Living Streams: Continuity and Change from Rabelais to Joyce
Description
This book examines how a long line of imaginative writers, starting from Rabelais and continuing over Cervantes and Sterne down to such modernists as Proust, Mann, Joyce, and Barth, has reaffirmed the picture of an enduring Western civilization despite repeated crises and transformations. The humanist capacity to recapture a sense of European greatness as exhibited in Antiquity was paralleled by and continued in the guise of newer vernacular works, achievements regarded as vital forms of a shared cultural rebirth. This was amplified most notably in the tradition of the ironic encyclopedic novel which surveyed the state of successive phases of culture. The evolving heritage and revitalization of the arts constituted main subject matters in the series of major self-conscious epochal movements, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Modernism, which Postmodernism reflexively now struggles to supersede.
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Gerald Gillespie, Professor emeritus at Stanford University, has served as President of the International Comparative Literature Association. Among his many book publications is the companion volume Echoland: Readings from Humanism to Postmodernism (Peter Lang, 2006) in the series "New Comparative Poetics".
Content
- Cover
- Table of Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- Part One: The Joys of Vision and Rewards of Retrospection
- Chapter 1: The Dangerous but Joyful Venture of Cultural Rebirth from Rabelais to Joyce
- Chapter 2: Looking Through Windows of Time: Illustrative Moments of Vision in Literature since the Renaissance
- Chapter 3: The World as Music: Variations on a Cosmological Theme
- Chapter 4: Traveling into the Abyss
- Chapter 5: Some Shape Shiftings of the Divine Feminine in Nineteenth Century Literature
- Chapter 6: Peripheral Echoes: "Old" And "New" Worlds as Reciprocal Literary Mirrorings
- Chapter 7: North/South, East/West, and Other Intersections
- Part Two: Hindsighted (Post)Modernism and Polysemous Multiplexity
- Chapter 8: Swallowing the Androgyne and Baptizing Mother
- Chapter 9: "Paradox Lust": The Fortunate Fall According to Joyce
- Chapter 10: Ondts, Gracehopers, and Quarks
- Joyce Never Gets Quit of Faust
- Chapter 11: The Tantric Strain in Western Literature and The Arts Since Romanticism
- Chapter 12: Newer Archaeologies of the Soul: By Way of a Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
