Author : Kaisa Kaakinen
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 3319518208
Total Pages : 261 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (195 download)
Book Synopsis Comparative Literature and the Historical Imaginary by : Kaisa Kaakinen
Download or read book Comparative Literature and the Historical Imaginary written by Kaisa Kaakinen and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-06-12 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.