Exploring the intersection of literature and historiography, this book examines aesthetic-historical works that defy traditional categorization. It investigates modern concepts of history, highlighting how these hybrid texts challenge our understanding of both literary and historical narratives. By analyzing these unique works, the author sheds light on the complexities of interpreting history through a creative lens.
Through the centuries Don Quijote has delighted readers, inspired artists, stimulated thinkers, and helped form historians' perception of early modern Spain. It has, furthermore, played a major part in the development and theoretisation of one of the modern world’s most characteristic literary forms: the novel. In its own playful and non-systematic fashion, Honest Entertainment, Transcendental Jest. Six Essays on Don Quijote and Novelistic Theory explores the reception of Cervantes’ masterpiece with special attention to its significance for the theory of the novel. A book about books about a book about books, this volume is essentially an introduction to the theory of a seminal modern literary genre as approached from the vantage point of the outstanding, truly epoch-making work. Chapters can be read separately as introductions to individual cervantists or theorists of the novel (including Friedrich Schlegel, Viktor Shklovsky, Georg Lukács, and Milan Kundera), but are also connected via a unifying theoretical theme —the question of what is the ultimate direction of novelistic mimesis: towards abstract ideas or worldly phenomena?— and the discussion of the continuous recurrence of the opposition between Enlightenment and Romanticist literary aesthetics in the theory of the novel.
Parallel with the mythological vogue in contemporary art, late sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century European literature virtually overflowed with texts based on the narrative treasurehouse of ancient mythology. After more than a millenium, poems and plays swarmed again with lascivious gods and death-defying heroes; burning desires and violent deaths; paederasty and incest; adultery, rape, and murder. With very few exceptions all the greatest authors of the day dedicated themselves to mythological pursuits, creating some of the most astonishing and significant but also hermetic works ever to have been written in the European languages. Indeed, this literary trend was both so consistent and so extensive that we may speak of a virtual early modern „mythological literature“: a wide-branched organism of generically varied literary variations on the Ovidian fables. The book Diglossia. The Early Modern Reinvention of Mythological Discourse aims to answer the basic research questions: „Why did this mythological literature arise at this particular time?“ and „What are its constants and variants?“
Professor Kluge’s examination of the Baroque marginalization of tragedy takes off from an analysis of the crucial role played by allegory in central fields of seventeenth-century culture such as political theory, education, mythography, literary criticism, and dramatic theory. The emergence of the term comedia as the generic designation of the drama is presented as intricately intertwined with the allegorical outlook dominating these fields, and, especially, as an effect of the ambiguous re-moralization of aesthetics that is also observable in the period’s famous literary feuds. The Baroque terminological development must consequently be seen as a central element in the highly equivocal contemporary revitalization of the Christian aesthetic tradition as a countermeasure to cultural decadence. As La vida es sueño shows, the serious comedia is eminently concerned with the transfiguration of the tragic in its various forms of historical pessimism and the ‘tragic view of life’, the moral tragedy of ‘neopagan’ secularism, and, not the least, ancient tragedy as an authoritative art form. However, although tragedy may be marginalized on a terminological level, it is by no means absent from the serious Baroque comedia, which is a tragicomic theatrum mundi rather than a comedy in the Aristotelian sense of the term.
