Crossing boundaries

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Berta Raposo, Walther L. Bernecker (Hrsg./eds

"Hauptgegenstand dieses Sammelbandes ist die Darstellung spanischer Städte und Landschaften, Reisewege und Kulturdenkmäler in der deutschen Reiseliteratur vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart. Einige der Beiträge gehen ausserdem auf Werke der fiktionalen Literatur ein, deren Handlung in Spanien spielt. In seiner Gesamtheit bietet der Band historische ebenso wie literatur- und kulturwissenschaftliche Fragestellungen und Methoden. Im Ergebnis verstehen die Analysen sich als Beitrag zur Erforschung inter- und transkultureller Beziehungen zwischen der deutschsprachigen Welt und Spanien." --

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John Bellairs

Johnny Dixon and Professor Childermass discover a trolley which transports them back to Constantinople in 1453 as the Turks are invading the Byzantine Empire.

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Earl Miner

Travel is one of literature's great metaphors for life; to investigate the properties of travel writing in different cultures affords a particular opportunity for intercultural comparison. In Naming Properties, Earl Miner examines closely four travel accounts: in Japanese, Basho's great Narrow Road through the Provinces, and, as control, the nonliterary account of his friend Sora; in English, Johnson's Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and Boswell's manuscript version, his unbowdlerized Journal. The works were carefully chosen to provide a maximum of literary evidence. The focus of Miner's comparison is on the practical and philosophical implications of naming. Because comparison can reveal parochialism, it puts currently familiar and unexamined Western conceptions in question on such issues as identification (what is a name, what is identity in different cultures?); reference (why name a child or river if they do not exist?); intention (how can we refer without intending to?); and fact and fiction (do names differ in fiction and in fact? What of a factual or historical character in a fiction like the novel? or a legal fiction in daily life?). In addition to examining the travel accounts, Miner considers the philosophical issues of naming in a range of other texts, from the Bible, Plato, Thucydides, Confucius, and earliest Japanese writing to current western philosophers such as Kripke, Donnellan, and Nelson. This book will interest scholars in eighteenth-century English and premodern Japanese literature; comparative literature; Intercultural study; and naming (onomastics).

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Pat Rogers

This is the first full-length analysis of A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724-26), long recognized as a key book for understanding the eighteenth century and as one of Daniel Defoe's most characteristic works. A principle aim of this book is to describe the elements that went into the making of the Tour. A substantial introduction sets out a conceptual framework for the chapters that follow, putting the Tour into the historical context of travel writing and the development of a literature of tourism. This work also reflects the concerns and methods of Defoe's oeuvre as a whole. Other aspects of the Tour's ideology are reviewed, notably its political bearings and its treatment of the South Sea Bubble of 1720, a national disaster that has strong personal overtones for Defoe. Finally, an attempt is made to illuminate the design of the work and the ways in which its formal structure supports Defoe's intellectual attitudes.