theory, feminism, genre studies, and comparative literature).

This volume consists of articles on imagery in the poetry of various literary canons. The articles present new research based on individual approaches for each particular canon within a wide span from socio-cultural environment to semantic and cognitive properties of specific images.