Table of Contents Introduction: "Reading the Past Across Space and Time: Receptions and World Literature"

Brenda Deen Schildgen and Ralph Hexter

Epic Receptions

Chapter 1 "Epic Worlds"

Ralph Hexter

Chapter 2 "Recycling the Epic: Gilgamesh on Three Continents"

Wai Chee Dimock

Chapter 3 "Wheels Working Together: The Popol Wuj and Time Commences in Xibalba as Markers of a Maya Cosmovision"

Arturo Arias

Chapter 4 "Reception Configurations: The case of European Epic in India"

Brenda Deen Schildgen

Chapter 5 "Formal Experiments in Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad"

Zina Giannopoulou

Greek Philosophical Receptions

Chapter 6 "Disagreement and Reception: Peripatetics Responding to the Stoic Challenge"

Jan Szaif<

Chapter 7 " 'Now we must consider that some of the ancients discovered the truth'": Reception and Antiquity in Ancient Neoplatonism" Michael Griffin

Chapter 8 "Reading and Commenting on Aristotle's Rhetoric in Arabic"

Uwe Vagelpohl

Drama and Receptions

Chapter 9 "A Third Antike: Hans Henny Jahnn's Medea and the Introduction of the 'Sumerian' to Modern German Literature"

Adam Siegel

Chapter 10 "American Bushido: A Kabuki Play Transplanted"

Robert Borgen

Chapter 11 "Tamil Translation, French Orientalism, and Indian Dramatic Traditions in Louis Jacolliot's La Devadassi (1868)"

Kristen Bergman Waha

Lyric Receptions Chapter 12 "Goethe's Chinesisch-deutsche Jahres- und Tageszeiten: Vernacular Universal, Erotica Sinica, and the Temporality of Nachtraglichkeit" Chunjie Zhang

Chapter 13 "The Mediterranean Metaphor"

Kevin Batton

Chapter 14 "Inventing China: The American Tradition of Translating Chinese Poetry"

Michelle Yeh

Politics and Sociology of Reception

Chapter 15 "Meaning, Reception, and the Use of the Classics: Theoretical Considerations in the Chinese Context"

Zhang Longxi

Chapter 16 "The Sociology of Reception"

Gisele Sapiro

Bibliography
Index

Promotional Information

"If 'literariness' and 'the autonomy of the aesthetic' ever meant anything, it cannot have been a purely abstract difference from all material pressures or circumstances. This collection shows literariness arising from specific instances of context-breaking and cultural grafting, and suggests a new field of study, 'receptions' defined as the total of such acts. Non-reductive, polyglot, historically deep, and argumentatively pointed, it restores the 'effective history' of circulation and reception." (Haun Saussy, University Professor, University of Chicago, USA) "Reading the Past Across Space and Time: Receptions and World Literature breaks new ground in its sophisticated examination of literary circulation across a wide range of linguistic, geographic, national, and cultural domains. The case studies will prove valuable for all readers with interests in reception and world literature." (Kenneth Haynes, Professor of Comparative Literature and Classics, Brown University, USA)

About the Author

Brenda Deen Schildgen is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Davis, USA. The author of more than fifty articles focused on Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, as well as Chaucer, Augustine, and biblical hermeneutics, her most recent books include Divine Providence, A History: Bible, Virgil, Orosius, Augustine, and Dante; Heritage or Heresy: Destruction and Preservation of Art and Architecture in Europe; and Other Renaissances: A New Approach to World Literature.

Ralph Hexter is Distinguished Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of Caliornia, Davis, USA, where he also serves as Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor. He has published on Homer's Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid, the reception of Ovid, and the intersections of the history of scholarship and sexuality.