This book mainly discusses about the alter ego perspectives in literary historiography. This comparative analysis of the major Chinese literary histories in China and in the West brings to light the alter ego perspectives of Stephen Owen in literary historiography. The most interesting part of the book will be the interpretation of new notions and perspectives proposed by Stephen Owen, especially in the newly published The Cambridge History of Chinese Literature (2010). This book gives a detailed overview about the different stages of writing Chinese literary history and the different modes of literary historiography in China and in the West. Two case studies of Chinese poems are made on the notion of discursive communities and the Cultural Tang. Readers will a better understanding about the paradigm of literary historiography and the interrelationships between the different modes of literary historiography and the intellectual history. ​

This work is an anthology of 225 translated and annotated Sinitic poems (kanshi 漢詩) composed in public and private settings by nobles, courtiers, priests, and others during Japan’s Nara and Heian periods (710-1185). The authors have supplied detailed biographical notes on the sixty-nine poets represented and an overview of each collection from which the verse of this eminent and enduring genre has been drawn. The introduction provides historical background and discusses kanshi subgenres, themes, textual and rhetorical conventions, styles, and aesthetics, and sheds light on the socio-political milieu of the classical court, where Chinese served as the written language of officialdom and the preeminent medium for literary and scholarly activity among the male elite.

How does a writer discuss her creative process and her views on a writer’s role in society? How do her comments on writing relate to her works? The Hindi writer Krishna Sobti (1925-2019) is known primarily as a novelist. However, she also extensively wrote about her views on the creative process, the figure of the writer, historical writing, and the position of writers within the public sphere. This study is the first to examine in detail the relationship between Sobti’s views on poetics as exposed in her non-fictional texts and her own literary practice. The writer’s self-representation is analysed through her use of metaphors to explain her creative process. Sobti’s construction of the figure of the writer is then put in parallel with her idiosyncratic use of language as a representation of the heterogeneous voices of her characters and with her conception of literature as a space where time and memory can be "held." At the same time, by delving into Sobti’s position in the debate around "women’s writing" (especially through the creation of a male double, the failed writer Hashmat), and into her views on literature and politics, this book also reflects on the literary debates of the post-Independence Hindi literary sphere.

"The aim of this book is to explore some of the main pre-occupations of literature, culture and criticism dealing with historical themes in post-Soviet Russia, focusing mainly on literature in the years 1991 to 2006." --introd.

An authoritative volume that is the first literary history of the Netherlands and Flanders in English since the 1970s

In 1963, French-Spanish writer Jorge Semprun published Le Grand Voyage (The Long Voyage), a fictional account of his deportation to Buchenwald. Later, Semprun became an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and served as Spain's minister of culture. This volume of the Yale French Studies series constitutes an overall assessment of his work, spanning his broad range of genres and traditions. Including both new perspectives and pieces by authors who have written widely on Semprun, this volume is a refreshing and dynamic look at one of the twentieth-century's most interesting literary voices.

A groundbreaking essay collection that pursues the rise of geoculture as an essential framework for arts criticism, The Planetary Turn shows how the planet—as a territory, a sociopolitical arena, a natural space of interaction for all earthly life, and an artistic theme—is increasingly the conceptual and political dimension in which twenty-first-century writers and artists picture themselves and their work. In an introduction that comprehensively defines the planetary model of art, culture, and cultural-aesthetic interpretation, the editors explain how the living planet is emerging as distinct from older concepts of globalization, cosmopolitanism, and environmentalism and is becoming a new ground for exciting work in contemporary literature, visual and media arts, and social humanities. Written by internationally recognized scholars, the twelve essays that follow illustrate the unfolding of a new vision of potential planetary community that retools earlier models based on the nation-state or political “blocs” and reimagines cultural, political, aesthetic, and ethical relationships for the post–Cold War era.