This volume treats conceptions of the fin-de-sièle as they were affected and characterized by the work of Walter Pater, the leading nineteenth-century English art critic after Ruskin, essayist and novelist, and major influence on the temper and style of the 'aesthetic' and 'decadent' movements. Many subjects are explored: Denis Donoghue recreates the sceptical spirit of Pater for our time and Wolfgang Iser with the 'translatability' of Paterian discourse in the current context of interpretation theory. On the larger European scene David Carrier treats the decisive role of Baudelaire in the movement towards Modernism in writing and painting, and the subterranean forms in which he was imported. The first publication of an important work, believed lost, of Pater's major disciple, the twentieth-century art critic Adrian Stokes, is also featured in this volume. Some translation is included, and finally,The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney, displays the changing forms of the traditional ele
Comparative Criticism is an annual journal of comparative literature and cultural studies that has gained an international reputation since its inception in 1979. It contains major articles on literary theory and criticism; on a wide range of comparative topics; and on interdisciplinary debates. It includes translations of literary, scholarly and critical works; substantial reviews of important books in the field; and bibliographies on specialist themes for the year, on individual writers, and on comparative literary studies in Britain and Ireland.
The theme of volume 19 is 'Literary Devolution: Writing Now in Scotland, Wales, Ireland and England', and includes poetry from Scotland, with essays by David Kinloch and Christopher Whyte on Socttish Gaelic; and poetry from Wales with essays by Jerry Hunter and Sam Adams; from Ireland, three cantos of John Montague's new poem on David Jones, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill's Gaelic poetry translated by Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon and Medbh McGuickan, and a new play by Vincent Woods, acclaimed in performance and published here for the first time; and English poetry together with new fiction by Iain Sinclair. It also includes an interview with Nathaniel Tarn, editor of innovative Cape Goliard Editions. Translation from European poets into English and Scottish is a seminal feature of poetry in this period, represented here by translation from the Polish by Seamus Heaney, from Mayakovsky by Edwin Morgan, from Rimbaud and Mandelstam by Alistair Mackie; and Sylvia Plath's translations from the French re
This volume, first published in 1996, addresses literary theory and criticism, comparative studies in terms of theme, genre movement and influence, and interdisciplinary perspectives. Geoffrey Hartman, one of the major comparatists of this period, whose subtle phenomenological readings have transformed Romantic studies in English, gives a lapidary account of those poets of the Holocaust Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs, whose refusal of traditional imagery is a last fragile link with it. The twentieth anniversary of the founding of the British Comparative Literature Association in 1975 at Norwich is also marked, with the publication of the plenary papers from the Seventh Triennial Congress held in Edinburgh in 1995. Anne Barton opens on the strange 'Wild Man' figure who haunts the literary and iconographical spaces of Europe, with notable examples in Shakespeare's Caliban and Timon; John Dixon Hunt counters with the civilized garden that is staked out and continuously retheorized in the mids
Revolutions and Censorship, first published in 1994, is concerned not only with recent momentous changes in the political landscape of Europe and their reverberations in the arts, but with the perennial problems of outside control which writers and artists face. The fall of the Iron Curtain, and the internal collapse of the Soviet Union have opened the floodgates of recovery of lost or secret documents, such as Lunacharsky's Letter to Stalin on the censorship of Mikhail Bulgakov, and of suppressed and censored work, whether by classics like Chekhov, whose bowdlerized letters are here restored to their intimate frankness by Donald Rayfield, or by modem writers such as Yevgeni Shvarts, whose full-length satirical play The Shadow Alan Myers here translates, or David Bergelson, shot in the Lubianka prison on his sixty-eighth birthday, whose fine story 'Remnants' is translated and introduced by Golda Werman (commended in the 1991 BCLA Translation Competition). Peter France details the diffi
Comparative Criticism addresses itself to the questions of literary theory and criticism, to comparative studies in terms of theme, genre movement and influence, and to interdisciplinary perspectives.
