This book presents a comparative literary study of the works of four writers working in European minority languages - Frisian, Welsh, Scots and Breton. The author examines the different strategies employed by the four writers to create distinctive literary fields for their languages in the interwar era when self-determination had been promised to national minorities, finding that each had to make some degree of a step backwards into the past to enable them to make a leap forward. The book also discusses the problems resulting from this oscillation between traditionalism and modernism, drawing on concepts such as Pascale Casanova's 'littératures combatives' to make sense of these minority languages and communities within the wider European context. This study will be of interest to students and scholars of minority languages - particularly the four explored here - as well as twentieth-century and comparative literature, multilingualism, and language policy.

This monograph investigates questions around new speakers of Breton, their identities, attitudes, and motivations, and how these intersect with linguistic practices. Investigating post-traditional contexts, it uses both quantitative and qualitative approaches to probe stereotypes around the language and speakers encountered in these settings. Focusing on the lexis in a sample of Breton gathered from radio, online, and print media sources, and on interviews carried out with professional users of Breton, this work illustrates the wide range of backgrounds and practices within the contemporary Breton language community and shows how speakers use Breton to position themselves within this diverse setting.

This book focuses on literary multilingualism and specifically on the challenging condition of writing in Trieste, a key European borderland located at the intersection between the Latin, Germanic and Slav civilisations. By focusing on some of the most representative modern writers operating in the area, such as Italo Svevo, Boris Pahor, Claudio Magris and James Joyce, this work offers a wide-ranging discussion of multilingual practices deriving from the different language choices made by these writers. Along with the most common manifest strategies, such as code-switching and hybridisations, Deganutti highlights how Triestine writers found innovative latent practices to engage with multilingualism, such as writing in an analogical way or exploiting internal linguistic stratifications. Moreover, she shows how they provided answers to the several linguistic, cultural and even political challenges they were subjected to, with the result of redefining linguistic boundaries that clearly separate different tongues. This book will be of interest to graduate students, researchers and academics interested in literary multilingualism in the fields of sociolinguistics, borderland studies and comparative literature.

A Companion to Scottish Literature offers fresh readings of major authors and periods of Scottish literary production from the first millennium to the present. Bringing together contributions by many of the world’s leading experts in the field, this comprehensive resource provides the historical background of Scottish literature, highlights new critical approaches, and explores wider cultural and institutional contexts. Dealing with texts in the languages of Scots, English, and Gaelic, the Companion offers modern perspectives on the historical milieux, thematic contexts and canonical writers of Scottish literature. Original essays apply the most up-to-date critical and scholarly analyses to a uniquely wide range of topics, such as Gaelic literature, national and diasporic writing, children’s literature, Scottish drama and theatre, gender and sexuality, and women’s writing. Critical readings examine William Dunbar, Robert Burns, Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, Muriel Spark and Carol Ann Duffy, amongst others. With full references and guidance for further reading, as well as numerous links to online resources, A Companion to Scottish Literature is essential reading for advanced students and scholars of Scottish literature, as well as academic and non-academic readers with an interest in the subject.

Insightful look at the interactions between German and migrant Jewish writers and the creative spectrum of Jewish identity

This Handbook provides a comprehensive overview of Turkish literature within both a local and global context. Across eight thematic sections a collection of subject experts use close readings of literature materials to provide a critical survey of the main issues and topics within the literature. The chapters provide analysis on a wide range of genres and text types, including novels, poetry, religious texts, and drama, with works studied ranging from the fourteenth century right up to the present day. Using such a historic scope allows the volume to be read across cultures and time, while simultaneously contextualizing and investigating how modern Turkish literature interacts with world literature, and finds its place within it. Collectively, the authors challenge the national literary historiography by replacing the Ottoman Turkish literature in the Anatolian civilizations with its plurality of cultures. They also seek to overcome the institutional and theoretical shortcomings within current study of such works, suggesting new approaches and methods for the study of Turkish literature. The Routledge Handbook on Turkish Literature marks a new departure in the reading and studying of Turkish literature. It will be a vital resource for those studying literature, Middle East studies, Turkish and Ottoman history, social sciences, and political science.

A probing reading of leftist Jewish poets who, during the interwar period, drew on the trauma of pogroms to depict the suffering of other marginalized peoples. Between the world wars, a generation of Jewish leftist poets reached out to other embattled peoples of the earth—Palestinian Arabs, African Americans, Spanish Republicans—in Yiddish verse. Songs in Dark Times examines the richly layered meanings of this project, grounded in Jewish collective trauma but embracing a global community of the oppressed. The long 1930s, Amelia M. Glaser proposes, gave rise to a genre of internationalist modernism in which tropes of national collective memory were rewritten as the shared experiences of many national groups. The utopian Jews of Songs in Dark Times effectively globalized the pogroms in a bold and sometimes fraught literary move that asserted continuity with anti-Arab violence and black lynching. As communists and fellow travelers, the writers also sought to integrate particular experiences of suffering into a borderless narrative of class struggle. Glaser resurrects their poems from the pages of forgotten Yiddish communist periodicals, particularly the New York–based Morgn Frayhayt (Morning Freedom) and the Soviet literary journal Royte Velt (Red World). Alongside compelling analysis, Glaser includes her own translations of ten poems previously unavailable in English, including Malka Lee’s “God’s Black Lamb,” Moyshe Nadir’s “Closer,” and Esther Shumiatsher’s “At the Border of China.” These poets dreamed of a moment when “we” could mean “we workers” rather than “we Jews.” Songs in Dark Times takes on the beauty and difficulty of that dream, in the minds of Yiddish writers who sought to heal the world by translating pain.

In 1931, a sexologist arrived in colonial Shanghai to give a public lecture about homosexuality. In the audience was a medical student. The sexologist, Magnus Hirschfeld, fell in love with the medical student, Li Shiu Tong. Li became Hirschfeld’s assistant on a lecture tour around the world. Racism and the Making of Gay Rights shows how Hirschfeld laid the groundwork for modern gay rights, and how he did so by borrowing from a disturbing set of racist, imperial, and eugenic ideas. Following Hirschfeld and Li in their travels through the American, Dutch, and British empires, from Manila to Tel Aviv to having tea with Langston Hughes in New York City, and then into exile in Hitler’s Europe, Laurie Marhoefer provides a vivid portrait of queer lives in the 1930s and of the turbulent, often-forgotten first chapter of gay rights.

The fields of comparative and world literature tend to have a unidirectional, Eurocentric focus, with attention to concepts of “origin” and “arrival.” DisOrientations challenges this viewpoint. Kristin Dickinson employs a unique multilingual archive of German and Turkish translated texts from the early nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century. In this analysis, she reveals the omnidirectional and transtemporal movements of translations, which, she argues, harbor the disorienting potential to reconfigure the relationships of original to translation, past to present, and West to East. Through the work of three key figures—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schrader, and Sabahattin Ali—Dickinson develops a concept of translational orientation as a mode of omnidirectional encounter. She sheds light on translations that are not bound by the terms of economic imperialism, Orientalism, or Westernization, focusing on case studies that work against the basic premises of containment and originality that undergird Orientalism’s system of discursive knowledge production. By linking literary traditions across retroactively applied periodizations, the translations examined in this book act as points of connection that produce new directionalities and open new configurations of a future German-Turkish relationship. Groundbreaking and erudite, DisOrientations examines literary translation as a complex mode of cultural, political, and linguistic orientation. This book will appeal to scholars and students of translation theory, comparative literature, Orientalism, and the history of German-Turkish cultural relations.

In The Populist Persuasion, the distinguished historian Michael Kazin guides readers through the expressions of conflict between powerful elites and "the people" that have run through our civic life, filling it with discord and meaning from the birth of the United States until the present day. Kazin argues persuasively that the power of populism lies in its adaptable nature. Across the political spectrum, commentators paste the label on forces and individuals who really have just one big thing in common: they are effective at blasting "elites" or "the establishment" for harming the interests and betraying the ideals of "the people" in nations that are committed, at least officially, to democratic principles. Kazin’s classic book has influenced debates over populism since its publication. The new preface to this edition brings the story up to date by charting the present resurgence of populist discourse, which was front and center in the 2016 elections and in the Brexit debate.