1: Introduction
Part 1: Antiquity
2: The Old World Literary System
3: Empire and Its Discontents in Classical Latin
Part 2: The Vernacular: From the Middle Ages to Early Modernity
4: The Vernacular
5: Medieval Epic
6: Medieval Lyric
7: Medieval Narrative after 1100
8: Language, Literature, and Popular Culture in the Age of the
Reformation
Part 3: Early Modernity
9: The Representation of Empire in the Renaissance, 1: Europe and
the Mediterranean
10: The Representation of Empire in the Renaissance, 2: Global
Perspectives
11: Eurasian Literature through the Eighteenth Century
Part 4: Modernity
12: Nineteenth-century Poetry: Romanticism and After
13: Nineteenth-Century Fiction
14: Jewishness and Modernist Fiction
15: World Literature and Contemporary Fiction
16: Conclusion
Bibliography
Walter Cohen is Professor of English at the University of Michigan,
Ann Arbor, after having taught from 1980 to 2014 in Comparative
Literature at Cornell University, where he received a distinguished
teaching award and held various college and university
administrative posts for two decades. He is the author of Drama of
a Nation: Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain, and of
numerous articles on Renaissance literature, literary criticism,
the
history of the novel, and world literature. He is also one of the
editors of The Norton Shakespeare.
It is hard to do more than confirm in new ways the duly earned
praises that others have already heaped upon Cohen's book ... it is
the way Cohen integrates Slavic literature into his general model
of borrowing, invention, and globalization that makes it
particularly valuable to Slavicists.
*Russell E. Martin, Canadian-American Slavic Studies*
Cohen, with extraordinary erudition, places European literature
from the Romans onwards alongside extra European literatures. His
book bulges with fascinating detail. The local provenance of Roman
authors; the interplay among medieval vernaculars that shaped the
lyric and the romance; the constant presence of the Mediterranean
in Shakespeare; fiction on the European peripheries (Dostoevsky,
Melville, Machado de Assis); the transformative Jewish presence in
modernism - these are just a few of the high spots. A bird's eye
view of genres alternates with illuminating close readings:
Horace's "Nunc est bibendum", Hamlet, Moby-Dick, Pale Fire. This
amazing book is a counterpart to Auerbach's Mimesis for the
globalized present.
*Times Literary Supplement*
this monograph is a timely intervention, which emphasizes the
enduring significance of European culture within a wider context
without shying away from its troubled history. Cohen succeeds
admirably in delineating and magnifying the story he sets out to
tell -- one version of events, to be sure, but a compelling and
insightful one. His championing of comparative literary criticism
that pays attention synchronically and diachronically to the formal
properties of languages in literary works is also welcome.
*Ian Ellison, Modern Language Review*
Cohen's erudition is nothing short of impressive. His account of
the complex interrelations between literatures through this vast
territory, before the vernaculars and across languages, and also
later in the Middle Ages into the Renaissance, maps out a huge
landscape, and the list of texts he considers is enormous. Most
importantly, the general overview is underpinned by thorough
analyses ... The book is an admirable encyclopedic one-man show,
but it also shows that all-encompassing histories today can only be
carried out as teamwork, across languages and, to a certain extent,
across disciplines ... it deserves a prominent place on a
comparatist's book shelf.
*Svend Erik Larsen, Comparative Critical Studies*
A lifetime of extensive and wide reading, coupled with a fine and
sharp critical judgement, go into the making of a book that is
certain to remain without match for a while [...] Monumental and
erudite without ever becoming precious or obscure, firmly grounded
historically but completely enmeshed in theoretical discussions,
Cohen's book will stand the test of time like the works of the
great critics he lists at the end: Lukacs, Curtius, Auerbach,
Spitzer, Adorno and a few others. As a great study of European
literature, it could not have come at a better or more appropriate
time, as such wide vision is much in demand for a
reconceptualization of Europe turned imperative. For the present it
makes for engaging, provocative and pleasurable reading, as much as
it also points the way forward.
*Journal of European Studies*
This books achievement lies in substituting challenging
possibilities in place of over-familiar constructs.
*Osman Durrani (University of Kent), The Modern Language
Review*
A History of European Literature triumphantly demonstrates the
continuing conceptual force and argumentative power of the
single-author monograph. Its more contentious claims will only help
this magnificently ambitious book to stimulate debate for decades
to come.
*Ben Hutchinson, Times Literary Supplement*
Cohen, with extraordinary erudition, places European literature
from the Romans onwards alongside extra European literatures. His
book bulges with fascinating detail.
*Ritchie Robertson, Times Literary Supplement*
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