Karen-Margrethe Simonsen

This book is a study of the forensic theatricality of human rights claims in literary texts about slavery in the sixteenth and the nineteenth century in the Spanish Empire. The book centers on the question: how do literary texts use theatrical, multisensorial strategies to denunciate the violence against enslaved people and make a claim for their rights? The Spanish context is particularly interesting because of its early tradition of human rights thinking in the Salamanca School (especially Bartolomé de Las Casas), developed in relation to slavery and colonialism. Taking its point of departure in forensic aesthetics, the book analyzes five forms of non-narrative theatricality: allegorical, carnivalesque, tragicomic, melodramatic and tragic.

Slavery and the Forensic Theatricality of Human Rights in the Spanish Empire

Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen

In a global age where people, goods and cultural products transcend the boundaries of geography and temporality as never before, it is only natural that literary and cultural studies turn their attention to Goethe's nineteenth-century notion of a Weltliteratur. Offering their own Twenty-First Century perspectives - across generations, nationalities and disciplines - the contributors to this anthology explore the idea of world literatue for what it may add of new connections and itineraries to the study of literature and culture today. Covering a vast historical material from witness accounts of the fall of Constantinople to Hari Kunzru's contemporary representations of multicultural London, these essays, by a diverse group of scholars, examine the pioneers of world literature (Juan Andres Morell, Goethe and Hugo Meltzl), and the roles played by translation, migration and literature institutions in the circulation and reception of both national and cosmopolitan literatures. They illustrate how literary analysis can be enriched by attention to the border-crossing itineraries followed by migrants, writers, publishers, translators and texts; thereby yielding new discoveries about writers and artists such as Catullus, Manuel Vicent, Jean-Luc Godard, Dubravka Ugresic, Derek Walcott, Cabral do Nascimento, Thomas Pynchon, Asger Jorn and Louis Paul Boon.

World Literature, World Culture

This volume is a Nordic contribution to research on law and humanities. It treats the legal culture of the Nordic countries through intensive analyses of canonical Nordic artworks. Law and justice have always been important issues in Nordic literature, film and theater from the Icelandic sagas through Ludvig Holberg and Henrik Ibsen to Lars Noréns theatre and Lars von Trier's Dogme films of today. This book strives to answer two fundamental questions: Is there a special Nordic justice? And what does the legal and literary/aesthetic culture of the North mean for the concept of law and justice and for the understanding of the interdisciplinary exchange of law and humanities? The concept of law and literature as a research area was originally developed in countries of common law. This book investigates law and humanities from a different legal tradition, and contributes thus both to the discussion of the general and the comparative studies of law and humanities.

Nordic Perspectives

Law and Justice in Literature, Film and Theater

Mads Rosendahl Thomsen

Marianne Ping Huang

The history of the Novel is a story of perpetual change, so that its identity still remains open to question. The sixteen articles inReinventions of the Novel investigate connections, differences and similarities in the Novel around the world for the past three hundred years. Rather than searching for the essence of the genre, they look for the formal and thematic patterns on which the novel thrives, considering such matters as tradition and modernity, realism, rhetoric and identity, tableau and spatiality, and wondering whether epic and avant-garde are not quite contradictory terms. Close readings combined with historical overviews and theoretical discussions open up new constellations in the history of the novel. Untraditional cross-readings are made between Rabelais and Jens Peter Jacobsen and between Balzac and Nicholson Baker. Transformations of traditional modes of epic, biography and Bildung are traced as far as Georges Perec and Günter Grass, while canonical classics like Proust, Joyce, Richardson and Goethe are read in prosaic, pragmatic and media specific contexts. In the 1920s many people predicted the death of the novel; now more than ever it seems to be the dominant literary form – perhaps because it is the same, yet always different.

Karen-Margrethe Simonsen

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