Resources

Europeana Collections is a collection of almost 58,000,000 resources in book, manuscript, art, film and music media drawn from European museums, galleries, libraries and archives. Curated collections include: The Rise of Literacy in Europe, Migration, the First World War, Twentieth Century Modernist Art, and Women’s History.

LitLine is a website which serves the independent literary community. It features a extensive databases of independent, community and not-for-profit publishers, literary and poetry journals, and organisations which support independent writers and poets.

Online Books Page comprises an index of more than 2 million online and electronic books,  readable without charge, copyright cleared or with permissions for non-commercial use, with search facilities by author, title, and subject

VoS – Voice of the Shuttle is a database that serves content dynamically on the Internet. The VoS categories include resources in Literature in English, Literatures other than English, Classical Studies, Literary Theory,  Gender and Sexuality Studies, in all languages, and covering individual authors as well as genres, topics and periods. There are also databases of journals, conferences and mailing lists. 

Words Without Borders: The Online Magazine for International Literature carries a wide range of fiction and interviews from contemporary international authors. Words without Borders has published 2,200 writers from 134 countries, translated from 114 languages, and also holds regular events, in addition to its education programme WWB Campus, which aims to inspire a lifelong interest in international literature.

The British Centre for Literary Translation is a research centre within the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. It is a national and international focus for literary translation research, hosting regular research events, and works in partnership with the BCLA to support the annual John Dryden Translation Competition. The BCLT’s Resources page is also an up-to-date and comprehensive guide to funding, residencies, networking, publishing and events.

The Creative Literary Studio carries a list of resources with links to publishing houses specialising in translation, prizes and awards for translation and some articles.

The European Society for Translation Studies has a list of international research associations, a 2012 list of 103 associations in European Union Member States, and a list, with links, of all international journals in Translation Studies.

The Institute for Translation and Interpreting is the UK-based independent professional membership association for practising translators, interpreters and language service businesses. It offers networking opportunities and peer group support, together with links to professional development and current institutional research projects.

Literature Across Frontiers  Translation Workshops  comprise week-long residential workshops which act as cross-cultural encounters for writers and poets working in all European languages, in partnership with local literature organisations.  The workshops often focus on poetry, usually less supported by commercial interests.  Literature Across Frontiers also carries a hub of resources for translation, including information for publishers on grants for publishing translation,  and information for writers and translators on where to locate residences and bursaries,.

The National Centre for Writing is a charity supporting writers, literary translators and those working in any literary field.  Based in Norwich, UNESCO’s first UK City of Literature,  the Centre offers collaborations, mentoring and support, events of all kinds and activities for young people.

The Translation Database, hosted by Publishers Weekly,  searchable and open to contributions, tracks all original publications of fiction and poetry published in English translation in the USA. It identifies which books are available, from which countries and in what language.

ACLALS – Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies
The ACLALS promotes and coordinates Commonwealth Literature Studies through multiple activities in the academic field, including a triennial conference.  The Association was officially accredited to the Commonwealth in 2005, and is eligible to apply for funding from the Commonwealth Foundation, and participate in civil society organisations and other consultation.  Membership of ACLAS is offered through its local branches in the Commonwealth countries. all contact details for these may be found on the website.

CLAROC – Comparative Literature Association of the Republic of China
The activities sponsored by the CLAROC include an annual national comparative literature conference in Chinese, and an international comparative literature conference in English held every four years. For contact details, go to this page.

English PEN is the founding centre of PEN International, a worldwide writer’s association with 145 centres in more than 100 countries, whose core mission is to defend readers and writers in the UK and around the world from threats to freedom of expression. PEN promotes a residency programme, hosts events, an online magazine and collection of contemporary works in translation, and awards grants and prizes for the translation and promotion of world literature.

ISNFR – The International Society for Folk Narrative Research
The ISNFR is a scholarly and professional organisational organisation of international specialists in the areas of folk narrative, popular literature, folklore and all aspects of narrative. The Association has four special Committees, and the next ISFNR Congress will be held in Zagreb, Croatian from 21 – 26 June, 2020.

Literature Across Frontiers: European Platform for Literary Exchange, Translation and Policy Debate, based in Mercator International/Mercator Rhyngwladol in Wales, aims to develop intercultural dialogue through literature and translation, highlight Europe’s literary diversity to new audiences, and also highlight less translated literatures.

MLA – Modern Language Association of America 
The MLA offers numerous resources and activities related to the study and teaching of language and literature, including the MLA International Bibliography, four major periodicals, more than 50 membership committees in all the specialism, and a book publication programme.

The Royal Society of Literature organises over twenty literature-related events per year, and administers a number of awards and prizes for writing and services to literature, together with schools outreach programmes.

Ben Hutchinson, The Midlife Mind: Literature and the Art of Aging.
London: Reaktion Books, 2020
ISBN: 978178914350
20 illustrations

The meaning of life is a common concern, but what is the meaning of midlife? With the help of illustrious writers such as Dante, Montaigne, Beauvoir, Goethe and Beckett, The Midlife Mind sets out to answer this question. Erudite but engaging, it takes a personal approach to that most impersonal of processes, ageing. From the ancients to the moderns, from poets to playwrights, writers have long meditated on how we can remain creative as we move through our middle years. There are no better guides, then, to how we have regarded middle age in the past, how we understand it in the present, and how we might make it as rewarding as possible in the future.

Dominique Jullien, Borges, Buddhism and World Literature: A Morphology of Renunciation Tales.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.
ISBN: 9783030047177

This book follows the renunciation story in Borges and beyond, arguing for its centrality as a Borgesian compositional trope and as a Borgesian prism for reading a global constellation of texts. The renunciation story at the heart of Buddhism, that of a king who leaves his palace to become an ascetic, fascinated Borges because of its cross-cultural adaptability and metamorphic nature, and because it resonated so powerfully across philosophy, politics and aesthetics. From the story and its many variants, Borges’s essays formulated a ‘morphological’ conception of literature (borrowing the idea from Goethe), whereby a potentially infinite number of stories were generated by transformation of a finite number of ‘archetypes’. The king-and-ascetic encounter also tells a powerful political story, setting up a confrontation between power and authority; Borges’s own political predicament is explored against the rich background of truth-telling renouncers. In its poetic variant, the renunciation archetype morphs into stories about art and artists, with renunciation a key requirement of the creative process: the discussion weaves in and out of Borges to highlight modern writers’ debt to asceticism. Ultimately, the enigmatic appeal of the renunciation story aligns it with the open-endedness of modern parables.

Michelle Bolduc, Translation and the Rediscovery of Rhetoric. Studies and Texts 217; Toronto Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Rhetoric.
Toronto: PIMS, Pontificial Institute of Medieval Studies, 2020.
ISBN: 9780888442178

This study explores a significant and quite specific transmission of rhetorical thought. Beginning with the Roman orator Cicero it proceeds to the medieval Italian notary, philosopher, and statesman Brunetto Latini, whose translations of Cicero’s De inventione would plant the seeds for the renewal of rhetoric as an art of persuasion and radically change the fate of rhetoric in the twentieth century in the work of the French literary critic Jean Paulhan and the Belgian philosophers Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca.

In so doing, Translation and the Rediscovery of Rhetoric serves to underscore the importance of medieval culture to contemporary thought by studying not only how knowledge was transmitted from antiquity to modernity by means of translation, but also by revealing how the Middle Ages made an essential and traceable contribution to modern rhetorical studies.

Professor Andrew Ginger, Instead of Modernity: The Western Canon and the Incorporation of the Hispanic (c. 1850 – 75) – Interventions: Rethinking the Nineteenth Century.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020.
ISBN: 9781526147844 

When all that was solid melted into air… For decades, intellectuals from Benjamin to Bourdieu, Berman to Foucault, have been in thrall to this vision of the mid-nineteenth century. It shaped and underpinned their most influential thoughts, its legacy insinuated into institutionalized theories of culture. In this new book, that vision implodes, as if in a cultural supernova, its exceptionalism and limitations exposed. The story of modernity fades before a spectacle of linkages, stretching from and into the depths of history, the breadths of place. And, in a parallel substitution, the vast territories of the former Spanish Empire’s thread through the narrative, rather than lurking on the peripheries, no longer just the fallen founders of modernity. Instead of modernity goes to the very heart of comparative cultural study: the question of what happens when intimate, dynamic connections are made over place and time, what it is to feel at home amid the lavish diversity of culture. This ambitious interdisciplinary book reconsiders foundational figures of the modern western canon, from Darwin to Cameron, Baudelaire to Whistler. It weaves together brain images from France, preserved insects from the Americas, glass in London, poetry from Argentina, paintings from Spain. Flaubert, Whitman, and Nietzsche find themselves with Hostos from Puerto Rico and Gorriti from Argentina. The flotsam and jetsam of history – optical toys from Madrid – sit with Melville and Marx. The book ranges over theoretical fields: trauma and sexuality studies, theories of visuality, the philosophy of sacrifice and intimacy, the thought of Wittgenstein. Instead of modernity is an adventure in the practice of comparative writing: resonances join suggestively over place and time, the textures of words, phrases and images combine to form moods. This book will be of interest to anyone concerned with the question of modernity and with the fate of cultural theory and comparison.

Ziad Elmarsafy, Esoteric Islam in Modern French Thought: Massignon, Corbin, Jambet 
London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021
ISBN: 9781780938240

Why would a devout Catholic, a committed Protestant, and a Maoist atheist devote their lives and work to the study of esoteric aspects of Islam? How are these aspects ‘good to think with’? What are the theoretical and intellectual problems to which they provide solutions? These are the questions at the heart of Esoteric Islam in Modern French Thought. The three French specialists of Islam described above form an intellectual and personal genealogy that structures the core of the text: Massignon taught Corbin, who taught Jambet in his turn. Each of them found in the esoteric a solution to otherwise insurmountable problems: desire for Massignon, certainty for Corbin, and resurrection/immortality for Jambet. Over the course of three long chapters focused on the life and work of each writer, the book maps the central place of esoteric Islam in the intellectual life of twentieth and twenty-first century France.

Professor Ziad Elmarsafy is Professor of Comparative Literature at King’s College London. His  publications include Sufism in the Contemporary Arabic Novel (2012).

T. J. Reed, Genesis: The Making of Literary Works from Homer to Christa Wolf.  Camden House/Boydell and Brewer. Rochester, New York: 2020.
ISBN-13: 9781640140820
ISBN-10: 1640140824

The book reasserts a traditional genetic approach to critical understanding. An account of the creative “processes” of real authors is illustrated by thirteen case studies, from single poems to epic and dramatic works, from the genesis of new genres to the pattern of a whole career.  The selection ranges from antiquity (Homer and the Bible), to Early Modern (Montaigne, Shakespeare) Goethe (three chapters, on “Faust”, the lyrical poetry, and two novels), and finally 19th and 20th century German (Büchner, Thoams Mann, Kafka, Brecht, Paul Celan and Christa Wolf). All texts are quoted in English translation, the crucial ones (poems especially) in the original as well.

Poetry of Jiangnan, 2020: Issue 3, ISSN 1001 6694.
Kindly contributed by BCLA member Brent Yan, Beijing Foreign Studies University