Original Subjects explores the interweaving of the child-hero and the fortunes of a nation, as these are portrayed in a wide selection of novels and national narratives in the French and English traditions. Alryyes examines how these works deploy similar metaphors and signifying narratives in which a homeless child is central. 
 Taking up such disparate writers and novelists as Locke, Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, Defoe, Richardson, Diderot, Scott, Stendhal, Balzac, and Disraeli, as well as Homer, St. Augustine, and Hannah Arendt, this book argues that the generational parent-child dynamic is key to understanding the structure of novels, the theory of the state, and the events of history.

Original Subjects: The Child, the Novel, and the Nation (Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature)

Literature & Fiction

Ala A. Alryyes

History & Criticism

Harvard University Department of Comparative Literature

This work examines the travel account of a German baroque author who journeyed in search of silk from Northern Germany, through Muscovy, to the court of Shah Safi in Isfahan.   Adam Olearius introduced Persian literature, history, and arts to the German-speaking public; his frank appraisal of Persian customs foreshadows the enlightened spirit of the eighteenth century (influencing Montesquieu's Persian Letters as well as Goethe's West-Eastern Divan) and prepares the way for German Romanticism's infatuation with Persian poetry.   Brancaforte focuses on the visual and discursive nexus uniting Olearius's text with the numerous engravings that supplement the book. The emphasis falls on contextualized readings of Olearius's decorative frontispieces and his new and improved map of Persia and the Caspian Sea, as expressions of early modern subjectivity.

Visions of Persia: Mapping the Travels of Adam Olearius (Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature)

Brancaforte, Elio

Soliciting Darkness: Pindar, Obscurity, and the Classical Tradition (HARVARD STUDIES IN COMPARATIVE LITERATURE)

Hailed by Horace and Quintilian as the greatest of Greek lyric poets, Pindar has always enjoyed a privileged position in the so-called classical tradition of the West. Given the intense difficulty of the poetry, however, Pindaric interpretation has forever grappled with the perplexing dilemma that one of the most influential poets of antiquity should prove to be so dark.   In discussing both poets and scholars from a broad historical span, with special emphasis on the German legacy of genius, Soliciting Darkness investigates how Pindar's obscurity has been perceived and confronted, extorted and exploited. As such, this study addresses a variety of pressing issues, including the recovery and appropriation of classical texts, problems of translation, representations of lyric authenticity, and the possibility or impossibility of a continuous literary tradition. The poetics of obscurity that emerges here suggests that taking Pindar to be an incomprehensible poet may not simply be the result of an insufficient or false reading, but rather may serve as a wholly adequate judgment.

Soliciting Darkness: Pindar, Obscurity, and the Classical Tradition (Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature)

Hamilton, John T.

United States

The Ascension of Authorship: Attribution and Canon Formation in Jewish, Hellenistic, and Christian Traditions (Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature)

The Ascension of Authorship traces the history of the idea of the author in the ancient world, beginning with the attribution practices of Second Temple and Rabbinic Judaism. Jed Wyrick explores the testimony of Josephus on the succession of prophetic scribes and their superiority to Greek historiographers, and interprets the formation of the biblical canon in this light. The Ascension of Authorship also examines the Greek scholarly methodology that questioned traditional connections between names and texts, a methodology perfected by Hellenistic grammarians and inherited by early Christian scholars. Wyrick argues that the fusion of Jewish and Hellenistic approaches toward attribution helped lead to St. Augustine's reinvention of the writer of scripture as an author whose texts were governed by both divine will and human intent.

History

Wyrick, Jed

Ancient Civilizations

The Ascension of Authorship traces the history of the idea of the author in the ancient world, beginning with the attribution practices of Second Temple and Rabbinic Judaism. Jed Wyrick explores the testimony of Josephus on the succession of prophetic scribes and their superiority to Greek historiographers, and interprets the formation of the biblical canon in this light. The Ascension of Authorship also examines the Greek scholarly methodology that questioned traditional connections between names and texts, a methodology perfected by Hellenistic grammarians and inherited by early Christian scholars. Wyrick argues that the fusion of Jewish and Hellenistic approaches toward attribution helped lead to St. Augustine's reinvention of the writer of scripture as an author whose texts were governed by both divine will and human intent.

Medieval Joke Poetry: The Cantigas d’Escarnho e de Mal Dizer (Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature)

Medieval Joke Poetry examines the intersection of jokes, laughter, insults, and poetry in a collection of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century medieval Iberian songs known as the Cantigas d'escarnho e de mal dizer. Written in Galician-Portuguese, these 'songs of mockery and insult' make up a heterogeneous corpus whose witticisms are by turns funny and vicious, crudely obscene and exquisitely sophisticated, playful and deadly serious. Liu's readings disentangle the complex verbal strategies of these joke-poems in order to reveal the latent cultural tensions that underlie their humor. Wordplay, double meanings, and deliberate combinations of incongruous ideas are intended to elicit laughter, even as they gesture toward the rupture of accepted cultural categories in such manifestly hybrid paradoxes as an "Albardan cavaleiro" (noble buffoon), a "mouro cruzado" (Crusader Moor), or a male "dona salvage" (wild woman). Liu shows how these jokes operate in such varied cultural contexts as the arts of augury and divination, pilgrimage, prostitution, interfaith sexuality, and medical malpractice.

Liu, Benjamin

Thin Culture, High Art: Gogol, Hawthorne, and Authorship in Nineteenth-Century Russia and America (Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature)

In Russia and America a perceived absence of literature gave rise to grandiose notions of literature's importance. This book examines how two traditions worked to refigure cultural lack, not by disputing it but by insisting on it, by representing the nation's (putative) cultural deficit as a moral and aesthetic advantage. Through a comparative study of Gogol and Hawthorne, this book examines parallels that seem particularly striking when we consider that these traditions had virtually no points of contact. Yet the unexpected parallels between these authors are the result of historical similarities: Russians and Americans felt obliged to develop a manifestly national literature ex nihilo, and to do so in an age when an unprecedented diversity of printed texts were circulating among an ever more heterogeneous reading public. Responding to these conditions, Gogol and Hawthorne articulated ideas that would prove influential for their nations' literary development: that is, despite the culture's thinness and deviation from European norms, it would soon produce works that would surpass European literature in significance.

Lounsbery, Anne

Reference

In Russia and America a perceived absence of literature gave rise to grandiose notions of literature's importance. This book examines how two traditions worked to refigure cultural lack, not by disputing it but by insisting on it, by representing the nation's (putative) cultural deficit as a moral and aesthetic advantage. Through a comparative study of Gogol and Hawthorne, this book examines parallels that seem particularly striking when we consider that these traditions had virtually no points of contact. Yet the unexpected parallels between these authors are the result of historical similarities: Russians and Americans felt obliged to develop a manifestly national literature ex nihilo, and to do so in an age when an unprecedented diversity of printed texts were circulating among an ever more heterogeneous reading public. Responding to these conditions, Gogol and Hawthorne articulated ideas that would prove influential for their nations' literary development: that is, despite the culture's thinness and deviation from European norms, it would soon produce works that would surpass European literature in significance.

This book offers a detailed, comparatist defense of hyperbole in the Baroque period. Focusing on Spanish and Mexican lyric (Góngora, Quevedo, and Sor Juana), English drama (King Lear and translations of Seneca), and French philosophy (Descartes and Pascal), Christopher Johnson reads Baroque hyperbole as a sophisticated, often sublime, frequently satiric means of making sense of worlds and selves in crisis and transformation. Grounding his readings of hyperbole in the history of rhetoric and literary imitation, Johnson traces how rhetorical excess acquires specific cultural, political, aesthetic, and epistemological value. Hyperboles also engages more recent critiques of hyperbolic thought (Wittgenstein, Derrida, and Cavell), as it argues that hyperbole is the primary engine of a poetics and metaphysics of immanence.

Hyperboles: The Rhetoric of Excess in Baroque Literature and Thought (Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature)

Johnson, Christopher D.

Religion & Spirituality

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Books by Harvard University Department of Comparative Literature

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Harvard University Department of Comparative Literature publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Original Subjects: The Child, the Novel, and the Nation (Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature)

Visions of Persia: Mapping the Travels of Adam Olearius (Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature)

Soliciting Darkness: Pindar, Obscurity, and the Classical Tradition (Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature)

The Ascension of Authorship: Attribution and Canon Formation in Jewish, Hellenistic, and Christian Traditions (Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature)

The Ascension of Authorship: Attribution and Canon Formation in Jewish, Hellenistic, and Christian Traditions (Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature)

Medieval Joke Poetry: The Cantigas d’Escarnho e de Mal Dizer (Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature)

Medieval Joke Poetry: The Cantigas d’Escarnho e de Mal Dizer (Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature)

Thin Culture, High Art: Gogol, Hawthorne, and Authorship in Nineteenth-Century Russia and America (Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature)

Thin Culture, High Art: Gogol, Hawthorne, and Authorship in Nineteenth-Century Russia and America (Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature)

Hyperboles: The Rhetoric of Excess in Baroque Literature and Thought (Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature)