Romantic Renderings of Selfhood in Classic American Literature

by Anca Peiu



Romantic Renderings of Selfhood in Classic American Literature is the complete form of Anca Peiu’s book on eleven masters of American literature. The previous volume entitled Five Versions of Selfhood in 19th Century American Literature represents the author’s first step toward the accomplishment of her literary studies gathered here.
The new book consists of two sections: the former one titled “Selfhood in/or Poetry,” dealing with five foremost authors who laid the foundations of American poetry; and the second section called “Selfhood in/or Story-Telling,” containing essays on the main works of six emblematic American masters of fiction.
Anca Peiu’s present book is meant for students of philology, in the first place; likewise, for those high-school pupils interested in American culture and its classic writers; and, last but not least, for those readers who are still fond of the American literary canon, and also aware of its undeniable impact upon our own approach of the contemporary world.
In Romania, all the eleven American writers discussed here – E. A. Poe, R. W. Emerson, H. D. Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Kate Chopin – are part of any syllabus bibliography for the study of American literature. Therefore our return today to these American masterpieces of universal literature acquires an enhanced significance.

Literature and Cultural Memory

Ed. Mihaela Irimia, Andreea Paris and Dragoş Manea



Cultural Memory, a subtle and comprehensive process of identity formation, promotion and transmission, is considered as a set of symbolic practices and protocols, with particular emphasis on repositories of memory and the institutionalized forms in which they are embodied. High and low culture as texts embedded in the texture of memory, as well as material culture as a communal receptacle and reservoir of memory are analysed in their historical contingency. Symbolic representations of accepted and counter history/ies, and the cultural nodes and mechanisms of the cultural imaginary are also issues of central interest. Twenty-six contributions tackle these topics from a theoretical and historical perspective and bring to the fore case studies illustrating the interdisciplinary agenda that underlies the volume.

Contributors: Luis Manuel A.V. Bernardo, Lina Bolzoni, Peter Burke, Pia Brinzeu, Adina Ciugureanu, Thomas Docherty, Christoph Ehland, Herbert Grabes, László Gyapay, Donna Landry, Christoph Lehner, Gerald MacLean, Dragoş Manea, Daniel Melo, Mirosława Modrzewska, Rareş Moldovan, C.W.R.D. Mosely, Petruţa Năiduţ, Francesca Orestano, Maria Lúcia G. Pallares-Burke, Andreea Paris, Leonor Santa Bárbara, Hans-Peter Söder, Jukka Tiusanen, Ludmila Volná, Ioana Zirra.

Performance and Performativity in Contemporary Indian Fiction in English

by Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru



This book starts with a consideration of a 1997 issue of the New Yorker that celebrated fifty years of Indian independence, and goes on to explore the development of a pattern of performance and performativity in contemporary Indian fiction in English (Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy and Vikram Chandra). Such fiction, which constructs identity through performative acts, is built around a nomadic understanding of the self and implies an evolution of narrative language towards performativity whereby the text itself becomes nomadic. A comparison with theatrical performance (Peter Brook’s Mahabharata and Girish Karnad’s ‘theatre of roots’) serves to support the argument that in both theatre and fiction the concepts of performance and performativity transform classical Indian mythic poetics. In the mythic symbiosis of performance and storytelling in Indian tradition within a cyclical pattern of estrangement from and return to the motherland and/or its traditions, myth becomes a liberating space of consciousness, where rigid categories and boundaries are transcended.

LOCAL REPRESENTATION AND GLOBAL PERSEPECTIVE IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN LITERARY CULTURE

by Roxana Oltean



The four writers selected here – Frederick Douglas, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Henry James – illustrate in a particularly compelling manner the sometimes contradictory, other times complementary impulse towards, on the one hand, a local American context and, on the other hand, a vision of the global or cosmopolitan settings of identity-forming episodes.

The Graphic Lives of Fathers – Memory, Representation, and Fatherhood in North American Autobiographical Comics

by Precup Mihaela


This book explores the representation of fatherhood in contemporary North American autobiographical comics that depict paternal conduct from the post-war period up to the present. It offers equal space to autobiographical comics penned by daughters who represent their fathers’ complicated and often disappointing behavior, and to works by male cartoonists who depict and usually celebrate their own experiences as fathers. This book asks questions about how the desire to forgive or be forgiven can compromise the authors’ ethics or dictate style, considers the ownership of life stories whose subjects cannot or do not agree to be represented, and investigates the pervasive and complicated effects of dominant masculinities. By close reading these cartoonists’ complex strategies of (self-)representation, this volume also places photography and archival work alongside the problematic legacy of self-deprecation carried on from underground comics, and shows how the vocabulary of graphic narration can work with other media and at the intersection of various genres and modes to produce a valuable scrutiny of contemporary norms of fatherhood.

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