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A Pioneer of Comparative Literature and a Global Public Intellectual
Georg Brandes (1842-1927) was one of the leading literary critics in Europe of his time. His Main Currents of Nineteenth Century Literature (1872-1890) was a foundational text to the field of comparative literature and extolled by Thomas Mann as the “Bible of the young intellectual Europe at the turn of the century.” Georg Brandes eventually developed into a truly global public intellectual, living by his pen and public lectures. On the eve of World War I, he was one of the most sought-after commentators, vigorously opposing all conflicting factions. This book seeks to understand Brandes’ trajectory, to evaluate Brandes’ significance for current discussions of literary criticism and public engagement, and to introduce Brandes to an international audience. It consists of 15 original chapters commissioned from experts in the field.
A Pioneer of Comparative Literature and a Global Public Intellectual
Georg Brandes (1842-1927) was one of the leading literary critics in Europe of his time. His Main Currents of Nineteenth Century Literature (1872-1890) was a foundational text to the field of comparative literature and extolled by Thomas Mann as the “Bible of the young intellectual Europe at the turn of the century.” Georg Brandes eventually developed into a truly global public intellectual, living by his pen and public lectures. On the eve of World War I, he was one of the most sought-after commentators, vigorously opposing all conflicting factions. This book seeks to understand Brandes’ trajectory, to evaluate Brandes’ significance for current discussions of literary criticism and public engagement, and to introduce Brandes to an international audience. It consists of 15 original chapters commissioned from experts in the field.
Peter Abelard and the Mental Architecture of the Paraclete
The Paraclete was founded in 1129. Out of necessity to find a new place to shelter a group of nuns, this female community was created by Peter Abelard (1079–1142) for Heloise of Argenteuil (1090–1164). Varieties of the Self shows how this community was dependent on a network of monasteries, while also representing a formative driving force in the twelfth-century reform, the period of flourishing to which it clearly belonged. The anthropological approach connects different works written by Peter Abelard (hymns, life-rules, letters, biblical commentaries) to views on the female self. What is the perspective on identity, sacrifice, and intentionality within these sources, and how do views on pollution, purity, and sacredness reflect on ethics of body and soul?
Peter Abelard and the Mental Architecture of the Paraclete
The Paraclete was founded in 1129. Out of necessity to find a new place to shelter a group of nuns, this female community was created by Peter Abelard (1079–1142) for Heloise of Argenteuil (1090–1164). Varieties of the Self shows how this community was dependent on a network of monasteries, while also representing a formative driving force in the twelfth-century reform, the period of flourishing to which it clearly belonged. The anthropological approach connects different works written by Peter Abelard (hymns, life-rules, letters, biblical commentaries) to views on the female self. What is the perspective on identity, sacrifice, and intentionality within these sources, and how do views on pollution, purity, and sacredness reflect on ethics of body and soul?
Abstract
This article addresses poetic form as a foundation bridging the literary contexts of Arabic and Persian that exists beyond the bounds of Euro-American influence. We find the originally Arabic science of ʿarūḍ, prosody, used in these two contexts to retool premodern poetic form for the modern era. Questions of form encourage us to think about how modernist poets writing in Persian and Arabic approach their poetry as a craft that emerges not out of engagements with Western literature but rather from a shared poetic past. By tracing formal links across Arabic and Persian, this article argues that paying attention to the premodern tradition of prosodic science they share helps us both to understand the early development of modernist poetry in each language and to avoid explanations informed mostly by literary critical frameworks used to study Western literatures.
Abstract
This article analyzes a little-known practice called iqtirāḥ—“test of poetic talent” or “poetic competition”—that proliferated in twentieth-century Persian-language periodicals. It examines two case studies: one in Tehran in 1928, which mythologized Nādir Shah (r. 1736–1747), a Turko-Persian monarch, as a national hero, and one in Kabul in 1932, which eulogized Muḥammad Nādir Shah (r. 1920–1933), a ruling monarch at the time, for restoring an Afghan homeland imagined as unified. The article frames iqtirāḥ as an afterlife of Persianate modes of sociability that were reconfigured by modern periodicals to serve the demands of romantic nationalism in the twentieth century. By critically examining the ways in which poetic composition interacts with the formation of a national historiography, this article also shows that any clear-cut distinction between the two is arbitrary.
Abstract
This article focuses on late Ottoman/Turkish translations of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat (“quatrains”) as part of Perso-Ottoman poetic connectivity in the early twentieth century. Situating the reception of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat at the nexus of world literature, literary historiography, and translatability, the article explores the methodological affordances of translation to redress the overdominance of discursive and historical points of rupture in studies of late Persianate literatures. To that end, the article offers a comparative reading of Hüseyin Daniş’s Rubaiyat-ı Ömer Hayyam (1927), Rıza Tevfik’s Ömer Hayyam ve Rubaileri (1945), both of which are based on their co-authored translation in 1922, and Mevlevi Mustafa Rüşdi b. Mehmet Tevfik’s translation of Khayyam’s quatrains (1931–32). By way of specific attention to translation as hermeneutics, this article suggests that translating after the Persianate did not involve a straight shift from regional translation practices to translation proper nor was it exclusively a modus operandi of literary and linguistic nationalism. In drawing attention to how translation can accommodate both synchronic and diachronic mobility, the article therefore calls for alternative comparative methodologies which attend to persistent textual practices as well as conjunctural discourses in literary history.
Shaftesbury, Akenside, and the Discipline of the Imagination
Eighteenth-Century Stoic Poetics: Shaftesbury, Akenside, and the Discipline of the Imagination offers a fresh perspective on the eighteenth-century poetics of Lord Shaftesbury and Mark Akenside. This book traces the two authors’ debt to Roman Stoic spiritual exercises and early modern conceptions of the care of the self, which informs their view of the poetic imagination as a bundle of techniques designed to manage impressions, cultivate right images in the mind and rectify judgement. Alexandra Bacalu traces the roots of this articulation in early modern writings on the imagination, as well as in Restoration and Augustan debates on wit, exploring the fruitful tension between ideas of imaginative enthusiasm and imaginative regulation that it provokes.
Shaftesbury, Akenside, and the Discipline of the Imagination
Eighteenth-Century Stoic Poetics: Shaftesbury, Akenside, and the Discipline of the Imagination offers a fresh perspective on the eighteenth-century poetics of Lord Shaftesbury and Mark Akenside. This book traces the two authors’ debt to Roman Stoic spiritual exercises and early modern conceptions of the care of the self, which informs their view of the poetic imagination as a bundle of techniques designed to manage impressions, cultivate right images in the mind and rectify judgement. Alexandra Bacalu traces the roots of this articulation in early modern writings on the imagination, as well as in Restoration and Augustan debates on wit, exploring the fruitful tension between ideas of imaginative enthusiasm and imaginative regulation that it provokes.
Abstract
This article centers on an Urdu-language manual on lithography, published in 1924 by the Nizami Press in Budaun (United Provinces), to explore how a Muslim printer-publisher in a North Indian qaṣbah tried to reform educational methods in his trade. It introduces the Nizami Press (est. 1905) and compares the manual with similar European and Indian instructional handbooks. How did Indian printers and publishers learn their craft? What were the tools and materials used for lithographic printing in colonial India? And given the popularity of lithography, why were such manuals rarely published in Indian languages? By examining the material and technical aspects of the lithographic printing process explained in the Urdu manual, this article engages with larger scholarly debates revolving around knowledge production, pedagogy, and technological developments in South Asia. Furthermore, it analyzes the manual’s language to demonstrate how printers and publishers were engaged in discourses about nationalism, modernization, and social reform.