Bücher der Reihe Studies in Comparative Literature

The study of European literatures was once characterized by single-language, nation-bound enquiry, but in the context of globalization the transnational and multi-lingual aspect of these literatures has come to the fore. The forces driving this change range from acknowledgement of ancestral and regional enclaves within nation states to migration between nation states, and from beyond Europe, giving rise to minority communities across the continent. This wide-ranging volume spans literatures from Galicia to Greenland, written in and between languages ranging from Basque, Welsh and Breton, to French, Italian and German, and in genres that include theatre, narrative prose and experimental poetry. By viewing Europe from its peripheries and investigating diversity both between and within European nations, this book presents small, minority and minor literatures as a continuum along which notions of community are constantly affirmed, contested and redefined.Kate Averis teaches European literatures at the Universidad de Antioquia, Colombia. Margaret Littler is Professor Emerita of Contemporary German Culture at the Univ­ersity of Manchester. Godela Weiss-Sussex is Professor of Modern German Literature at the Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies, London and Fellow of King's College Cambridge.

In 1945, Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti (1901-66) brought back to Paris six matchboxes filled with the work of his war years: minute figurines that crumbled upon a single touch. Around this time, Irish playwright Samuel Beckett (1906-89) began writing plays, first Eleutheria and then Waiting for Godot. When they came together in 1961 to collaborate on a re-staging of Godot, both had turned their attention to different types of figures: Giacometti to lanky, attenuated figures that seem to erode into their environment, and Beckett to increasingly disembodied characters, such as Henry and Ada in Embers.What can we make of this turn in depicting figures that seem to make and unmake themselves in our processes of perceiving them? Through a close examination of Beckett's dramatic works and Giacometti's art, Lin Li traces the development of this peculiar type of figuration and uncovers its implications on personhood, rhetoric and inter-medial reading.Lin Li is research associate at the University of Antwerp.

The avant-garde in the early-twentieth century planted its flag on the ruins of the day's pieties, with religion a particularly urgent target. Movements such as Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism often represented religion in blasphemous, prurient, or sacrilegious ways: but the invocation of spirituality and scripture were also indispensable to their transcendent, revelatory experiences. Examining the contemporaneous, and cross-national, careers in poetry and artistic propaganda of Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), F. T. Marinetti (1876-1944), and Ezra Pound (1885-1972), James Leveque frames the early avant-garde as an attempt to rediscover the necessity of prophecy and apocalyptic thought. Biblical literature furnished a sense of legitimacy and distinction to these avant-garde writers by charging many of their works with themes of spiritual direction in a new rationalized and secularized century, allowing them to present themselves as preachers of the End Times or visionaries of a new heaven and a new earth.James Leveque has taught literature at the University of Edinburgh, University of Dundee, and Edinburgh Napier University, and currently teaches at the City Literary Institute in London.

As Albert Camus once remarked: 'Of capital punishment, people write only [...] in a low voice.' Journalists and state officials alike use a carefully policed language when making any reference to the death penalty: when human beings are to be executed by the state, some key actors talk about what will be done in terms of legalities and procedures. Does fiction provide a counterbalance for that discretion, or simply echo it? What other perspectives can it bring into the foreground, and can literary language express a response to a supposedly necessary horror, or a terrible injustice, which other voices or media cannot?Considering a range of major works from across Western Europe and the United States, from the 18th century until the present day, Death Sentences investigates the contribution of poetics to our understanding, past and present, of capital punishment. The sophisticated literary representations found in Hugo, Dostoevsky, Wilde, Kafka, Mailer, King and others offer a privileged vantage point from which to illuminate and critique a unique institution which itself relies heavily on spectacle and representation to be operative and legitimized.Birte Christ is Assistant Professor of American Literature and Culture at Justus-Liebig-University Giessen. Ève Morisi is Associate Professor of French and Fellow of St Hugh's College at the University of Oxford.

H. G. Adler (Prague, 1910-London, 1988), a survivor of Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and two other Nazi concentration camps, is unique for his scholarly and creative approach to the traumas of the Second World War. While Adler became a pioneer in the now well-established field of Holocaust studies, he was nearly forgotten as a prolific author of poetry and prose. The tables have turned in recent years. English translations of his major fictional works have led to an international literary reception. At the same time, his groundbreaking historical work deserves renewed attention.This edited volume elucidates Adler's complex reception history and is the first comprehensive interdisciplinary publication that responds to his new international acclaim. In addition to offering innovative perspectives on Adler's individual works, the major intervention of the volume is the examination and contextualization of Adler's significant contributions to literary modernism and scholarly investigations of persecution and genocide under National Socialism.Lynn L. Wolff is Assistant Professor of German Studies at Michigan State University.

One writer, Mary Shelley, inaugurated two of the three paradigms through which human beings imagine, with panic or pleasure, the end of their species. Complementing her visions of a world-encompassing natural plague (The Last Man, 1826) and man-made technological self-eradication (Frankenstein, 1818), the third - and oldest - paradigm of how to depict humankind's demise is the religious notion of Apocalypse, God's Day of Reckoning. Through in-depth philosophical and theological contextualization of the German, French and British literary settings of the apocalyptic tradition around 1800, Sublime Conclusions chronicles the transition from theism and deism to atheism and the 'Death of God' on which, Weninger contends, Shelley's novels - and hence modern science fiction in general - are premised. A tour de force of comparative methodology, Weninger's transdisciplinary approach is as wide-ranging as it is meticulous, interweaving the manifold discourses of catastrophe in literary history, art and film history, philosophy and theology, as well as the history of science and science fiction, across more than two centuries of European intellectual history from Voltaire's mid-eighteenth-century response to the earthquake of Lisbon to Günther Anders's presaging, in the wake of Hiroshima, humankind's extinction through nuclear Armageddon.Robert Weninger is Emeritus Professor of German and Comparative Literature at King's College London.

The Rhetoric of Exile explores the rhetorical construction of force in indirect exile and in literary responses to it. Between banishment, a compulsory exile, and expatriation, a voluntary one, many legal systems have allowed for a third model. Such an exile is pragmatic and ambiguous in nature: the degree of compulsion is never explicitly defined, but all agents involved understand that it is real. As far back as the Roman Republic, there have been exiles who felt considerable duress but could not pin it down to any specific legal document or judicial decision, and these victims of silent persecution are all the more likely to brood on the elusive force over them, and to recreate it by imaginative means. What is displaced and hidden in law - force as metonymy -- returns as a potent and condensed image in literature -- force as metaphor.Vladimir Zori¿ is Assistant Professor in Russian and Slavonic Studies at the University of Nottingham.

If I have been a vagabond, and have never been able to root myself in any one place in the world, it is because I have no early memories of any one sky or soil. It has freed me from many prejudices in giving me its own unresting kind of freedom; but it has cut me off from whatever is stable, of long growth in the world. - Arthur SymonsArthur Symons (1865-1945) was a central figure in the cultural and social networks of the British fin de siècle. He was an often controversial poet and critic who introduced British readers to French Decadence and Symbolism and had an equally important if largely unacknowledged influence on the development of modernism. In 1908 - the year of a mental breakdown that had a disastrous effect both on his career and posthumous reputation - W.B. Yeats referred to him as 'the best critic of his generation.' Symons's vast body of work also includes fiction and writings on the visual arts, music, theatre and the popular stage, as well as translations of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Verlaine and D'Annunzio. The essays in this volume reflect the breadth of Symons's interests, reassessing this dynamic writer who played a key mediating role between English and European literatures, and between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.