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The article provides an insight into the conceptualisations of Biedermeier in Slovak literary historiography from the 1930s to the present day. It maps the process of establishment of the term in literary-historical discourse in the first half of the 20th century and points out the role German Literary Studies played in it. The article analyses the transformation of the term adopted from German literary theory in the 1930s and 1940s. In these decades, M. Pišút and A. Mráz applied Biedermeier to the study of Slovak literature. They identified features of this style – alongside the dominant Classicism and the early Romanticism – in several literary works and authorial styles. In the latter half of the 20th century, Biedermeier was researched by S. Šmatlák, V. Marčok, and J. Noge. The article also touches upon typological definition of biedermeier in Slovak poetry and fiction of the 19th century, the relationship of this style with pre-Romantic and Romantic literature, the revitalisation of Biedermeier in the second half of the 19th century, and current research that focuses on Biedermeierian configurations of Realism and looks for its origins in pre-1815 texts.

The article provides an insight into the conceptualisations of Biedermeier in Slovak literary historiography from the 1930s to the present day. It maps the process of establishment of the term in literary-historical discourse in the first half of the 20th century and points out the role German Literary Studies played in it. The article analyses the transformation of the term adopted from German literary theory in the 1930s and 1940s. In these decades, M. Pišút and A. Mráz applied Biedermeier to the study of Slovak literature. They identified features of this style - alongside the dominant Classicism and the early Romanticism - in several literary works and authorial styles. In the latter half of the 20th century, Biedermeier was researched by S. Šmatlák, V. Marčok, and J. Noge. The article also touches upon typological definition of Biedermeier in Slovak poetry and fiction of the 19th century, the relationship of this style with pre-Romantic and Romantic literature, the revitalisation of Biedermeier in the second half of the 19th century, and current research that focuses on Biedermeierian configurations of Realism and looks for its origins in pre-1815 texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay seeks to disrupt temporal distance to consider what an Anzaldúan perspective of Shakespeare contributes to the powerful conversations that premodern critical race studies have engendered. By drawing on what I term the temporal borderlands of Shakespeare—a borderlands rich with varied critical approaches and cultural products from which to consider the boundaries of periodization that demarcate, define, and inform strategies of race making—I offer an intervention that unsettles the critical frameworks that have, for far too long, reinforced the white rage and linguistic violence that sustain Shakespeare's white capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay uses the "Race and Periodization" conference of 2019 as a point of departure to consider the role played by different types of words that contributed to the construction of racial thinking over the centuries. The words to be examined in the main sections include race and one of its synonyms (kin), a proper name (Aryan), and adjectives denoting colors (black and white in Old English). The concluding section circles back the word Anglo-Saxon to compare the trajectory of the semantic development of this word with those of race and Aryan in order to foreground some of the resemblances among these three. In order to place its investigation of race and other English words in a larger, global perspective, this essay begins each section with brief accounts of events that took place in two very different parts of the world: namely, England and Japan. While it is more common to consider the question of race in relation to the Western hemisphere, this essay encourages us to look in the other direction to recognize the global impact of racial thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers medieval and early modern strategies of racialization and periodization through the figure of the hold and the critical lens of empathy. I take as my test case The Squire's Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer that reimagines the medieval Mongol empire. Empathy, the act of feeling into a strange aesthetic object, person, or situation, characterizes the affective similitude interposed between the tale's heroine, Canacee, and the wounded falcon. Canacee's empathic lap is one figuration of the premodern hold that attempts to contain and erase difference. Empathy as an approach to history and cross-racial encounters, however, is deeply problematic. Next, I examine periodization as the historiographic equivalent to racial passing, arguing that classification and recognition do not always align. The empathic scene is often a failed encounter marked by the noncoincidence of subjects or objects. The falcon in Canacee's lap signifies whiteness as racial capital in the guise of European courtliness. I then turn to the reception history of The Squire's Tale , in which readers have constructed a modern, Orientalizing Part 1 vis-à-vis a medieval, de-Orientalizing Part 2. The critical periodizing impulses extend to early modern assessments of Chaucer. Milton's designation of the tale as "half told" is a Foucauldian contre-practice that emblematizes all sorts of modernist and Orientalist efforts at periodizing and racializing texts, bodies, and histories. Finally, I consider the limits of figural approaches to periodization and racialization and advocate the practice of critical implication in place of interpellation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

P eriodization is inherently political and bound up with racial ideas. Following Kathleen Davis's model for the analysis of feudalism and secularism, this essay asks how race governs the politics of time. 1 Understanding the racial logic behind the construction of Italian history in the premodern and modern periods can help us to understand and challenge those categories and logics, thereby destabilizing the ancient/medieval/modern divides. Older concepts of periodization in nineteenth- and twentieth-century historiography divided the ancient world from the Middle Ages, juxtaposing Romans with foreign barbarians as well as with Africans. This essay will first analyze the historiographical category of late antiquity, arguing that the construction of the Lombards, a post-Roman group who ruled much of Italy in the sixth- through eighth- centuries, played a fundamental role in Italian self-definition beginning in the nineteenth century. Finally, this essay examines the use of the concept of Romanitas (Roman-ness or romanità , or the political and cultural values spread by Romans throughout their empire) in modern Italian scholarship and politics to demonstrate that shifts in its conceptualization suggest that the desire to create a white Italian identity was tied to Europe and had devastating effects on those excluded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

T his essay is not one i thought to write when asked to contribute to this issue. My expectation was that I would submit a simple revision of "Coloring the Past, Rewriting Our Future: RaceB4Race" (the keynote lecture from which this paper emerges), only along scholarly lines. Yet, as history has long proven, what people intend and what they actually produce may be very different. I now find myself in a different writing space and less wedded to academic rhetoric. This essay, then, is a thought piece, a forward-facing reflection on the public humanities. It is also autobiographical in certain respects, since I am an academic who once struggled to find a place within the academy but no longer do. Thus, this meditation/mediation has two parts. Part One is retrospective: a look back at my place in an effort to decolonize my professional relationship to the academy and the discipline where my intellectual efforts are housed, the field of early modern English literature and culture (where I once landed not fully by choice). Part Two is a letter to and for Black, Indigenous, Peoples of Color (BIPOC) colleagues and allies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the literary-historical context of the attempts by late Southern Song critics to periodize Tang poetry. It demonstrates that the primary agenda of these critics was to establish High Tang poetry as the sole correct model. The insistence on the supremacy of the High Tang went in tandem with, and formed part of, the rebuke of contemporary poets for choosing Late Tang poetry as the object of emulation. The focal point of contention was whether Late Tang poetry could or should serve as a useful model, at least for some in the initial stage of their poetic training. In this context, periodizations of Tang poetry functioned as an auxiliary to the discourse on choices of models in the late Southern Song. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of IBEROAMERICANA. América Latina - España - Portugal is the property of Vervuert Verlag and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article examines Jorge Luis Borges's ingenious, largely dehistoricized interpretations and imitations of seventeenth-century writers typically called Baroque. It contends that the aesthetic, epistemological, and metaphysical values Borges assigns to works by Cervantes, Góngora, Quevedo, Gracián, Marino, Browne, Pascal, Leibniz, Angelus Silesius, and Spinoza depend largely on his conservative notions of how style and, specifically, metaphor should work. While writers from the historical Baroque often require readers to embrace hermeneutic difficulty, Borges, despite the ingenious difficulty of his own writings, refuses to countenance this stance. This refusal turns also on Borges's distinction between writing he fervently praises as "classic" and writing he ambiguously blames as "baroque." The former serves as the explicit model for his own invention; but the latter implicitly, agonistically, informsmuch of his thinking and writing as well. Borges's unwillingness to distinguish the historical Baroque from a recurring, eternal baroque is understandable, given his philosophy of art and history; however, it ignores how periodization can have the heuristic and conceptual function of finding unity in multiplicity, a unity that includes divergent styles and ideologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When investigating the history of translation of Jane Austen in Spain, I always feel the need to establish historical periods to handle materials, data and trends. From time to time, I also feel the need to redefine those periods, even to use different time frames altogether. However, it is only irregularly that I find academic debates about such an important part of research on translation history. In the present article, I examine the way in which we, Translation Studies scholars, reflect on periods and periodization systems. I build my analysis around three interlinked questions: the type of periods we use, how we use those periodization systems, and why we use those periods and not others. I examine theoretical reflections on translation history, and include practical case studies from four national histories of translation and/or literary translation (China, Finland, Turkey, and Spain). At the end, I emphasize that we, as a discipline and as individual researchers, must debate critically about our periods and periodization systems in order to advance in the study of history of translation with awareness and analytical perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the article author discusses the role of Ralph Cohen, editor of the journal, in periodization of literature. Topics discusses include delivery of "On the Presuppositions of Literary Periods” paper by Cohen in 1970s which buried with a cluster of original papers on literary periods; presentation of the Cohen's hypothesis of a period as a model for the detection and elaboration of other literary norms; and purpose of Cohen’s period papers to explain literary & cultural change.

Eimear McBride’s multi-award-winning debut novel A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (2013) garnered global attention for its invocation of recognisably “modernist” strategies. Yet there remains a conspicuous lack of academic analysis of McBride’s “modernist” project, as well as the wider cultural and political context thereof. Such a contextual approach may run counter to the recent turn in modernist studies away from periodisation, however, in the case of Ireland, it can be revealed that the argument for periodisation - both past and present - holds true. Given the nation’s 2008 economic crash and resultant identity crisis, as well as its complex relationship with Europe and the UK, Ireland now finds itself in the midst of a second “modernist” moment; one to which writers like McBride are directly responding. Yet, despite these diagnoses, this essay will conclude by challenging the default “modernist” vernacular which has come to dominate both critical and industry conversations surrounding McBride and her peers. Ultimately, the gendered implications of these frameworks risk upholding the historical silencing of experimental women writers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay begins by investigating the possibility of a global literary history through the lens of periodization and its challenges for comparatists, starting from World War I. Second, by examining neglected texts from the periphery, it seeks to 'provincialize' the Eurocentric focus of our histories of war literature. To address the complex temporality of this epoch, we must accommodate the multicultural contexts from which these works emerge, as well as the long-term recovery of texts. Belatedness reflects the reemergence of memories from trauma, the discovery of manuscripts, the paucity of translations, and the long silencing of marginalized voices from the periphery. In turn, shifts in critical values and the translation of materials permit us to enlarge and reconstitute a globalized archive, as a few examples demonstrate. Great War texts by Huidobro, Svarnakumari, and Diallo as well as oral laments offer fruitful perspectives from the periphery on that epochal experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How might scholars extrapolate from the material evidence of "used books" to build larger narratives that help us make sense of the past, without reducing it again to grand, progressivist theories? he history of reading, and book history more generally, would beneit from an exploration of frameworks that extend beyond those of linear time and discrete periodization, and media and technology studies might help lead the way. his essay juxtaposes two annotations let in a set of cut- and- paste biblical harmonies made at the religious household of Little Gidding in the 1630s and 1640s. he irst is a seventeenth- century note let by King Charles I; the second is a cut- up booklet made by an anonymous reader in the nineteenth century. Comparing these two moments of reading reveals the urgency of expanding the historical horizons of literary studies and deepening its engagement with theories of time, media, and materiality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the article, the author analyzes the contemporary writing genre about nescient dead (ND) or the dead people who do not know they are already dead. Other topics include the periodization and historicity questions raised by ND on such issues as genre, knowledge, technology, and diaspora, as well as cultural patrimony and some literary examples like "The Sixth Sense,""Ubik," and "White Noise."

This essay interrogates the 'postnation' in contemporary Swahili novel writing by involving a discussion of two other post-isms, namely postrealism and postmodernism. It starts out by arguing for a classification and periodization of post-independence Swahili writing according to three different paradigms of writing, i.e., a realist, a postrealist, and a nascent synthetic paradigm. Subsequently, it takes a look at postmodernism in Swahili novels and discusses whether it is possible to neatly differentiate between postrealism and postmodernism. The core part of the essay scrutinizes postnation writing in Swahili novels by relating it to its supposed predecessor of nation writing and asks whether and how postrealism and postmodernism are linked to postnation writing. It looks into different features of postnation writing and discusses to what extent they influence a novel text on the whole. Against the backdrop of this survey with a few brief case studies and examples, this essay relates the contemporary Swahili novel to Habila's reflections on 'postnationalist' writing and proposes a broader theorization of postnation writing. It ends by deliberating on whether there is a 'Swahili specific' and on further prospects of postnation writing in the Swahili novel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author of the text poses questions why there has never been a historical and literary synthesis regarding Polish camp literature, Lager-themed in particular, as Gulag literature possesses at least protosyntheses. He presents his answers which refer to the significance of Tadeusz Borowski's camp prose, the exceptionality of the Holocaust, and the differences in recording the camp experience domestically and during emigration. What is most important in the article is the indication of the opportunities available today, regardless of the virtually impossible to overcome difficulties, for at least a preliminary synthesis of Polish camp literature to exist. The starting point for that postulate is the application of external criteria: historical-geographical (which camps, when and where?), and historical and literary considering such categories and study perspectives as periodisation, genology, and comparative study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tudor literature, especially texts written between 1530 and 1580, has been understudied by scholars. But Shakespeare was born and came of age in Tudor England, and his work is influenced by the drama and politics of this period. Reading Tudor drama alongside Shakespearean drama helps us better examine the way that various ideas and dramatic techniques developed across the 16th century. Attention to Tudor drama and its relationship to Shakespeare helps us rethink scholarly periodization and the social, religious, and theatrical changes and continuities of the long 16th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the relationship between American poets Melvin B. Tolson and Allen Tate and Tolson's proposal to revise the New Critical practice of classifying works as either propaganda or literature. Topics include the characteristics of New Criticism, periodization practice in literary studies, the writing of African Americans, and the relationship between African American literature and segregtation.

How might one begin to use energy as a critical component of cultural and literary analysis, especially within world-literary studies? Does making a link between a specific energy system and a previously defined literary period, movement or form open up a new way of analysing corresponding literary texts? This article argues that one of the most important reasons for reading energy into literature and, indeed, into the world-literary system is that it can provide us with critical and political resources we might otherwise lack. While we can imagine the modern period as an era shaped in relation to fossil fuels, the outcome of this periodization is different than we might think. Besides offering insights into the shape taken by literary form, what such a periodization also allows us to grapple with are the deep and complex ways in which energy has shaped the capacities, beliefs and practices of capitalist modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The complex, multilayered contact between the Quechuan and Aymaran languages is a central but still poorly understood issue in Andean prehistory. This paper proposes a periodization of that relationship and characterizes some aspects of the languages as they might have existed prior to their first contact. After disentangling the linguistic lineages on the basis of a large corpus of lexical data, the paper makes some observations about the phonology of Pre-Proto-Aymara: first, about aspiration and glottalization; second, about the glottal fricative *h; and third, about the phonotactic structure of lexical roots. The paper also presents lexical reconstructions of Proto-Aymara and Proto-Quechua and proposes provenances for several hundred roots. More than a third of the reconstructed Proto-Aymara lexicon may originate in Proto-Quechua. A method like the one presented here is a prerequisite for testing a hypothesis of genetic relatedness between the two families (and others in the region). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay positions the figure and thought of T.W. Adorno in relation to Mulk Raj Anand, and the latter’s foundational contributions to the modern Indian novel in English. In Adorno’s musical writings, “late style” features as a methodological premise, or an expository mode that removes the work from conventional norms of evaluation (including periodization, biography and context). Late style is directed especially toward canonized works that seem to lack current artistic or social relevance, despite their culturally privileged standing. The essay approaches Adorno and Anand, accordingly: Their affiliations with European modernism and postcolonial realism, respectively, are read in late style, or, as largely obsoleted formations of the previous century. Focussing on Anand’s historical fiction,Across the Black Waters(1936), my essay recuperates the novel’s vision of a single if internally differentiated twentieth-century: By imagining the Great War as world-historical crisis, Anand’s novel stages the spaces of continental Europe and an emergent postcolonial nation, together, as the map of an intertwined yet unequal modernity. Today, the obsolescence of Anand’s world-view features as an apposite image for global forces of commodification, rapid cultural aging, and loss of context. Anand’s style attests less to its origins in colonial realism than to the possibilities of a contemporary aesthetic of disintegration — or what Adorno hails as an enactment of the “loss of content” that now inheres in our very understanding of social reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literary periodization is still a useful practice, but in constant need of revision. As we approach the centenary of Robert Lowell's birth in 2017, a critical reexamination of the contested concept of an 'age of Lowell' is required, both because of its unwarranted, apparently magisterial claim and its untapped potential. This essay recalls the historical circumstances of Irvin Ehrenpreis's coining of that term and its fraught reception history. Three arguments remain significant: Lowell's historical position and his own, strongly historicizing poetry changed the poetic discourse of the 1960s and beyond; Lowell participated in and helped shape the 'identitarian' turn of the 1960s, and Lowell's 1973 volume History marked the conclusion of his age-crafting and personal myth-making project. The essay concludes with a brief look at Lowell's biological age, heretofore rarely considered in Lowell studies. The 'age of Lowell' deserves a fresh interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a historiographical review of the generation that has been identified with many denominations: Posnadaístas, Generación sin Nombre, Frentenacionalistas, Desarraigados, Generación Desencantada, Generación Golpe de dados, Poetas del In-xilio, among others. In the read studies there are many labels but is not clear who are the poets that are part of. Those contradictions demonstrate that the method of generational periodization is not suitable, because classified different writers in only one group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article approaches transnational poetry through the recent engagement of medieval studies with the theoretical frame of postcolonial studies, which raises questions about periodization, contact zones and axes of power. The intersection of postcolonial theory and medievalism has uncovered global interconnections across time and space through a transnational dialectics investigating the contemporaneity of the Middle Ages and modernity. The article traces the transnational affiliations connecting Geoffrey Chaucer's "The Wife of Bath" and the work of two contemporary women poets of the African diaspora, British-born poet of Nigerian origin, Patience Agbabi, and Jamaican Jean 'Binta' Breeze, who have recontextualized the well-known character of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in the space of the metropolitan African diaspora. While Breeze's poem, published in 2000, imagines that "The Wife of Bath speaks in Brixton Market", Agbabi has reworked the Wife's vivid language in the voice of a Nigerian businesswoman in "What do women like bes'?" from her 2014 collection Telling Tales. The article suggests that, by exposing the transnational flows and "crossover" skills already present in Chaucer, Agbabi and Breeze engage in a continuing conversation which contributes to our understanding of both medieval England and contemporary Britain as, in Bill Ashcroft's term, "transnation". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the literary works on late antiquity. Topics discussed include the works of Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius like "Meditations," the works of philosopher Galen in the field of ethics and psychology, and the book "Aristotle's Categories in the Early Roman Empire," by Michael Griffin.

The history of argument theories is, in general, the history of the evolution of the use of structures, procedures and resources. Probably due to that, some unresolved problems such as periodization, conceptualization, descriptor indices, and whether we should talk about one or several theories built upon different contributions along the tradition, still remain. In this paper, we state these problems, propose an extension to one of the classical periodization schemes, and focus primarily on presenting some relevant elements in order to draw a picture of the first of these periods known as "foundational". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on U.S. experimental writing. It examines language used in literature in 1980s, canonical scene and epistemic virtues in literary experimentalism. The author discusses on historicization, periodization and recovery to recount experiment in literature in U.S. and the resistance to state imperialism through language at the cybernetic moment of Cold War.

In her article "Periodization, Comparative Literature, and Italian Modernism" Donata Meneghelli discusses why periodization is one of the most problematic issues in literary studies. Following a discussion of literary history and comparative literature, Meneghelli focuses on the notion of Italian modernism which has recently begun to circulate in literary studies referring to Italian literature of the beginning of the twentieth century. Meneghelli argues that Italian modernism is a paradoxical and contradictory notion which calls into question the relationships between literary history, geography (literary, cultural, political), and comparative literature while at the same time challenging the new framework of world literature(s) and the blending of local/global dichotomies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with montage in the broad sense of the term: it is discussed not as a principle of film editing, but as an aesthetic method based on the contrasting combination of elements; in the case of literary narrative, montage can be defined as a contrasting parataxis. Being understood in that sense, montage became an international "grand style" of the post-WWI epoch. In the Soviet Union this new method had many ideological connotations. It represented history (the historical process as such) as creative and cruel violence. Otherwise, art montage was a method of designing the utopian vision. The following development of montage in Russian culture could be defined as a change of its semantic. It was expelled from the Socialist Realism mainstream (excluding poster graphics), but survived in unofficial art of the 1940s and became postutopian. During the "Thaw" period (the late 1950s to the early 1960s) montage methods could indicate the connection of an author with the Soviet or Western European avant-garde of the 1920s. The reconsideration of those methods followed two different ways: imitation of the "resurrection of revolutionary impulses" or deconstruction of Soviet historical and social imagination - also with the tools of montage. This very intensive dialogue with the aesthetic tradition of the 1920s came to an end at the beginning of the 1970s. The authors of uncensored art and literature in that period polemicized not with the 1920s, but with the 1960s. The "living" translation of the early Soviet montage aesthetics has been settled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the history of romanticism related to literary movement and the scenario of British romanticism in the field of English literature. It mentions that romanticism regarded as a branch of literary study in English literature dominated in the U.S. after World War II where romantic studies proved to be a major factor in enhancement of literature. It reveals the emergence of romanticism in the field of historiography related to periodization.

This essay explores the use of outmoded forms in the Shakespearean history play, examining the reanimation of the morality play and its implications for our thinking about periodization and the temporality of language. Focusing on the play-within-the-play inSir Thomas More, it argues that paying close attention to the uses of theatrical archaism can provide us with a new perspective on Shakespeare and his collaborators' engagement with the past. In doing so, the essay engages with an important strand of recent criticism in the Humanities, which has focused on temporality and, above all, ambiguities and tensions in the ways in which time is conceptualized by artists and theorists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews and discusses two major publications on Greek comedy (J. Rusten, The Birth of Comedy and I. Storey, Fragments of Old Comedy) in the light of recent advances and trends in scholarship. It focuses in particular on periodization of the genre, including an evaluation of the contribution of ancient scholarship; the evidence for variety in Old Comedy; the different perspectives on competition within the genre; and the presentation and implications of the comic body. An assessment is offered of the impact on scholarship of large-scale research projects such as Kassel and Austin's Poetae Comici Graeci and Koster et al.'s Scholia in Aristophanem, as well as the growing material evidence for Greek comedy, its context and reception. Some significant ongoing problems are identified which require further study. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper we aim at presenting the way in which the Iassian linguist G Ivănescu divided the history of the Romanian language, as well as the socialcriteria which lay at the basis of this division. We limit our presentation to the development of the spoken Romanian language, from its origin until the 16th century, and disregard its written version, since the latter, according to the Iassian researcher, is influenced by other factors and it, therefore, needs to be separated from the evolution of the spoken dialects. We also attempt to highlight the causalist perspective that characterises Ivănescu's vision upon the diachronic linguistic phenomenon, that is, the cause-effect relation between various extra-linguistic factors and the evolution of the Romanian language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The essay discusses literary periodization and the influence of time perception, particularly a sense of the present, on reading. The problems of defining historical and literary periods are explored, and the author's assertion that history should be viewed through the lens of subjective experiences of time is examined.

The article discusses the importance of space and periodization in postcolonial literary history. A brief overview of the field of postcolonial literary studies is presented, and the author's assertion that too strong of a focus on time and periodization limits accurate readings of postcolonial literature is explored.

The article discusses the trend of "presentism" in the study of English, Italian, German, French, and Spanish literature, and presents the author's opinion that decreasing emphasis on early modern and Enlightenment literature represents a loss for scholars and prevents full understanding of modern works influenced by earlier ones. The impact of periodization on which literary works are taught is also touched on.

The essay discusses the impact of transnationalism on literary production in early modern England and Spain, with particular focus given to the literary "golden ages" of each nation. The influence of the imperialistic rivalry between the two nations on the literary tradition of each is examined, and its importance to historical and literary periodization is touched on.

The materials collected from /Xam informants in the second half of the nineteenth century by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd have received attention from historians, anthropologists, rock art interpreters, and poets. Generic categories have been imported into /Xam studies in ways that are derivative and critically unreflexive. This article argues that the consequences have been far-reaching for the reading of the texts as well as for the ways that the materials have been positioned ontologically and in relation to history and period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers criticism on the novel "Underworld," by Don Delillo. The author discusses "Underworld" as a postmodern novel and focuses on periodization and politicization in the novel. Specific topics include literary theorist Fredric Jameson's theories on capitalism and utopia in relation to periodization, scholar Phillip Wegner's interpretation of the novel in relation to the 1990s, how the book relates to the politicization of the Cold War and Marxism, and Delillo's novel "White Noise."