Aspects of Irish-language song transmission in Munster, 1700–1850

This chapter looks at aspects of Irish-language song transmission in Munster in the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century. As musical airs were ascribed to written poetry with greater and greater frequency in manuscript sources throughout the eighteenth century, the suggested airs to which this sung poetry circulated will be discussed, and reference made to the oeuvre of the most prominent of the eighteenth-century Munster poets, who often set their poetry to the popular tunes of their day. Aspects of oral and literary transmission of song will be given consideration, before focusing on two important collections of Irish song, taken from the field in the mid-nineteenth century.

Forty years of HIV/AIDS narratives: what’s next?

This essay proposes to look across HIV/AIDS narratives in order to trace a larger relationship between the onset, development, and perceived disappearance of both HIV/AIDS and HIV/AIDS literature - what I dub its literary epidemiology. I aim to trace and compare both the literary transmission and depiction of HIV/AIDS in the major novels of this genre by authors like Hélène Laygues, Michel Simonin, Hervé Guibert, Erik Rémès, Guillaume Dustan, Tristan Garcia, and Camille Genton. Such a study affords a better understanding of the concepts of life, death, and what the future holds for a literature centered on a disease. This approach offers readers a novel perspective on the literary past and future of French HIV/AIDS literature.

ON GILGAMESH AND HOMER: ISHTAR, APHRODITE AND THE MEANING OF A PARALLEL

This article reconsiders the similarities between Aphrodite's ascent to Olympus and Ishtar's ascent to heaven in Iliad Book 5 and the Standard Babylonian Gilgamesh Tablet VI respectively. The widely accepted hypothesis of an Iliadic reception of the Mesopotamian poem is questioned, and the consonance explained as part of a vast stream of tradition encompassing ancient Near Eastern and early Greek narrative poetry. Compositional and conceptual patterns common to the two scenes are first analyzed in a broader early Greek context, and then across further Sumerian, Akkadian, Ugaritic and Hurro-Hittite sources. The shared compositional techniques at work in Mesopotamia and the Eastern Mediterranean can be seen as a function of the largely performative nature of narrative poetry. This contributes to explaining literary transmission within the Near East and onto Greece.

‘O Hebraic People!’

When Chaucer wrote his anti-Judaic Prioress’s Tale, there had been no Jews in England for roughly a century. Nevertheless, the loss of the small but vital twelfth and thirteenth-century Jewish community—and with it Hebrew as a literary language—has implications for Chaucer’s place in a polyglot England. This chapter concerns the Anglo-Hebrew grammarian and poet Berekhiah ha-Nakdan, who composed, among other works, a translation of Adelard of Bath’s Natural Questions and a collection of beast fables, translated from Latin and French sources. The Fox Fables, a Hebrew text from the Angevin cultural moment of the twelfth century, touches on many of the themes of language, literary transmission, and social injustice that later interested Chaucer.

A New Manuscript of Ninĝišzida’s Journey to the Netherworld

The article presents an edition of a new manuscript of the Old Babylonian Sumerian myth Ninĝišzida’s Journey to the Netherworld from the Louvre museum. The article deals with the complex literary transmission of this composition, known in different versions with much variation. The myth, lamentful in tone, and including Emesal vocabulary and litanies, is compared to the corpus of Emesal prayers, especially the laments over Damu. The myth is also examined in light of an Old Babylonian Akkadian myth on Ninĝišzida’s descent to the netherworld.

Object-Books and Exposed Writings: New Textual and Literary Landscapes in Latin America and Spain

ABSTRACT In this essay I explore new ways of literary transmission edited in formats other than the codex in Latin America and Spain. My study also analyzes what Armando Petrucci called exposed writings. Taking as departing point a review of the concept of book, I will scrutinize several object-books to offer an analysis of literary materials edited in non-codex supports. This essay also proposes a clear distinction between book-object and object-book. Since the object-books I analyze convey literary texts, a main aim of my research is to vindicate the inclusion of these new materialities of literature into the field of literary studies, an area that historically has omitted non-codex formats considering them non-serious literature or literary diversions.

Brown and the Novel in the Atlantic World

This chapter situates Charles Brockden Brown’s Gothic and sentimental novels in relation to the broader culture of novelistic miscellany that proliferated before 1820. It considers Brown’s contributions to contemporary narrative theory, his revision of the political economy of sentimentalism and the Gothic, and the historical formalism of episodic and picaresque narratives. It offers an overview of contemporary debates about the moral value of novel reading and considers contemporary calls for a novelistic culture of literary nationalism in terms of a broader, circum-Atlantic system of literary transmission and adaptation. It offers a heuristic account of the social function of the episode or fragment in early American imaginative writings and considers how Brown theorizes his relationship to the generically variable, constitutively elliptical nature of early American literary production more generally.