Books in the Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature series

This book examines the intersection of jokes, laughter, insults, and poetry in a collection of 13th- and 14th-century medieval Iberian songs. Liu shows how these jokes operate in such varied cultural contexts as the arts of augury and divination, pilgrimage, prostitution, interfaith sexuality, and medical malpractice.

Tracing the history of the idea of the author beginning with attribution practices of Second Temple and Rabbinic Judaism, Wyrick argues that the fusion of Jewish and Hellenistic approaches to attribution helped lead to Augustine's reinvention of the writer of scripture as an author whose texts were governed by both divine will and human intent.

Offers a comparatist defense of hyperbole in the Baroque period. Focusing on Spanish and Mexican lyric, English drama, and French philosophy, this title reads Baroque hyperbole as a sophisticated, often sublime, frequently satiric means of making sense of worlds and selves in crisis and transformation.

First published in 1960, The Singer of Tales remains the fundamental study of the distinctive techniques and aesthetics of oral epic poetry-from South Slavic epic songs to the Iliad, Odyssey, Beowulf, and beyond. This edition offers a corrected text and is supplemented by an open-access website with audio recordings.

In discussing both poets and scholars from a broad historical span, with emphasis on the German legacy of genius, Hamilton investigates how Pindar's obscurity has been perceived and confronted, extorted and exploited. This study addresses a variety of pressing issues, including the possibility or impossibility of a continuous literary tradition.

This work examines the travel account of a German baroque author who journeyed in search of silk from Northern Germany, through Muscovy, to the court of Shah Safi in Isfahan. Olearius introduced Persian culture to the German-speaking public; his appraisal of Persian customs prepares the way for German Romanticism's infatuation with Persian poetry.

Covering novels by Herman Melville, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and Thomas Pynchon, this text shows how aesthetic figurations of unconscious experience generate new forms of literary language and an aesthetic reception directly relevant to an increasingly global culture.

Original Subjects explores the interweaving of the child-hero and the fortunes of a nation, as these are portrayed in a wide selection of novels and national narratives in the French and English traditions.