Taking Stock – Twenty-Five Years of Comparative Literary Research: (200 Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

Read an interview with Norbert Bachleitner. In this 200th volume of Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft the editors Norbert Bachleitner, Achim H. Hölter and John A. McCarthy ‘take stock’ of the discipline. It focuses on recurrent questions in the field of Comparative Literature: What is literature? What is meant by ‘comparative’? Or by ‘world’? What constitute ‘transgressions’ or ‘refractions’? What, ultimately, does being at home in the world imply? When we combine the answers to these individual questions, we might ultimately reach an intriguing proposition: Comparative Literature contributes to a sense of being at home in a world that is heterogeneous and fractured, rather than affirming a monolithic canon marked by territory and homogeneity. The volume unites essays on world literature, literature in the context of the history of ideas, comparative women and gender studies, aesthetics and textual analysis, and literary translation and tradition.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors Introduction Part 1 Comparative and World Literature 1 Comparative Literature: Being at Home in the World  John A. McCarthy 2 An On/Off Affair. Voltaire in Eighteenth-Century Vienna  Norbert Bachleitner 3 Ludwig Tieck’s Book Collection: the Holdings of the Austrian National Library (önb)  Achim Hölter and Paul Ferstl Part 2 Literature and History (of Ideas) 4 Pride and Conviviality – Pride in Conviviality. The Rise and Recognition of a Prospective Force  Ottmar Ette 5 Enlightened Citizenship in Lessing’s Emilia Galotti and Mozart’s Lucio Silla  Carl Niekerk 6 Good Comrades for Young Readers: the First World War in the Fiction of Boys’ Periodicals in Britain and Germany  Barbara Korte 7 Fighting the ‘Freudian Farce’: Vladimir Nabokov’s Portrayal of America’s Post-War Infatuation with Psychoanalysis  Juliane Werner Part 3 Women and Gender Studies 8 Enlightenment Angst: James Parsons’ A Mechanical and Critical Enquiry into the Nature of Hermaphrodites  Stephanie M. Hilger 9 Writing the Nation, Writing the Self: Discourses of Identity in Fanny Lewald’s Italienisches Bilderbuch and George Sand’s Un hiver à Majorque  Sandra Vlasta 10 ‘Jewish Mothers’ by Jenny Erpenbeck, Julia Franck, and Adriana Altaras  Agnes C. Mueller 11 Theorising Central European Postcoloniality: a Postcommunist Reading of 21st Century Literature from Slovakia  Dobrota Pucherová Part 4 Aesthetics and Textual Analysis 12 Aesthetic Illusion and the Breaking of Illusion in Ancient Literature?  Werner Wolf 13 Intermediality in Twentieth Century Animal Poetry. Guillaume Apollinaire – Ted Hughes – Durs Grünbein  Annette Simonis 14 Autofiction and Its (Involuntary) Protagonists: A Comparison of Autofictional Novels by Mario Vargas Llosa, Javier Cercas, Karl Ove Knausgård, and Navid Kermani  Stefan Kutzenberger 15 ‘Sometimes things begin with the wrong book’: Images and Intertexts in Darryl Pinckney’s Black Deutschland  Gianna Zocco Part 5 Translation and Tradition 16 Translation, Transmission, Irony: Benoît de Sainte-Maure and the Trope of the Fictional Source Text in Western Literature before Cervantes  Daniel Syrovy 17 Of ‘Conversion’ and ‘Reversal’: Georg Philipp Harsdörffer and His Adoptions of Jean Pierre Camus in the Context of the Counter-Reformation, Reform Catholicism, and Jansenism  Christoph Schmitt-Maaß 18 The Romes of Titus Andronicus  Manfred Pfister 19 Towards a Global South Literary Genealogy: M. G. Vassanji and Joseph Conrad as Secret Sharers in The Book of Secrets and Heart of Darkness  Russell West-Pavlov Index

About the Author :
Norbert Bachleitner is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Vienna/Austria. His fields of interest include the reception of English and French literature in the German speaking area; literary translation and transfer studies; social history of literature; censorship; literature in periodicals; intertextuality, and digital literature. His most recent book publication is Die literarische Zensur in Österreich von 1751 bis 1848(2017). Achim Hermann Hölter is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Vienna/Austria. His thematic priorities are European Romanticism, the exploration of topics and discourses, the historiography of fine arts and literature, ritualisations around literature, aesthetics metareference, aesthetic completeness, comparative arts, comics, international reception studies, canon studies, libraries in literature, and multilingualism in comparative literature. He co-edited with Rüdiger Zymner: Handbuch Komparatistik. Theorien, Arbeitsfelder, Wissenspraxis (2013). John A. McCarthy is Professor of German & Comparative Literature emeritus at Vanderbilt University. His interests range from the European Enlightenment, to readership studies, the history of Germanics, Romanticism, the relationship of social history, philosophy, science, and law to literature. He recently edited Shakespeare as German Author: Reception, Translation Theory, Cultural Transfer (2018).

Review :
"The volume Taking Stock offers a valuable overview of current trends in comparative literature [...]. Since this book is very broad in scope, nearly any scholar of literature and cultural history will find some topics, approaches, concepts, and references of interest. Given that the collected texts are for the most part, case studies, they can be viewed as heuristic examples as well." -Igor Tyšš, Institute of World Literature SAS, Slovak Republic, in World Literature Studies, Vol. 13 Iss. 2, 2021, pp. 99-101