Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Comparative Literature and the Historical Imaginary: Reading Conrad, Weiss, Sebald

Comparative Literature and the Historical Imaginary: Reading Conrad, Weiss, Sebald

Kaakinen, Kaisa

Paperback

Series: Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature

Literary Criticism

ISBN10: 331984749X
ISBN13: 9783319847498
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: Aug 1 2018
Pages: 261
Weight: 0.74
Height: 0.59 Width: 5.83 Depth: 8.27
Language: English
This book argues that increasingly transnational reading contexts of the twenty-first century place new pressures on fundamental questions about how we read literary fiction. Prompted by the stylistic strategies of three European émigré writers of the twentieth century -- Conrad, Weiss and Sebald -- it demonstrates the need to pose more differentiated questions about specific effects that occur when literary narratives meet a readership with a heterogeneous historical imaginary. In conversation with reception theory, trauma theory and transnational and postcolonial studies, the study shows how historical pressures in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries require comparative literature to address not only implied but also various unimplied reading positions that engage history in displaced yet material ways. This book opens new analytical paths for thinking about literary texts as media of historical imagination and conceiving relations between incommensurable historical events and contexts. Challenging overly global and overly local readings alike, the book presents a sophisticated contribution to discussions on how to reform the discipline of comparative literature in the twenty-first century.

1 different editions

Also available

Also in

Literary Criticism

View All