Food Culture and Literary Imagination in Early Modern Italy

As the long sixteenth century came to a close, new positive ideas of gusto/taste opened a rich counter vision of food and taste where material practice, sensory perceptions and imagination contended with traditional social values, morality, and dietetic/medical discourse. Exploring the complex and evocative ways the early modern Italian culture of food was imagined in the literature of the time, Food Culture and the Literary Imagination in Early Modern Italy reveals that while a moral and disciplinary vision tried to control the discourse on food and eating in medical and dietetic treatises of the sixteenth century and prescriptive literature, a wide range of literary works contributed to a revolution in eating and taste. In the process long held visions of food and eating, as related to social order and hierarchy, medicine, sexuality and gender, religion and morality, pleasure and the senses, were questioned, tested and overturned, and eating and its pleasures would never be the same.

Sympathy for Oswald Mosley: Politics of Reading and Historical Resemblance in the Moral Imagination of an English Literary Society

The mid-twentieth-century English novelist, Henry Williamson, wrote nature stories but also romantic and historical fiction, including a fifteen-volume saga that contains a largely favorable characterization of Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists. This essay considers the challenge of such a fascist character through the prism of the literary imagination of Williamson readers, and more specifically through my longstanding ethnographic work with an English literary society constituted in the author’s name. I am centrally concerned with how literary society members deal with the positive depiction of the Mosley-based character through the stages of the reading process that they identify and describe. Do the immersive values commonly attached to their solitary reading culture, for instance, assist or further problematize that engagement? What role does their subsequent, shared practice of character evaluation play? As well as considering the treatment of characters as objects of sympathy, I explore the vital sympathies that for literary society members tie characters together with historical persons. Across the essay I dialogue with anthropological literature on exemplars, historical commentaries on the fascist cult of leadership, and finally with the philosophical claims that Nussbaum makes for the moral and political consequences of fiction reading.

Ekspresja i empatia. Tauromachia okiem Reymonta ("Los toros")

Reymont wrote the short story, 'Los toros', in the year 1907 after coming back from Spain, where he witnessed a corrida in San Sebastián. The choice of the genre was intentional. The writer used it to reflect the realities of life and depict a group portrait of Spaniards, in which he succeeded without a doubt, using all with his literary imagination and ability to make his works metaphoric. Baffled by the corrida as an element of Spanish culture, Reymont did not express his moral approval of torturing animals (bulls and horses) on stage. On the contrary, his narration is full of sympathy and expressions that indicate emotional engagement. The turning point, the act of pardon performed by the young shepherd and the narrator’s friend towards the bull, indicates that Reymont’s reception of the corrida was empathic. Now, we had two conclusions on the contesting of the phenomenon. Reymont’s work was used by the French Chamber of Deputies as a literary example of disapproval of bloody spectacles that are justified by tradition.

Born from pain and fire: mystical symbolism and the search for cronopia in the poetry of Izara Batres Cuevas

zara Batres Cuevas has published four collections of poetry, a study on the poetics of Julio Cortázar, and works of prose. She has won two international awards for her poetry. Her work is based on the notion of the «cronopia», or the place in which the «cronopios», the altruistic and artistic beings of Cortázar’s literary imagination, may thrive and create a new world.

Dissolution identitaire dans Sérotonine de Michel Houellebecq

"Sérotonine, Michel Houellebecq’s latest novel, can be read as the account of a case of identity dissolution, at both an individual and a collective level, the two levels intersecting each other. The author proposes the reader a chaotic trajectory through the despondency-ridden universe of the narrating character, who travels across a given geographic, cultural, social, professional space representative of today’s France, in keeping with the free will of a whimsical memory and a type of writing that follows a continual chronological and emotional disruption. Our analytic approach lies at the crossroads of self hermeneutics and group psychology, while intending to show how the field of literary imagination and imagery capitalizes on the present-day world’s insecurity identity-wise."

Interpretation of History in the Contemporary Lithuanian Essayistics

The article discusses the peculiarities of the representation of history in Sigitas Parulskis’s essay collection Eternity does not move me (2018). The essay as genre in this book unites subjectivity, critical and ironic mode of narration and the conventional categories of historiographical analysis (the state, religion, society, collective identity, culture). Explanation on the ambivalent sense and relationship between literary imagination and historical facticity is done to prove the New Historicism slogan “the historicity of texts and the textuality of history”.