How Strange the Change - Language, Temporality, and Narrative Form in Peripheral Modernisms (Hardcover, New)

In this book, Marc Caplan argues that the literatures of ostensibly marginal modern cultures are key to understanding modernism. Caplan undertakes an unprecedented comparison of nineteenth-century Yiddish literature and twentieth-century Anglophone and Francophone African literature and reveals unexpected similarities between them. These literatures were created under imperial regimes that brought with them processes of modernization that were already well advanced elsewhere. Yiddish and African writers reacted to the liberating potential of modernity and the burdens of imperial authority by choosing similar narrative genres, typically reminiscent of early-modern European literatures: the picaresque, the pseudo-autobiography, satire, and the "Bildungsroman." Both display analogous anxieties toward language, caught as they were between imperial, "global" languages and stigmatized native vernaculars, and between traditions of writing and orality. Through comparative readings of narratives by Reb Nakhman of Breslov, Amos Tutuola, Yisroel Aksenfeld, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Isaac Meyer Dik, Camara Laye, Mendele Moykher-Sforim, Wole Soyinka, Y. Y. Linetski, and Ahmadou Karouma, Caplan demonstrates that these literatures' "belated" relationship to modernization suggests their potential to anticipate subsequent crises in the modernity and post-modernity of metropolitan cultures. This, in turn, leads him to propose a new theoretical model, peripheral modernism, which incorporates both a new understanding of "periphery" and "center" in modernity and a new methodology for comparative literary criticism and theory.

General

Imprint:	Stanford University Press
Country of origin:	United States
Series:	Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture
Release date:	September 2011
First published:	2011
Authors:	Marc Caplan
Dimensions:	229 x 152 x 24mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Hardcover - Cloth / Cloth
Pages:	360
Edition:	New
ISBN-13:	978-0-8047-7476-5
Categories:	Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies > General Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Ethnic studies > Jewish studies Promotions
LSN:	0-8047-7476-5
Barcode:	9780804774765

Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate? Let us know about it.

Does this product have an incorrect or missing image? Send us a new image.

Is this product missing categories? Add more categories.

Review This Product

No reviews yet - be the first to create one!