Analysis of two medieval documents on the Celtic rite of the threefold death in Hispania, where hitherto it had been not yet noted. The legend of Santa Marina de Aguas Santas, in Orense, Galicia, is associated with a galaico-lusitanian switch-sauna for initiatic rituals of pre-Roman origin, while the story of the son of the King Alcaraz in the Castillian Libro de Buen Amor (14th century) is a new example of Hispanic Celtic literature, derived from the Arthurian cycle of (...) Merlin, originated in Wales and Brittany, but with some Persian influence. (shrink)

In the 1880s and 1890s, the British Isles-Ireland especially-experienced a Celtic Literary Revival. Drawing on both history and religion, this revival focused on aspects of old Celtic spirituality and how their beliefs were intertwined with the natural world around them. While not everyone was sympathetic to this sense of spirituality and nostalgia, the revival did gain traction amongst many authors of the time. Using the works of influential writers like William Butler Yeats and the Rhymers Club, this paper (...) seeks to explore how Celtic spirituality was being rediscovered and interpreted during the late Victorian period. (shrink)

The essays in this collection, many originally presented at a 2008 colloquium on Celtic Cosmology and the Power of Words, aim to examine the worldviews held by the Celtic peoples, particularly the Gaelic (Irish and Scottish) perspectives. Texts and inscriptions, some of them pre-Christian, in Celtic languages and in Celtic Latin provide the sources for the worldviews under study. This area of research is also linked to that of the power of words, which refers to human (...) belief in powerful speech acts. Naming and story-telling processes convey knowledge of the cosmos; this knowledge is connected to the landscape and its roads, rivers, mountains and hills. Cosmology is a description of the order and structure of the world as perceived by human beings, and its study is a study of layers – in the earth, in the language and in the tales. (shrink)

O trabalho estuda as formas de representação do sagrado no romance hispano-americano do século XX e propõe uma reflexão sobre algumas formas de utilização das mitologias e tradições religiosas pela literatura. A presença das narrativas sagradas no texto literário do século XX surge marcada por uma renovada experiência estética, pois não se trata apenas de utilizar ou reutilizar uma temática exótica, mas, sim, perceber um potencial tradutor de verdades universais, imanentes aos textos religiosos ou mitologias ancestrais. O artigo propõe (...) uma reflexão sobre as particularidades da produção literária europeia e hispano-americana, que utilizam os temas sagrados, a fim de perceber as consonâncias e dissonâncias estéticas e históricas. O fenômeno estético denominado “mitologismo”, estudado por E.M. Mielietinski, pode ser entendido como um modus operandi da estruturação do romance que conjuga literatura e relatos sagrados e, neste estudo, fundamenta a discussão sobre a heterogeneidade cultural dos povos hispânicos expressa em suas representações literárias. Palavras-chave : Romance . Mitologias. Religião. Hispano-América.This article studies the forms of representation of the sacred in the Hispanic-American novel of the 20th century and proposes a reflection on some ways of using the mythological and religious traditions by literature. The presence of sacred narratives in the literary texts of the 20th century is marked by a renewed aesthetic experience, once it does not only refer to using or re-using an exotic theme, but perceiving a potential translator of universal truths, immanent to religious texts or mythological ancestors. The present proposal offers a reflection on the peculiarities of European and Hispanic-American productions which make use of sacred themes, meaning to understand the aesthetic and historical consonances and dissonances. The aesthetic phenomenon named “mythologism”, studied by E.M. Mielietinski, can be understood as a modus operandi of the structure of the novel that joins literature and sacred texts and, in this study, serves as a basis for the discussion on the cultural diversity of Hispanic peoples expressed in their literary representations. Keywords: Novel. Mythologies. Religion. Hispanic-America. (shrink)

This chapter explores the philosophical nature of social injustice in contemporary Ireland. By appealing to four key concepts in contemporary political philosophy, this chapter will expose the tension between Ireland’s strong economy, currently growing faster than any other country in the European Union, and the persistent unacceptable levels of poverty and inequality in all aspects of Irish society. There are three parts to the main thesis advanced in this chapter. First, to defend the political philosophy of egalitarianism from prioritarian critics. (...) Secondly, to refute what is known in the literature as the Levelling-Down Objection to egalitarianism, according to which we ought to prefer a state of affairs where everyone is worse off as long as equality is maintained. Third, to suggest that Levelling-Down should not be seen as something objectionable, but merely as a much-needed correction. In the final part of the chapter, two possible solutions to the problem of inequality and social injustice in Ireland will be put forward: the introduction of a maximum income cap and a radical reassessment of Ireland’s historically entrenched assumption of the right to private property as an absolute right. (shrink)

Looking at representations of the Irish landscape in contemporary literature and the arts,this volume discusses the economic, political and environmental issues associated with it, questioning the myths behind Ireland's landscape, from the first Greek descriptions to present day post Celtic-Tiger architecture.

Medieval literature inherited from the Latin pastoral tradition exemplified by Virgil and others the motif of an ideal landscape, a paradise of shepherds. The Arcadia of classical tradition, inhabited by nymphs, satyrs and the heathen gods, became for the medieval mind a garden of love, where Amor held council (as developed by the French allegorists, for example), or a philosophical paradise, where man was recreated and restored. At the same time, medieval historians and theologians found themselves confronted by a different (...) kind of pagan paradise, namely the famous fairy hill of Romano-Celtic origin, which was inhabited not by fictional, but by real creatures such as elves and fairies. The Church Fathers condemned the fairy hill as a demonic illusion and the fairies as diabolical phantasms. This article will demonstrate that the literary description of the fairy hill in Latin tradition was strongly influenced by the idea of bucolic landscape, although it changed its character significantly: what once had been a literary model, now became a metaphysical reality and a concrete alternative to the contemporary world. (shrink)

Early medieval Irish literature presents several types of voyages into the afterworld: echtrai (various adventures into Mag Mell), immrama (sea travels to the enchanted islands of the Ocean), fisi (ecstatic revelations of Christian eschatology), journeys into Saint Patrick’s Purgatory. In this paper, we seek to contrast the fisi and the descents into the cave of Saint Patrick. From a morphological point of view, both have a great deal of topoï in common, which describe the structure of the Christian other world: (...) the waste land of pains, the infernal pit, the ordeal bridge, the land of the blessed, the celestial Kingdom of God, etc. However, between the two genres appear some major differences, such as the order in which these places are visited. The main distinction lies in the fact that the fisi are mainly ecstatic voyages (i.e. psychanodias ), implying a “ raptus animae ”, while the voyages into Saint Patrick’s Purgatory are physical expeditions (i.e. somanodias ), during the actual life of the adventurers. Although many of the common themes of the two genres derive from the medieval Christian tradition (especially the apocryphal apocalypses and visiones ), we argue that the differences may be due to the input of local Irish Celtic heritage. (shrink)

This work considers Valkyries in the medieval Scandinavian mythology and literature and places them in the context of the early history of European religion. Drawing on textual and archaeological sources, a detailed review of Celtic, Etruscan and Graeco-Roman female demons of the battlefield and of death is presented, and their remarkable similarity with the Valkyries analysed against the background of Mediterranean-transalpine cultural contacts.

The image of the Moor in Spanish literature reveals a paradox at the heart of Christian and Castilian hegemony in the period between the conquest of Nasrid Granada in 1492 and the expulsion of the Moriscos by Philip III in 1609.­­ Depictions fall between two extremes. On the “vilifying” side, Moors are hateful dogs, miserly, treacherous, lazy and overreaching. On the “idealizing” side, the men are noble, loyal, heroic, courtly—they even mirror the virtues that Christian knights aspire to—while the women (...) are endowed with singular beauty and discretion.Anti-Muslim diatribes are fairly common and predictable: they are flat and repetitive in their assertion of Old Christian superiority over every aspect of the lives of Muslims or crypto-Muslims. Any sign of cultural otherness is ridiculed; the conquering caste, insecure about its own lofty standards of limpieza de sangre , laughs away whatever trace of old Hispano-Arab splendor might remain in the Morisco. Or, conversely, the uneasy master recasts wretched Moriscos as ominous brethren of the Ottoman Turk.The truly vexed problem, however, consists in determining the meaning of idealized Moors in historiography, ballads, drama, and the novel. Roughly speaking, modern criticism divides into two camps in attempting to explain this curious phenomenon of literary infatuation with a cultural and religious minority subjected to growing popular hostility, Inquisitional hounding, and economic exploitation. I will call one camp “aestheticist” and the other “social.” Israel Burshatin, assistant professor of Spanish at Haverford College, is currently preparing a critical edition of Pedro del Corral’s Crónica sarracina. (shrink)

This remarkable work of scholarship sought to deal with the very roots of European civilisation and thought: the fundamental beliefs about life, mind, body, soul and human destiny which were embodied in the myths, legends and customs of the ancients and later emerged, often unrecognized, in literature, philosophy and science. Professor Onians adduces an extraordinary range of comparative evidence, predominantly from Greece and Rome, but also from Norse, Celtic, Jewish, Indian, Chinese and Christian sources. The volume remains a fascinating (...) compendium of ideas, conjectures and explanations which can continue to stimulate and inform the anthropologist, historian of science and philosophy, and classicist. (shrink)

BL With revised Latin text and English translationBL New historical notes and rewritten Introduction Columba is one of the best-known saints of the early Celtic church; through his foundation of the abbey of Iona he had a far-reaching influence on medieval Christianity. In about 700, a century after his death, the Life of Columba was written by Adomnán, ninth abbot of Iona. It has long been valued as the major primary source on the subject, for the light it throws (...) on early medieval Scotland and Ireland, and as an important work of literature. The 1961 edition of the Life, by Alan and Marjorie Anderson, has long been unavailable. Marjorie Anderson has now revised both the Latin text and the English translation, provided new historical notes, and rewritten the Introduction to take account of recent work in the area. This new edition of a source indispensable for the study of the early medieval church meets a major scholarly need. (shrink)

Research on Old Irish law was from the very beginning related to specific epistemological and political contexts in which Celtic and Indo-European Studies emerged as scientific disciplines at the end of the 19th century. The premise of historical linguistics that the Indo-European languages derived from a common ‘origin’ had far reaching implications for studies on medieval Celtic law tracts. Since linguists had discovered significant parallels between Old Irish and Sanskrit, the legal traditions of Ireland and India were believed (...) to preserve archaic Indo-European continuities as well. Against this background, and in a particular political context, Irish scholars of the 20th century argued for the autonomy and isolation of Old Irish law which was supposed to be unaffected by the Latin and Christian literature of continental Europe. However, later researches departed radically from this national perspective and emphasized the impact of Canon law, hagiography and the Bible on Irish written culture. This article takes up a different perspective by focusing on the persistence of a legal imagery that was by no means essentially Indo-European but still provided conceptual tools for the interpretation and ‘translation’ of texts, as they occur in vernacular adaptations of Latin literature. (shrink)

A perennial influence on the aesthetics of fashion, fostered by Plato and Aristotle, is challenged today by a prevalent social constructionism. The latter embraces an impracticable biodenial as well as an incoherent epistemic relativism, reminiscent of Greek Sophism, whereby truth-claims about good fashion may be both true and false either in the same culture at different times or at the same time in different cultures. But a normative aesthetics of Aristotle and Plato, that affirms an epistemic realism, roots women's fashion (...) in their psychobiological nature. The relation of this nature to their sex proceeds paripassu with an erogeneity proper to women's fashion. The case for this fashion as a mode of art that fulfills the complementary natures of men as well as women is not merely coherent. Beyond the coherence, the case is evidenced by the healthfulness of good art that ranges from its beneficial effects in architecture to medical findings on beautiful music such as Bach, Mozart, Celtic and Indian. (shrink)

While historians have tended to accord the Celts a place of minor significance in comparison to the Romans, The Celts firmly aligns the Celtic peoples as the primary European precedent to the Greco-Roman hegemony, restoring this culture to its true importance in the development of European civilization. An expert in Celtic studies, Markale regards myth as a branch of history, and explores mythological material to reveal the culture that gave rise to it. The alternative historical vision that emerges (...) is both convincing and exciting. - One of the most comprehensive treatments of Celtic civilization ever written. - A cornerstone of Western civilization and the major source of its social, political, and literary values, Celtic civilization occupied the whole of Western Europe for more than a millennium. - Unlike the Middle Eastern forerunners of the Greco-Roman world, Celtic civilization is still alive today. (shrink)

El presente libro no solo realiza un eficiente estudio de la recepción hispánica de la obra estética y crítica croceana, objeto sobre todo de su segunda parte, sino que además examina con perspicacia y erudición la presencia de España, su cultura y literatura, en la obra y en la formación del pensamiento del gran autor napolitano, esto es, a fin de cuentas, el nacimiento del moderno hispanismo italiano. La figura de Benedetto Croce, su obra teórica, es un lugar clave de (...) la cultura italiana contemporánea pero también de la española e hispánica; su singularidad y penetración exigen un estudio de recepción y de comparatística ampliamente orientado, pues no ha sido asumido hasta ahora con la amplitud requerida. Ello es imprescindible para la comprensión de una cultura contemporánea demasiado a menudo sepultada por formalismos y marxismos. Al igual que casos especialísimos como el de Menéndez Pelayo o el de Alfonso Reyes, la inmensidad de la opera omnia croceana, tanto por extensión como por alcance, configura una especie de género literario personal y una suerte de constelación como ideal heurístico. Es parte irrenunciable de una gran tradición hispano-italiana y europea, románica e hispánica que es preciso reconstruir al margen del burdo ideologismo que ha inundado la cultura contemporánea y que en España desgraciadamente ha alcanzado una de sus caras más lamentables. La selección de relaciones individuales entre Croce y autores del mundo hispánico ha sido determinada desde varios criterios, pero manteniendo la primacía, como no podía ser de otro modo, de la relevancia de los relacionados: Unamuno, Ortega, Zambrano, D’Ors, Dámaso Alonso, Amado Alonso, Alfonso Reyes, Korn, Lezama Lima, Antonio Caso…, sin excluir la impronta de las publicaciones periódicas. (shrink)

This translation of Enrique Dussel's “‘Ser-Hispano’: Un Mundo en el ‘Border’ de Muchos Mundos” offers an interpretation of hispanos (Latin Americans and U.S. latinos) as historically, culturally, and geographically located “in-between” many worlds that combine to constitute an identity on the intercultural “border.” To illustrate how hispanos have navigated and continue to navigate their complex history in order to create a polyphonic identity, the essay sketches five historical-cultural “worlds” that come together to form the hispanic “world.”.

A distinguished group of authors reflects on problems currently enlivening the space shared by philosophy and literary theory in a series of chapters that range in scope from Plato to postmodernism.

Journal Name: Semiotica Issue: Ahead of print.

In Culture, Genre, and Literary Vocation, Michael Davitt Bell charts the important and often overlooked connection between literary culture and authors' careers. Bell's influential essays on nineteenth-century American writers—originally written for such landmark projects as The Columbia Literary History of the United States and The Cambridge History of American Literature—are gathered here with a major new essay on Richard Wright. Throughout, Bell revisits issues of genre with an eye toward the unexpected details of authors' lives, and invites us to reconsider (...) the hidden functions that terms such as "romanticism" and "realism" served for authors and their critics. Whether tracing the demands of the market or the expectations of readers, Bell examines the intimate relationship between literary production and culture; each essay closely links the milieu in which American writers worked with the trajectory of their storied careers. (shrink)

Objective Apeiron was founded in 1966 and has developed into one of the oldest and most distinguished journals dedicated to the study of ancient philosophy, ancient science, and, in particular, of problems that concern both fields. Apeiron is committed to publishing high-quality research papers in these areas of ancient Greco-Roman intellectual history; it also welcomes submission of articles dealing with the reception of ancient philosophical and scientific ideas in the later western tradition. The journal appears quarterly. Articles are peer-reviewed on (...) a double-blind basis. Topics ancient philosophy ancient science reception of ancient philosophical and scientific ideas in the later western tradition Article formats Original Articles. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 10.2 (2000) 175-188 [Access article in PDF] Scope Note 38 Bioethics Resources on the Web * Once described as an "enormous used book store with volumes stacked on shelves and tables and overflowing onto the floor" (Pool, Robert. 1994. Turning an Info-Glut into a Library. Science 266 (7 October): 20-22, p. 20), Internet resources now receive numerous levels of organization, from basic directory listings (...) to elaborate "links" (cross-references to other Internet documents) that flash and glow in the dark. In many ways, the Internet functions as a direct extension of the traditional library. Following linked references across various sites is an electronic version of browsing library stacks, and the serendipitous discoveries made while "surfing the Net" recall the wonders of physically going "book-to-book." Although many of the Internet's best aspects augment library strengths by eliminating physical distance from sources, Net resources pose unique problems for researchers. It is not always clear who is responsible for the content of Web documents, when the document was produced, or how often (if ever) it is updated. Internet resource tools, then, must enable researchers to identify appropriate resources and to evaluate what they find when they get there. Web Research as Taking "Snapshots" Given the Internet's visual nature and fluid content, the process of conducting research on the Web has been likened to taking an informal picture of information on a specific date at a particular time. This metaphor also conveys the "zoom-in" aspect of searching through Web pages by going from general to specific categories. In the first section of this Scope Note, National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature (NRCBL) staff present a snapshot of bioethics resources taken during the spring months of 2000. Entries are divided into the categories of directories, electronic journals, full-text documents, news/current awareness, and teaching resources. In the two subsequent sections, this series of categories is repeated for entries on a specific topic within bioethics-genetics-and again for general search and evaluation tools. Where a Web site may contain pages applicable [End Page 175] to more than one category, multiple entries are made for that site with appropriate information for each category.Much as telecommunication advances have strengthened the relationship of patients and providers as partners, the dynamic nature of the Internet acknowledges that the researcher functions as a librarian whenever accessing the Web. It is our hope that BIOETHICSLINE and the other NRCBL databases not only will enable researchers to search the Web more efficiently, but also will help them to evaluate what they find when they get there. Bioethicsline on the Web: An International Plan in Progress Once only available through libraries, the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), the funding agency for the ongoing development of the BIOETHICS LINE® database from the Kennedy Institute, has provided free Web access to that database of 63,000 citations since September 1998 through Internet Grateful Med. Plans are now underway to eliminate such specialty databases and incorporate all citations into PubMed (for journal articles) or LOCATORplus (for book-like materials and chapters in books). Both of these databases are likewise available at no cost on the Web. In the transition to PubMed and LOCATORplus some features of BIOETHICSLINE that presently are available may be lost. Researchers are encouraged to contact the National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature with search requests or for search strategy assistance with either the current or the future system ([email protected]).The inclusion of bioethics citations in PubMed and LOCATORplus will have several advantages. First, unique keywords from the Bioethics Thesaurus will be considered for inclusion in Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), the indexing vocabulary for PubMed and LOCATORplus, thereby enhancing retrieval of relevant clinical literature by offering more precise terminology covering ethical issues. Second, it will be easier to identify foreign-language materials, which are not currently included in the scope of BIOETHICSLINE. Third, the updating schedule will become more frequent. On the other hand, there may be some loss of searching precision because certain specialized features... (shrink)

This book analyses the use of the crucial concept of 'taste' in the works of five major seventeenth-century French authors, Méré, Saint Evremond, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère and Boileau. It combines close readings of important texts with a thoroughgoing political analysis of seventeenth-century French society in terms of class and gender. Dr Moriarty shows that far from being timeless and universal, the term 'taste' is culture-specific, shifting according to the needs of a writer and his social group. The notion of (...) 'taste' not only helped to shape a new dominant culture, but also registered the conflicts within that culture between a view of taste that presupposted the values of 'polite society' as an exclusive (though not necessarily aristocratic) group, and a view that stressed the value of the classical-humanist tradition as a source of standards ratified by a broader public. this study sheds light not only on the central concept, but also on the individual authors discussed and on the norms of French classical literature in general. (shrink)

This book examines the complex and varied ways in which fictions relate to the real world, and offers a precise account of how imaginative works of literature can use fictional content to explore matters of universal human interest. While rejecting the traditional view that literature is important for the truths that it imparts, the authors also reject attempts to cut literature off altogether from real human concerns. Their detailed account of fictionality, mimesis, and cognitive value, founded on the methods of (...) analytical philosophy, restores to literature its distinctive status among cultural practices. The authors also explore metaphysical and skeptical views, prevalent in modern thought, according to which the world itself is a kind of fiction, and truth no more than a social construct. They identify different conceptions of fiction in science, logic, epistemology, and make-believe, and thereby challenge the idea that discourse per se is fictional and that different modes of discourse are at root indistinguishable. They offer rigorous analyses of the roles of narrative, imagination, metaphor, and "making" in human thought processes. Both in their methods and in their conclusions, Lamarque and Olsen aim to restore rigor and clarity to debates about the values of literature, and to provide new, philosophically sound foundations for a genuine change of direction in literary theorizing. (shrink)

This article reconstructs the forgotten friendship between Georges Bataille and the Russian émigré poet and philosopher Boris Poplavsky. Comparing their solar metaphysics, I focus on conceptions of friendship, sacrifice and depersonalisation. First, I retrace Bataille’s relationship to early Surrealis and Russian circles in interwar Paris, with a focus on his friendship with Irina Odoevtseva. I then offer a novel reading of Poplavsky’s poetry through the lens of Bataille’s philosophy, analysing a recurring motif that I call ‘dark solarity’. Uncovering a hidden (...) intertextual dialogue between Poplavsky and Bataille, I argue for Poplavsky’s lasting impact on Bataille’s anti-Icarian sun cult. Finally, my paper demonstrates how Poplavsky’s writings on solar sacrifice, excess and friendship left marks on Bataille’s vision of a solar community, embodied in the secret society Acéphale. The dialogue between Poplavsky and Bataille, I finally suggest, is a missing piece in the entangled history of Russian and French philosophy, as well as an original contribution to discourses on friendship in twentieth-century continental thought. (shrink)

El nombre de Lajos Kassák, el representante más importante del vanguardismo húngaro, no es muy conocido entre el público hispanohablante debido sobre todo a que sus obras literarias, por falta de traducciones, no llegaron a los lectores españoles e hispanoamericanos. Sin embargo, tanto en la obra propia de Kassák como en las revistas fundadas por él muchas veces aparecen diferentes temas hispanos. El presente artículo examina los temas y personalidades españoles e hispanoamericanos que recibieron atención y publicidad en las cinco (...) revistas −A Tett, Ma, Munka, Dokumentum y Kortárs− fundadas por Lajos Kassák. (shrink)

In the deep joint work Deleuze-Guattari there is the demand of consider it as a political theory of literature, a literary politics. The following paragraphs, to some extent respond to that demand, enroll the Deleuze-Guattari micropolitics in a concatenation between the revolutionary and artistic machines, in this case, literary. Considering this conjecture, in this article we propose to address the relationships between the concept of minor literature, the spatial dynamics and the informative order.

Introduction -- Creation and the other -- Originality and invention -- Inventive language and the literary event -- Singularity -- Reading and responding -- Performance -- Form, meaning, context -- Responsibility and ethics -- An everyday impossibility.

This work, in continuity with the article published by Ferdinando Casolaro and Giovanna Della Vecchia in Vol 5, 2017 of this series, in which we noted that in the centuries since the eight century B.C. at the 13th century A.D. the evolution of Astronomy and historical events have influenced the development of Mathematics, intends to demonstrate how the Architecture and Literature of the following centuries have further conditioned the development of the sciences in Italy and, in particular, of Mathematics, identifying (...) the affinities and, in some cases, the coincidences between the different forms of thought that invite us to make a serious reflection on the uniqueness of culture. (shrink)

Celtic spirituality has a long and distinguished ancestry with its origins in pre-Christian times. It was inculturated among peoples in the far west of Europe, particularly in Ireland, Scotland and the north and south-west of England. It was different from Roman Christianity in distinct ways until the mid-7th century CE when Roman Christianity became the norm in Britain and Ireland. This spirituality has endured throughout the centuries and has experienced a revival from the latter half of the 20th century. (...) From its inception, it has been closely linked to the environment. Over the years many key aspects of Celtic spirituality have been integrated in many religious traditions and shows similarities with and can contribute to a new ethical perspective on environmental issues. This article investigates the current environmental crisis from a faith perspective and attempts to draw lessons from Celtic traditions of spirituality in a scientific age. (shrink)

"Kevin Hart and Geoffrey H. Hartman bring together essays by prominent scholars from a range of disciplines to focus on Blanchot's diverse concerns: literature, art, community, politics, ethics, spirituality, and the Holocaust."--Jacket.

Bloom leads readers through the labyrinthine paths which link the writers and critics who have informed and inspired him for so many years.

This essay argues that the ‘thought figure’ of world literature has been under incalculable strain from its inception, given the diversity of linguistic and cultural contexts within which it must be understood. After a brief introductory discussion of Rabindranath Tagore’s talk on world literature (1907), the essay goes on to connect world literature debates with those in global modernism, especially modernism in the colony. Looking at the networks of modernism, and the role of little magazines in India, particularly Bengal, in (...) creating a sense of world literature through reviews and translations, it stresses the importance of location, language, and perspective in the wake of decolonization. However, in the present time of ecological and planetary crisis, with a global upsurge of xenophobia, insularity, and ethnic, racist, or communal violence, the notion of a world, or of a world literature, is hard to sustain. (shrink)