Crossings and Passages in Genre and Culture scrutinizes the fascinating and diverse wanderings forms of artistic expression, in particular literature, have taken through different cultural fields, both within and outside a specific geographical region or historical époque. Approaching the topic with a flexible genre concept and avoiding any superficial group classification of texts, the common focus of the essays collected in this volume is to explore the dimensions and potentiality which cultural encounters release in the field of genre transformation.
Crossings and Passages in Genre and Culture scrutinizes the fascinating and diverse wanderings forms of artistic expression, in particular literature, have taken through different cultural fields, both within and outside a specific geographical region or historical époque. Approaching the topic with a flexible genre concept and avoiding any superficial group classification of texts, the common focus of the essays collected in this volume is to explore the dimensions and potentiality which cultural encounters release in the field of genre transformation. Apart from broader transcultural aspects, a further point of interest is to shed light on the transgeneric, intertextual and intermedial crossings and passages, transferences.
The scholars contributing to this volume scrutinize in their essays a variety of literary forms and texts which comprise the specula form, travelogue, poetry, prose poem, the novel, holy writs, etc. Juxtaposing texts and genres in cultures and languages such as Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Persian, Arabic, Hebrew, German, and other European languages the volume pursues a comparative approach necessary to considering and understanding the wanderings and transformations of art forms. The discussion of Mediaeval texts shows that these processes are by no means restricted to the contemporary emergence of global literary systems.
This book is meant for scholars of comparative literature, and those interested in research on literature of the far East, the Middle East and European literatures as well as in literary theory.
Literatures in Context is a peer-reviewed book series devoted to Near Eastern and North African literatures. The editors want the title of the series to be understood programmatically. They presuppose a concept of world literature that includes Near Eastern and North African literatures. What is more, they assume that literatures are in many ways marked by intertextuality, that they constitute readings of extremely diverse earlier texts, and that they are posited within a field of tensions, much broader than their respective national language. For the earlier eras of Near Eastern and North African literatures, this field of tensions geographically covers the regions of the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean and Asia Minor. In modern times, it has become a space of interaction that has long since included “global” Western literatures (and realities). This does not imply that the modern Near Eastern and North African literatures have severed themselves from their predecessors. Instead it is precisely the tension between different sets of references in modern Near Eastern and North African literatures, or their “local historical context”, which is a great part of their attraction, that remains a crucial field of research for the modern scholar.
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