Comparative Criticism

This volume, first published in 1996, addresses literary theory and criticism, comparative studies in terms of theme, genre movement and influence, and interdisciplinary perspectives. Geoffrey Hartman, one of the major comparatists of this period, whose subtle phenomenological readings have transformed Romantic studies in English, gives a lapidary account of those poets of the Holocaust Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs, whose refusal of traditional imagery is a last fragile link with it. The twentieth anniversary of the founding of the British Comparative Literature Association in 1975 at Norwich is also marked, with the publication of the plenary papers from the Seventh Triennial Congress held in Edinburgh in 1995. Anne Barton opens on the strange 'Wild Man' figure who haunts the literary and iconographical spaces of Europe, with notable examples in Shakespeare's Caliban and Timon; John Dixon Hunt counters with the civilized garden that is staked out and continuously retheorized in the midst of the forest wilderness.