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Since the closing decades of the nineteenth century, Barcelona has striven to sustain an image of modernity that distinguishes itself within Spain. This book traces the development of that image through texts that foreground key social and historical issues. It begins with Barcelona's “coming of age” in the 1888 Universal Exposition and focuses on the first major narrative work of modern Catalan literature, La febre d'or. Positing an inextricable link between literature and modernity, the book establishes a literary framework for the evolution of the image of Barcelona's modernity through the 1980s, when the consciousness of modernity took on an ironic circularity. Because the city is an aggregation of knowledge, the book draws from sociology, urban studies, sociolinguistics, history, psychoanalysis, and literary history to produce a complex account of Barcelona's self-reflection through culture. The last chapter offers a glimpse into the “post-historical” city, where temporality has been sacrificed to the spatialization associated with the seductions of the spectacle.

A literary cult figure on a par with Franz Kafka, Isaac Babel has remained an enigma ever since he disappeared, along with his archive, inside Stalin's secret police headquarters in May of 1939. Made famous by Red Cavalry, a book about the Russian civil war (he was the world's first “embedded” war reporter), another book about the Jewish gangsters of his native Odessa, and yet another about his own Russian Jewish childhood, Babel has been celebrated by generations of readers, all craving fuller knowledge of his works and days. Bringing together scholars of different countries and areas of specialization, this book examines Babel's life and art since the fall of communism and the opening of Soviet archives. This book is a part biography, part history, and part critical examination of the writer's legacy in Russian, European, and Jewish cultural contexts.

Following Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's analysis of art's increasing difficulty to both engage and extricate itself from prosaic reality, this book investigates the strategies employed by German literature from 1750 to 1850 for increasingly attuning itself to quotidian life—common heroes, everyday life, non-extraordinary events—while also avoiding all notions of mediocrity. It focuses on three sites of this tension: the average audience (Gotthold Ephraim Lessing), the average artist (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller), and the everyday, or average life (Franz Grillparzer and Adalbert Stifter). The book's title, Exemplarity and Mediocrity, describes both a disjunctive and a conjunctive relation. Read disjunctively, modern art must display the “exemplary originality” (Immanuel Kant) which only genius can provide and is thus fundamentally opposed to mediocrity as that which does not stand out or lacks distinctiveness; in the conjunctive sense, modern art turns to non-exceptional life in order to transform it—without forsaking its commonness—thereby producing exemplary forms of mediocrity that both represent the non-exceptional and, insofar as they stand outside the group they represent, are something other than mediocre.

Eighteenth-century Europe, preoccupied with both the origins and the defense of reason, was naturally concerned with what might be the root of all error. A topic any systematic account of knowledge must grapple with, error became a frequent point of debate in new scientific, aesthetic, and philosophical investigations. Taking John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding as its point of departure, this book examines a number of such debates, focusing on literary and philosophical accounts of the relationship between language and thought. Rather than approaching its topic conceptually or historically, it takes on canonical texts of the Enlightenment and Romanticism, and engages with their rhetorical strategies. In so doing, the book elucidates how people wrote about error, and how texts claimed to produce reliable and error-free modes of knowledge. The range of authors addressed—Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, Adam Smith, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Immanuel Kant, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe—demonstrates the diversity and heterogeneity underlying the textual production of the age.

This book argues that seventeenth-century Baroque and twentieth-century Neobaroque aesthetics have to be understood as part of the same complex. The Neobaroque, rather than being a return to the stylistic practices of a particular time and place, should be described as the continuation of a cultural strategy produced as a response to a specific problem of thought that has beset Europe and the colonial world since early modernity. This problem, in its simplest philosophical form, concerns the paradoxical relation between appearances and what they represent. The book explores expressions of this problem in the art and literature of the Hispanic Baroques, new and old. It shows how the strategies of these two Baroques emerged in the political and social world of the Spanish Empire, and how they continue to be deployed in the cultural politics of the present. Further, it offers a unified theory for the relation between the two Baroques and a new vocabulary for distinguishing between their ideological values.

This book examines the evolution of neoclassical translation theory from its origins among the first generation of French Academicians to its subsequent importation to England by royalist exiles, its development under the influence of such translator-critics as John Dryden and Anne Dacier, and its evolution in response to the philosophical and political ideas of the Enlightenment. The book shows how translators working from a range of literary, political, and philosophical viewpoints speak to such issues as the relationship of past to present, authorship and the status of women writers, the role of language in national identity, and Anglo-French intellectual exchange. Responding to recent translation historians who describe neoclassical translation as ethnocentric, it uncovers within these translators' projects not only openness to cultural others, but constant and multiple reformulations of the very concept of otherness. The book is a sustained reflection on the aims and methods of contemporary translation studies and the most complete account available of the role of translation during a critical period in European history.