Mao Zedong’s Talks at the Yan’an Conference on Literature and Art stands as a seminal work that profoundly influenced Chinese literary theory. The complex interplay of historical, cultural, and ideological elements in the Talks presents significant challenges for translators. Despite extensive studies on translation strategies for political texts, there remains a research gap...
André Adorján (1883, Szombathely, Hongrie–1966, Eaubonne, France) était un traducteur et journaliste à succès qui, ayant vécu à Paris sans interruption à partir de 1919, était bien intégré dans les cercles intellectuels français. Il est, avec Ladislas Gara, celui qui a le plus contribué à faire découvrir la littérature hongroise en France entre les années 1920 et la fin des...
The present study has as its starting point a theoretical framework contained in the Neohelicon Journal previous numbers, to which recent studies relating literature and space are added, not from a common, geographical perspective, but demonstrating that the evolution of the novel is observed through the narrative analysis of the itinerary and the map. The case studies are taken...
This study explores the influence of the musical principle of polyphony in the novelistic thinking of the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, with a particular focus on the structure of her novel Primeval and Other Times. This principle is manifested in various facets of the novels’ composition, their characters and their themes. In the introductory part of this text, I apply the...
What does literature tell us about the concept of chance? And how is chance relevant to literary theory and comparison? Relating chance to theory is counter-intuitive, because the very attempt to theorise seems to aim at reducing the coincidental and advancing systematic interpretations of literature. But writings about stones tell us otherwise. By highlighting stones’ aesthetic...
Literary texts are already written before they get read, and they are therefore not subject to chance in the same way as encounters in everyday life. However, at the same time, these texts often manage to evoke a strong sense in readers that the events they read about could have turned out otherwise. I propose the notion of the “contingency trap” as a conceptual tool to address...
The notion of chance epitomizes the limits and challenges of any theory’s struggle for control over itself as well as over its objects. Although contemporary literary theory has adapted its terminology and conceptual framework in line with the emergence of dynamic, “open forms” (Wölfflin in Principles of art history: The problem of the development of style in later art, Dover...
Set in Jamaica and London in the 1820s, Sara Collins’ debut novel The confessions of Frannie Langton (2019) is a neo-slave historical novel par excellence. In it, Collins shapes and reshapes several subgenres of historical fiction, such as gothic fiction, historical romance, and historical mystery. Facing a trial based on the accusation of killing her master and mistress, Frannie...
As an almost exclusively female-dominated medium, the popular romance novel has, throughout its history, allowed women writers to “amplify their political voice” (Teo, 2016, p. 102), especially when they could not actively participate in politics. Commonly, writers fashion storylines that reflect and process concerns from the real world in a fictional context. Using the Regency...
The relation between adventure and contingency is an ambivalent one. This ambivalence can be described by using a distinction of two aspects already tied together in âventiure (as a French foreign word in German), distinguished by Jacob Grimm as “begebenheit” versus “erzählte geschichte selbst,” rendered as ‘type of event’ versus ‘narrative pattern’ in the terminology of the...
This contribution aims to analyse the postmemory of the origins through the work of an Italian author of Armenian descent, Antonia Arslan, and stems from an ongoing research project about “Narrating the Trauma in European Literatures and Cultures” based at La Sapienza University of Rome. I will therefore focus on the link between this research project, which serves as a...
The paper “Black Monasteries”: Hungarian and Italian Literature and Popular Writing in the First World War analyzes War literature and the directly related literature about internment camps, both relating to the First World War, which had a different development in Hungary and Italy; however, similar features can be found in them. Regarding these aspects, this essay examines some...
Under Maria Theresa (ruled 1740‒1780), handling books in Austrian and Bohemian lands was largely governed by the Index librorum prohibitorum, which the Catholic Church in Rome started publishing in 1559, and the Catalogus librorum a commissione aulica prohibitorum, which the Court Book Censorship Committee in Vienna published from 1754 onward. Through censorship secularization...
Restoration censorship forced European Romantic literature to retreat from society and politics into subjective intimacy, fantasy, mythology, history, and exotic places. In addition to conforming to restrictions, however, censorship also led writers to evade its control (pseudonyms, publication abroad, allusive style) and, more rarely, to overt or covert rebellion (petitions...
The article looks at censors’ statements from the Venice State Archive and asks whether the parallels between censors speaking on literary texts and the mode of literary criticism can be productively analyzed with the help of these archival materials. The Venetian censorship bureau, established in 1814/15 in the context of the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia and forming part of...