Echoland

This book follows several major European literary «echoes» still reverberating since the mysterious emergence of such archetypal figures as Faust, Hamlet, Quixote, and Don Juan alongside lingering ancient and medieval protagonists in the Renaissance.
Four centuries of attempts to redefine «modern» identity are traced against the evolution of a new genre of totalizing encyclopaedic literature, the «humoristic» tradition which re-weaves the positive and negative strands of the European, and today also New World, «grand narrative.»
The book's method, inspired by Joyce, is to «listen» to recurrent motifs in the cultural flow from Humanism to Postmodernism for clues to an identity transcending the personal.

Autorentext

The Author: Gerald Gillespie is Professor Emeritus at Stanford University and a former President of the International Comparative Literature Association. He has held teaching and research appointments at various American, Asian and European universities. He has published or edited some twenty books on European and world literature and on the global development of international comparative studies and is currently directing the ICLA project Romantic Prose Fiction.

Zusammenfassung
"(...) 'Echoland' is a veritable tour de force covering quite a large area of literature from the Renaissance to the present; it is marked by an impressive surplus - academically as well as personally - most convincingly advocating for a global, non-biased, and transcultural study of literature. Its sceptical stance towards lofty, theoretical chimeras is often quite relieving; it is replaced by a genuine affection, not to say love, for literature, which is appreciated in its own right. The style is personal, witty, and exuberant; the book is indeed a pleasure to read. Finally, it is a priceless virtue of the book that it literally fuels one s desire to read (or reread) - a quality not often displayed in critical books these days - and helps one to appreciate the great, literary tradition inhabiting us (...)." (Benjamin Boysen, Orbis Litterarum)

Inhalt
Contents: Humanist theme of «rebeginning» Need to compare and critique cultural repertories Cervantine interrogation of the mind as source of cultural constructs New incarnations of the antagonist figure in the Christian West Connecting with the divine through nature and the feminine Conflicted views on the possibility of «rebeginning» outside Europe in a «New World» The persistence of pagan imagination in «Enlightened» Europe Eroticism and the body as message Inventing the noble savage as Europe's wished-for alter ego and republican virtue as redemptive pathway The subjectivist turn in writing history Romantic psychology complicates identity A new birth of mythic powers Triumphant return of Oedipus Faust grows perplexed in his quest The modern city as the new mental space and juncture Fear of decadence, and failure to find the noble savage The polyphony of modernism The modern artist as mythic quester hero Humoristic hypertrophy, or postmodern mannerism in the Western Hemisphere Cabalistic insights and mystical «yea-saying» trump the family romance.