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.

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.

Unlike many narratives about the Czech lands, which place them on the periphery of their own history, this study considers Czechs as central characters, looking both east and west to find their place in the early modern world. Islam, Christianity and the Making of Czech Identity, 1453-1683 works through the descriptive and ethnographic texts produced by Czech speakers about Islam and the Ottoman Empire to show how they used this discourse to create Czech identities. Rather than simply constructing identity in opposition to the Islamic Other, Laura Lisy-Wagner shows how these authors played the Holy Roman and Ottoman Empires off each other, creating an autonomous space for themselves in between. Lisy-Wagner introduces sources that are new to English-language historiography and uses them in a way that is new to Czech historiography as well. The chapters are organized based on different categories of agents-travelers, ethnographers, religious leaders, artists, and political revolutionaries-whose voices cast ideas of Europe and Czech identity in the early modern period in a new and different light.

How does gender shape memory? What role does literature play in cultural remembering? These are two of the questions to which the present volume is addressed. Even if we agree that remembering is not biologically determined, we can assume that memory is influenced by the particular social, cultural and historical conditions in which individuals find themselves. And since men and women generally assume different social and cultural roles, their way of remembering should also differ. So, do women and men remember different events, narrate different stories, and narrate or read them in different ways? Gendered Memories, then, not only looks at memory gendered by literature, but also wants to know how gender shapes the memory of literature.

The present volume is the product of a joint effort made by scholars from across China (including Hong Kong), Japan and Europe. The book gathers sixteen papers devoted to literary and cultural criticism from a comparative point of view. A perspective prominent in this volume is imagology, an approach first developed by Daniel-Henry Pageaux, and which focuses on specific images in literary and other texts. The study of the image of the “foreign” in national literary traditions, for instance, belongs to the traditional purview of comparative literature. Pageaux did more than uphold this tradition. He practically reinvented it using new theoretical concepts and perspectives (in particular, semiotics and reception aesthetics). On this basis, he was able to develop a theory and a methodology that are both usable and in tune with contemporary concerns. The present book covers a wide range of topics in the study of images of Westerners in Chinese and Japanese literature. Individual contributions deal with issues such as the genesis of the Chinese term Foreign Devil, the occurrence of Westerners in modern Chinese and Japanese literature, and the Chinese and Japanese reception of indiviual western authors and artists such as, amongst others, Oscar Wilde, Vincent Van Gogh, and Madame Roland. Some papers examine individual authors such as Lu Xun and Takeyama Michio. Others examine historical periods or literary movements. The approaches followed range from historical investigations of linguistic practices to detailed literary analyses.

The traumatic experiences of persecution and genocide have changed traditional views of literature. The discussion of historical truth versus aesthetic autonomy takes an unexpected turn when confronted with the experiences of the victims of the Holocaust, the Gulag Archipelago, the Cultural Revolution, Apartheid and other crimes against humanity. The question is whether - and, if so, to what extent - literary imagination may depart from historical truth. In general, the first reactions to traumatic historical experiences are autobiographical statements, written by witnesses of the events. However, the second and third generations, the sons and daughters of the victims as well as of the victimizers, tend to free themselves from this generic restriction and claim their own way of remembering the history of their parents and grandparents. They explore their own limits of representation, and feel free to use a variety of genres; they turn to either realist or postmodernist, ironic or grotesque modes of writing.