Gerald Gillespie

Raymond Adolph Prier

This volume focuses on the flourishing of irony as a primary characteristic of the great era of European narrative sophistication from the Goethezeit to Modernism. Its eighteenth essays explore varieties of ironic consciousness associated with texts especially of northern Europe, and the ways they established a dialogue with and on literature and culture at large. As the volume shows, this interrogation of Europe's self-awareness of cultural identity bound up in reading and writing habits gained a new post-Cervantine complexity in Romanticism and has been of lasting significance for literary theory down to postmodernism. By its comparativistic framing of the issues raised by ironic consciousness, Narrative Ironies duly serves as a Festschrift honoring Lilian R. Furst. Among major writers treated are Sterne, Goethe, Godwin, Schlegel, Hoffmann, Poe, Stendhal, Kierkegaard, Disraeli, Keller, Maupassant, Zola, Huysmans, Wilde, Tolstoi, Hofmannsthal, Strindberg, Proust, Mann, Musil, Kafka, Joyce, Faulkner, and Szczypiorski.

Narrative Ironies

In their readings of texts, the authors address the topics of theory, narrative, aesthetics, the idea of the text, and of specific moments in cultural history. The chapters cover a range of authors: Plato, Ovid, Dante, Petrarch, Chariteo, Ariosto, Tasso, Cervantes, Kleist, Gode, Edith Wharton, Pirandello, Kafka, Sartre, Saint-John Perse, Paz, Roubaud, Sanguineti, and Tomlinson. They also deal with philosophers: Peirce, Nietzsche, Saussure, Husserl, Marc Bloch, Lucien Febvre, Heidegger, Jakobson, Sartre, Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Lyotard, and Deleuze. The book opens up our relationships to the past and the usefulness or otherwise of the metaphors we use in our attempt to understand and participate in it. Although Countercurrents deals diversely with literary periods, authors, and critics, it speaks within the civilized and civilizing universe of our language and the texts we create. Running beneath the antihumanistic flotilla that skims the surface of texts for theory, the authors plumb for treasures from the ocean's floor.

On the Primacy of Texts in Literary Criticism

Countercurrents

In their readings of texts, the authors address the topics of theory, narrative, aesthetics, the idea of the text, and of specific moments in cultural history. The chapters cover a range of authors: Plato, Ovid, Dante, Petrarch, Chariteo, Ariosto, Tasso, Cervantes, Kleist, Gode, Edith Wharton, Pirandello, Kafka, Sartre, Saint-John Perse, Paz, Roubaud, Sanguineti, and Tomlinson. They also deal with philosophers: Peirce, Nietzsche, Saussure, Husserl, Marc Bloch, Lucien Febvre, Heidegger, Jakobson, Sartre, Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Lyotard, and Deleuze. The book opens up our relationships to the past and the usefulness or otherwise of the metaphors we use in our attempt to understand and participate in it. Although Countercurrents deals diversely with literary periods, authors, and critics, it speaks within the civilized and civilizing universe of our language and the texts we create. Running beneath the antihumanistic flotilla that skims the surface of texts for theory, the authors plumb for treasures from the oceans floor.

Raymond Adolph Prier

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