By Susan Crane (NHC Fellow, 1999–00) Medieval courtiers defined themselves in ceremonies and rituals. Tournaments, Maying, interludes, charivaris, and masking invited the English and French nobility to assert their identities in gesture and costume as well as in speech. These events presumed that performance makes a self, in contrast to the modern belief that identity … Continued
By Aileen Ward (NHC Fellow, 1986–87)
By Carla Nappi (NHC Fellow, 2012–13) The history of China, as any history, is a story of and in translation. Translating Early Modern China: Illegible Cities tells the story of translation in China to and from non-European languages and Latin between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries, and primarily in the Ming and Qing dynasties. Each … Continued
By Mary A. Favret (NHC Fellow, 2004–05) What does it mean to live during wartime away from the battle zone? What is it like for citizens to go about daily routines while their country sends soldiers to kill and be killed across the globe? Timely and thought-provoking, War at a Distance considers how those left on the … Continued
By Lilian R. Furst (NHC Fellow, 1988–89)
By Su Fang Ng (NHC Fellow, 2007–08) No figure has had a more global impact than Alexander the Great, whose legends have encircled the globe and been translated into a dizzying multitude of languages, from Indo-European and Semitic to Turkic and Austronesian. Alexander the Great from Britain to Southeast Asia examines parallel traditions of the Alexander Romance in Britain … Continued
By M. C. Bradbrook (NHC Fellow, 1978–79; 1980–81) This final great volume of Professor Bradbrook's essays offers a fascinating juxtaposition of the drama of the English Renaissance with the New Irish Drama on this century. Analyzing the way in which the drama itself was to become the point of growth verbally, she then shows how, … Continued
By Rebecca L. Walkowitz (NHC Fellow, 2010–11) As a growing number of contemporary novelists write for publication in multiple languages, the genre's form and aims are shifting. Born-translated novels include passages that appear to be written in different tongues, narrators who speak to foreign audiences, and other visual and formal techniques that treat translation as … Continued
By Gaurav Desai (NHC Fellow, 2001–02; 2009–10) Reading the life narratives and literary texts of South Asians writing in and about East Africa, Gaurav Desai builds a surprising, alternative history of Africa's experience with slavery, migration, colonialism, nationalism, and globalization. Consulting Afrasian texts that are literary and nonfictional, political and private, he broadens the scope … Continued
By Linda S. Kauffman (NHC Fellow, 1983–84) Kauffman looks at a neglected genre–the love letter written by literary heroines. Tracing the development of the genre from Ovid to the twentieth-century novel, she explores the important implications of these amatory discourses for an understanding of fictive representation in general.