The present volume looks at the relation between travel writing and cultural memory from a variety of perspectives, ranging from theoretical concerns with genres and conventions to detailed analyses of single texts. As befits the topic, the contributions roam far and wide, both geographically and historically. Some detail early Portuguese voyages of discovery, particularly to the East. Others depict encounters between Early, and not so early, Modern Western travelers and their Other interlocutors. Still others focus on travel writings as literature. Voyages and voyaging in literature form the subject of the last category of essays gathered here. Amongst the authors discussed are Fernão Mendes Pinto, Jean de Sponde, Furtado de Mendonça, Sor Juana Inéz de la Cruz, Elsa Morante, Ingeborg Bachmann, Sophia Andresen, Paul Claudel, Graham Greene, Valéry Larbaud, David Mourão-Ferreira, J.M.G. le Clézio, José Saramago, Michel Leiris, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. The volume concludes with an essay by the French-Lebanese author Salah Stétié.

Over the last two decades, the experiences of colonization and decolonization, once safely relegated to the margins of what occupied students of history and literature, have shifted into the latter's center of attention, in the West as elsewhere. This attention does not restrict itself to the historical dimension of colonization and decolonization, but also focuses upon their impact upon the present, for both colonizers and colonized. The nearly fifty essays here gathered examine how literature, now and in the past, keeps and has kept alive the experiences - both individual and collective - of colonization and decolonization. The contributors to this volume hail from the four corners of the earth, East and West, North and South. The authors discussed range from international luminaries past and present such as Aphra Behn, Racine, Blaise Cendrars, Salman Rushdie, Graham Greene, Derek Walcott, Guimarães Rosa, J.M. Coetzee, André Brink, and Assia Djebar, to less known but certainly not lesser authors like Gioconda Belli, René Depestre, Amadou Koné, Elisa Chimenti, Sapho, Arthur Nortje, Es'kia Mphahlele, Mark Behr, Viktor Paskov, Evelyn Wilwert, and Leïla Houari. Issues addressed include the role of travel writing in forging images of foreign lands for domestic consumption, the reception and translation of Western classics in the East, the impact of contemporary Chinese cinema upon both native and Western audiences, and the use of Western generic novel conventions in modern Egyptian literature.

In this volume collaborators from different universities all over the world explore a wide variety of methods for the study of literature as cultural memory. In literature, the past may be (re)constructed in various ways and in very diverse forms. This immediately raises the question as to how one can describe and inventory the various discourses and metadiscourses of historical representation. In what sense can the rhetoric of literary historiography itself contribute to literature's function as cultural memory? Which methods of analysis are most appropriate for describing specific text types or genres as cultural memory? What have been the pragmatic uses and the ethical merits of the stability and continuity that literature has often provided for European, American, Asian and African cultures? What are the dilemmas they create for our teaching at the end of the twentieth century? To all these questions, a wide range of scholars here tries to find answers. In thorough and highly original contributions, they not only address theoretical problems, but also engage themselves in practical analyses of specific works.

Comment les littératures du monde entier ont elles, chacune à sa façon ou s'inspirant mutuellement, vécu, assumé, rejeté les modèles culturels, artistiques et linguistiques, que de force ou de gré elles ont été amenées à accueillir au long des siècles? Comment les traductions, vecteurs premiers des relations interlittéraires, ont elles joué de leurs immenses ressources pour dissimuler, encourager ou décourager la constante et périlleuse mise en cause des traditions nationales?Les quatorze contributions de ce volume nous offrent un éventail de réponses à ces deux questions. De la France au Japon, de la Chine aux Etats-Unis, du Brésil à la Pologne, nous voyons se déployer les multiples stratégies médiatrices de la traduction, toutes révélatrices des tensions qui traversent les cultures où elle prend naissance, que ces tensions soient de nature culturelle, langagière ou littéraire.Ni simples transferts linguistiques, ni fenêtres transparentes sur l'Ailleurs, ni discours désincarnés sur l'Autre, les traductions relèvent plus exactement d'un processus complexe de communication, auquel prennent également part tant les traducteurs que leurs lecteurs: vivant et agissant au coeur des littératures adoptives, ils en investissent aussi bien les grands genres que la paralittérature, ils en infléchissent, souvent de concert, les valeurs et les modes d'écrire, et en démontent, pour mieux les exhiber, les rouages intimes.

This volume deals with the inherent relation between literary genres and cultural memory. Indeed, generic repertoires may be regarded as bodies of shared knowledge (a sort of ‘encyclopaedia' or 'museum' of stocked culture) and have played and still play an important role in absorbing and activating that memory. The contributors have focused on some specific memory-linked genres that prove especially relevant in remembering and transforming past experiences, i.e. the (post)modern historical novel and various forms of (post)modern autobiographical writing. They deal with such renowned authors as Carlos Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, Umberto Eco, Antonio Tabucchi, John Barth, Julian Barnes, Michel Butor, Nathalie Sarraute, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, Georges Perec and Marguerite Yourcenar. The volume, thus, constitutes an attractive and representative sample of (post)modern forms of rewriting and problematizing individual and collective pasts.

At no point in recorded history has there been an absence of intense, and heated, discussion about the subject of how to conduct relations between women and men. This Handbook provides a comprehensive guide to these omnipresent issues and debates, mapping the present and future of thinking about feminist theory. The chapters gathered here present the state of the art in scholarship in the field, covering: Epistemology and marginality Literary, visual and cultural representations Sexuality Macro and microeconomics of gender Conflict and peace. The most important consensus in this volume is that a central organizing tenet of feminism is its willingness to examine the ways in which gender and relations between women and men have been (and are) organized. The authors bring a shared commitment to the critical appraisal of gender relations, as well as a recognition that to think ‘theoretically’ is not to detach concerns from lived experience but to extend the possibilities of understanding. With this focus on theory and theorizing about the world in which we live, this Handbook asks us, across all disciplines and situations, to abandon our taken-for-granted assumptions about the world and interrogate both the origin and the implications of our ideas about gender relations and feminism. It is an essential reference work for advanced students and academics not only of feminist theory, but of gender and sexuality across the humanities and social sciences.