Modernism And The Mediterranean Literature And Politics 1900 1937

When we think about the process of European unification, our conversations inevitably ponder questions of economic cooperation and international politics. Salvatore Pappalardo offers a new and engaging perspective, arguing that the idea of European unity is also the product of a modern literary imagination. This book examines the idea of Europe in the modernist literature of primarily Robert Musil, Italo Svevo, and James Joyce (but also of Theodor Däubler and Srecko Kosovel), all authors who had a deep connection with the port city of Trieste. Writing after World War I, when the contested city joined Italy, these authors resisted the easy nostalgia of the postwar period, radically reimagining the origins of Europe in the Mediterranean culture of the Phoenicians, contrasting a 19th-century nationalist discourse that saw Europe as the heir of a Greek and Roman legacy. These writers saw the Adriatic city, a cosmopolitan bazaar under the Habsburg Empire, as a social laboratory of European integration. Modernism in Trieste seeks to fill a critical gap in the extant scholarship, securing the literary history of Trieste within the context of current research on Habsburg and Austrian literature.

This collection explores Gissing’s place in the narrative of fin-de-siècle literature. Together, chapters here theorise how late-Victorian spatial and generic norms are confronted, explored and performed in Gissing’s works. In addition to presenting new readings of the major novels and introducing readers to lesser-known works, the collection advocates Gissing’s importance as a journalist, short story, and travel writer. It also recognises Gissing as a central proponent in the late-Victorian realism debate. The book, like today’s nineteenth-century studies, is interdisciplinary. It includes familiar interpretive approaches—biographical, historicist, and comparative—together with fresh perspectives informed by ecocriticism, materiality, and cultural performance. In addition, it is markedly comparative in scope. Gissing is read alongside familiar authors like Dickens, Ruskin, and Hardy, but also, and more unusually, Nietzsche, Besant, Freud and Foucault. Collectively, these chapters illustrate that Gissing, though attentive to contemporary issues, is neither uncomplicatedly realist nor are his writings uncomplicated historical records of place.

Engaging with the work of Nobel Prize-winning poet Odysseus Elytis within the framework of international modernism, Marinos Pourgouris places the poet's work in the context of other modernist and surrealist writers in Europe. At the same time, Pourgouris puts forward a redefinition of European Modernism that makes the Mediterranean, and Greece in particular, the discursive contact zone and incorporates neglected elements such as national identity and geography. Beginning with an examination of Greek Modernism, Pourgouris's study places Elytis in conversation with Albert Camus; analyzes the influence of Charles Baudelaire, Gaston Bachelard, and Sigmund Freud on Elytis's theory of analogies; traces the symbol of the sun in Elytis's poetry by way of the philosophies of Heraclitus and Plotinus; examines the influence of Le Corbusier on Elytis's theory of architectural poetics; and takes up the subject of Elytis's application of his theory of Solar Metaphysics to poetic form in the context of works by Freud, C. G. Jung, and Michel Foucault. Informed by extensive research in the United States and Europe, Pourgouris's study makes a compelling contribution to the comparative study of Greek modernism, the Mediterranean, and the work of Odysseus Elytis.

Between the 1890s and 1920s, cities in the vast region stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean were experiencing political, social, economic, and cultural changes that had been set in motion at least since the early nineteenth century. As the age of pre-colonial empires gave way to colonial and national states, there was a sense that a particular liberalism of culture and economy had been irretrievably lost to a more intolerant age. Avoiding such dichotomies as East/West and modernity/tradition, this book provides a comparative analysis of contested versions of the concept of modernity. The book examines not only the "high" culture of scholars and the literati, but also popular music, the visual arts, and journalism. The contributors incorporate discussion of the way in which the business in both commodities and ideas was conducted in the increasingly cosmopolitan cities of the time.

This volume presents and illustrates the development of the ideologies of nation states, the "modern" successors of former empires. They exemplify the use modernist ideological framaeworks, from liberalism to socialism, in the context of the fundamental reconfiguration of the political system in this part of Europe between the 1860s and the 1930s. It also gives a panorama of the various solutions proposed for the national question in the region.