9 11 In European Literature

This volume looks at the representation of 9/11 and the resulting wars in European literature. In the face of inner-European divisions the texts under consideration take the terror attacks as a starting point to negotiate European as well as national identity. While the volume shows that these identity formations are frequently based on the construction of two Others—the US nation and a cultural-ethnic idea of Muslim communities—it also analyses examples which undermine such constructions. This much more self-critical strand in European literature unveils the Eurocentrism of a supposedly general humanistic value system through the use of complex aesthetic strategies. These strategies are in itself characteristic of the European reception as the Anglo-Irish, British, Dutch, Flemish, French, German, Italian, and Polish perspectives collected in this volume perceive of the terror attacks through the lens of continental media and semiotic theory.

After the Fall A common refrain heard since the collapse of the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001 is that “everything has changed.” After the Fall presents a timely and provocative examination of the impact and implications of 9/11 and the war on terror on American culture and literature. Author Richard Gray – widely regarded as the leading European scholar in American literature – reveals the widespread belief among novelists, dramatists, and poets – as well as the American public at large – that in the post-9/11 world they are all somehow living “after the fall.” He carefully considers how many writers, faced with what they see as the end of their world, have retreated into the seductive pieties of home, hearth, and family; and how their works are informed by the equally seductive myth of American exceptionalism. As a counterbalance, Gray also discusses in depth the many writings that “get it right” – transnational and genuinely crossbred works that resist the oppositional and simplistic “us and them” / “Christian and Muslim” language that has dominated mainstream commentary. These imaginative works, Gray believes, choose instead to respond to the heterogeneous character of the United States, as well as its necessary positioning in a transnational context. After the Fall offers illuminating insights into the relationships of such issues as nationalism, trauma, culture, and literature during a time of profound crisis.

Pursues the hypothesis that fictional literature has been instrumental in the development and dissemination of European anti-Americanism from the early 1800s to today. Focusing on Britain, France and Germany, it offers analyses of a range of canonical literary works in which resentful hostility towards the United States is a predominant feature.

European Literature from Romanticism to Postmodernism is an anthology of key theoretical writings by the major representatives of the schools and movements of recent European literature. Each chapter is devoted to one particular school of movement from within the broad body of literature, from romanticism, realism and modernism though to the literature of political engagement of the 1920s and 1930s, and the more recent initiative of postmodernism. These texts are approached both on their own terms as individual formulations of the goals and procedures (literary, aesthetic and political) that characterized the work of these writers, and as key documents of the literary school or movement to which these writers belonged.

This provocative and rich volume charts the post-9/11 debates and practice of multiculturalism, pinpointing their political and cultural implications in the United States and Europe.

This collection is the first book-length scholarly study of the pervasiveness and significance of Roxolana in the European imagination. Roxolana, or "Hurrem Sultan," was a sixteenth-century Ukrainian woman who made an unprecedented career from harem slave and concubine to legal wife and advisor of the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent (1520-1566). Her influence on Ottoman affairs generated legends in many a European country. The essays gathered here represent an interdisciplinary survey of her legacy; the contributors view Roxolana as a transnational figure that reflected the shifting European attitudes towards "the Other," and they investigate her image in a wide variety of sources, ranging from early modern historical chronicles, dramas and travel writings, to twentieth-century historical novels and plays. Also included are six European source texts featuring Roxolana, here translated into modern English for the first time. Importantly, this collection examines Roxolana from both Western and Eastern European perspectives; source material is taken from England, Italy, France, Spain, Germany, Turkey, Poland, and Ukraine. The volume is an important contribution to the study of early modern transnationalism, cross-cultural exchange, and notions of identity, the Self, and the Other.

Breaking with linearity – the ruling narrative model in the Jewish-Christian tradition since the ancient world – many 20th-century European writers adopted circular narrative forms. Juan Luis Toribio Vazquez shows this trend was not a unified nor conscious movement, but rather a series of works arising sporadically in different countries at different times, using a variety of circular structures to express similar concerns and ideas about the world. This study also shows how the renewed understanding of narrative form leading to this circular trend was anticipated by Nietzsche's critiques of truth, knowledge, language and metaphysics, and especially by his related discussions of nihilism and the eternal recurrence. Starting with an analysis of the theory and genealogy of linear narrative, the author charts the emergence of Nietzsche's idea of eternal return, before then turning to the history of the circular narrative trend. This history is explored from its inception, in the works of August Strindberg, Gertrude Stein and Azorín; through its development in the interwar years, by writers such as Raymond Queneau and Vladimir Nabokov; to its full flowering in the work of authors James Joyce or Samuel Beckett, among others; and its later employment by post-war writers, including Alain Robbe-Grillet, Italo Calvino and Maurice Blanchot. Through a series of close readings, the book aims to highlight the various ways in which narrative circularity serves to break with an essentially teleological and theological thinking. Finally, Toribio Vazquez concludes by proposing a new typology of non-linear narratives, which builds on the work of recent narratologists.

This incisive entry in the Classical Presences series explores the afterlife and influence of Apuleius' tale of Cupid and Psyche in European literature and art from 1650 to the present.