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This brief chapter outlines the predominant stereotype of post-Independent Irish culture as stagnated and insular, and then asks why this might be the case given the highly impressive range of Irish writers wielding manuscripts at the time, including James Joyce, Flann O’Brien, Frank O’Connor, George Bernard Shaw, and W. B. Yeats. It proceeds to provide the rationale for the rest of the book’s structure, indicating that its chosen poems will be read as constellations in which aesthetic forms and historical contradictions awaken to one another.

The nature of the Maṇimēkalai's textual or reading community is considered through an examination of the narrative as a literary work produced in the context of a diverse and multilingual South Indian literary culture. Through careful reading of the intertextual allusions in the Maṇimēkalai, particularly in relation to the principal themes of an earlier Tamil narrative from which the Buddhist text borrows its central characters and settings, a picture begins to emerge of a textual community of literary connoisseurs who are multilingual, well versed in world views and the literature of various religious communities, and thoroughly engaged in the project of articulating religious identity in a literary and religious landscape of extreme diversity through the medium of ornately sophisticated poetry. The Maṇimēkalai's free appropriation and translation into Tamil of Buddhist narratives and philosophical concepts found in earlier Pāli and Sanskrit transregional sources provides a glimpse of the processes of transmission of a tradition for which no other record exists. In a literary‐cultural context that includes the vehemently anti‐Buddhist invective of the earliest Hindu poet‐saints, such easy switching from transliterated Sanskrit to translated Pāli in the Maṇimēkalai bespeaks a moment in Tamil literary history when language choice did not entail the same cultural, political, or religious allegiance that it would assume by the time of the eleventh‐century Vīracōliyam.

The community of Buddhists imagined within the narrative world of the Maṇimēkalai itself is considered – a community whose locus is not the geographical region of Tamil‐speaking southern India in the narrative present, as might be expected, but rather that of all India and the far‐flung reaches of South‐east Asia in the era of the future Buddha's earthly birth. Focusing on the central role played by the begging bowl that never empties if used in service to the poor, it is argued that the bowl itself signals the coming of the future Buddha and embodies those moral values that will enable the Maṇimēkalai's audience to participate in that glorious community to come. Attention to the central locations of the narrative similarly reveals the text's expansive vision of Buddhist community that involves not only the subcontinent but also an island kingdom somewhere in South‐east Asia. Through reference to other Buddhist literature of this early medieval period, it is argued that the Maṇimēkalai participates in larger Asian patterns of redrawing the Buddhist world, relocating its centers away from the cities of northern India associated with Gautama Buddha and toward new foci of Buddhist activity in South India, Sri Lanka, China, and South‐east Asia.

This book has intended to stimulate new research and to raise new questions; it is gratifying how many of those questions have received fuller answers since this book was first published in 1984, though much still remains to be done. At the same time, many areas which are largely or entirely neglected have started to receive a lot of attention. The methodological reasons for these different developments are discussed here. The first edition of this book was an attempt to unite literary and historical studies, a process that hopefully will continue to be aspired to.

This chapter provides annotations for each of the forty tales recounted in the previous chapter. These notes trace, when possible, the literary history of each story, examine significant interpretations and variants on it, and provide relevant contextual information, e.g., on the Hindu time scheme of cyclically recurring epochs or yugas. A final section proposes that the complete “biographical” corpus of Hanuman tales may be understood, in part, as an idealized human life-narrative.

Arguing that the changing and more consolidated literary politics of the century’s turn helped make possible the canon wars of the twentieth century, this paper investigates the history of literary histories. Twentieth-century constructs of the field overlook an awareness that late-nineteenth century female literary historians envisioned in terms of a more inclusive and democratic American literary canon. Recovering a literary history largely erased by the turn into the twentieth century through a case study of Sarah Piatt’s career, this chapter focuses on two female literary historians of the 1890s: Ellen Mackay Hutchinson and Jeanette Gilder, whose literary anthologies include Piatt’s writing, unlike those of the following century. Hutchinson, who (with Edmund Clarence Stedman) edited a sizeable collection of American texts, the eleven-volume Library of American Literature, and Jeanette Gilder, co-editor of The Critic, who hosted a popular election to identify the top 125 American women writers of 1890, made arguments for the inclusion of Piatt in the canon that are worth revisiting in light of turn-of-the-century mechanisms for erasing the literary history of which Piatt was a part.

This chapter identifies the conceptual links between the different chapters in this book. It attempts to help further research along similar lines by presenting in separated paragraphs some of the work that has been done by others. It also provides a literary history of comic form and expression.

This chapter demonstrates how the historical project of New England regionalism extended beyond the supposed end of that mode's popularity (c. 1915) and into the modernist era. It focuses on the writings of three women fiction writers left out of accounts of regionalism: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Alice Brown, and Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins. Each of these writers used New England-based colonial revivalism in her fiction to explore problems of race and queer desires in history. These writers consistently limned the contours of identity in time by portraying women characters as fusing with ghosts of the colonial and Revolutionary-era past. This chapter troubles traditional accounts of literary history by revealing the modernist sensibilities of New England regionalism and its very practice up through the so-called modernist moment.

This chapter tracks the increasing awareness of the evolutionary character of literature that emerges in the latter part of the 18th century and the early years of the 19th. The discussion of genius (e.g., Marmontel, Mercier, Condillac, Diderot) tends to present it as a dynamic, mould-breaking quality moving literature towards the future. As a result, a new kind of literary history emerges that treats literature as developing in the manner of a human being, and in ways that invite parallels between individual biography and institutional history. Mme de Staël's De la littérature is one of the first examples of this quasi-biographical kind of literary history and it contrasts with the predominantly retrospective account given in La Harpe's Lycée. The idea of a national literature treated in De l'Allemagne supports the conflation of the individual and the collective. Hugo's Préface de Cromwell also uses a quasi-biographical model for its account of the history of literature since its origins, but where Mme de Staël adopts a largely pedagogical perspective, Hugo constructs a thoroughly organic account of a life-cycle which progresses from birth to death to rebirth, and in which literature is constantly recreated and reinvented.

The chapter offers a critique of the continuing influence of Lajwanti Rama Krishna’s pioneering English-language monograph Panjabi Sufi Poets (1938). It is argued that consequent misunderstandings of both pre-modern Punjabi literary history and of the Islamic character of early Punjabi Sufi poetry may be corrected by taking account of comparative evidence, including the better preserved later textual and hagiographic materials which are available for the major Sufi poets of the nineteenth century. The comparison with early Sindhi literature is used to illuminate the character of the first Punjabi Sufi poetry by Farid. It is then argued that the major poets of the Mughal period (Shah Husain, Sultan Bahu, and Bullhe Shah) are each to be understood in their own terms, as Sufis rather than as exponents of some universalized Indian spiritual understanding.

In the decade before T. S. Eliot matriculated at Harvard University, several graduates who had studied with Dean Briggs brought John Donne into the curriculum of other US colleges. By the time that Eliot heard Briggs's lecture in 1907, however, the study of Donne at Harvard was on the decline. These developments — the spread of Donne studies beyond Harvard and the waning of Donne's reputation in the University where he had been made a substantial academic subject — created apt conditions for Eliot to display his individual talent a decade later as he began engaging in a neglected literary tradition in which Donne had played a central part. As Anne Ferry has shrewdly observed, even before Eliot began writing about Donne, he had imagined a future anthology, in which readers would discover in a poem such as ‘Whispers of Immortality’ a long delayed coupling between the dead writers of the 17th century and the living modern verse in which they assert their immortality.

Across the period from 1880 to 1930, the processes of rethinking the past can be read as a historical gesture as significant as the consideration of wholly new works of art, resulting in a period of experimentation, negotiation, hybridity, and historical dualities. Despite pressures to valorize the modern and thus separate literary eras at the century’s dividing mark, authors from the turn of the century, or the T-20 period, explore their historical legacies as well as anticipatory inscriptions of the new. Calling for a reading practice that encourages both forward and backward glancing, essays collected in this volume attest to the irreducibility of the century’s turn, which can be read as an era of historical complexity rather than as a period shaped by a decisive teleological march into new intellectual territory. Exploring the permeable boundaries and elastic categories of a literary history rich in multiple investments, essays here stress American literature’s navigation of moving boundaries that encompass not only temporal markers but intersecting literary and cultural traditions.

This chapter considers postcolonial Ireland, with particular reference to politics, culture, and the construction of a new nation state. Its primary purpose is to indicate some of the ways in which postcolonial readings of modern Irish literary culture in the period that stretches from the Irish Literary Revival through the Counter-Revival and up to the contemporary Northern Ireland Troubles can help to reconfigure received versions of modern Irish literary and cultural history. Postcolonial readings of Irish culture have the capacity not only to critique established versions of Irish literary history, but also to extend the scope of inquiry to engage with the cultural dilemmas of subaltern groups such as women, workers, and emigrants. Irish postcolonial analysis is conceived here as the most expansive and outward-looking of the various modes of sociocultural analysis currently shaping Irish studies.