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Stephen Romer's essays range from the key figures of French and English Modernism to the contemporary practice of poetry, and its translation. At the heart of Chaos and the Clean Line is an enquiry into the talismanic power that a source of order can possess for the poet who lives in a disordered world. It is what drives Mallarmé's 'fury against the formless'. Sometimes it may be found in a longed-for sense of psychological detachment, as when Laforgue invents the figure of Pierrot. Or it may be the craft and genius of a former age, safely removed from the alienating cities of today, such as Eliot finds in Dante, or in Gautier's chiseled verse. For Pierre Reverdy, the clean line of order may come from a Cubist painting; for Ezra Pound, it may be an epiphany of angled sunlight fallen on stone in Provence; for Apollinaire, the shockingly original analogies he draws between physical eroticism and trench warfare.Stephen Romer is Associate Professor of English at the University of Tours, and Lecturer in French at Brasenose College, Oxford.

Crossings is a gathering of essays whose preoccupations converge in the idea that the workings of poetry and trans­lation are closely related. This is especially true in the work of Hölderlin, in whose poems the kinship is coupled with a way of reading the world and an attentiveness to transitions of all kinds: what can come over to us from the past, and what will pass on from us to posterity? What are the consequences for poetry if the present moment is understood as a perpetual transition? Translation can be a means of testing this understanding, and poetry perhaps negotiates the crossing itself. Later writers like Philippe Jaccottet, who thought of the poet's work as a work of translation, continue this line: the poem becomes a form of attention and, as such, a thing permeable to an elsewhere. Touching on bird-flight and sonnets, aqueducts and metamorphosis, what these readings have in common is a fidelity to the movement of particular poems.Charlie Louth is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the Queen's College, University of Oxford.

In the popular imagination, the pioneering explorer Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) provides the link between Romantic-era Germany and Latin America. But the reception and critical reworking of German Romantic culture reach far beyond Humboldt's legacy, and still inform contemporary Latin American writing. Initial responses to the European Romantic tradition were deeply embedded in the cultural nationalism of newly-independent nation states. Nineteenth-century Germans, however, often encountered the region through travel writing and landscape painting, in the context of a market for exotic images in the age of European empires. Today, Latin American authors problematize this historic relation, but their work also recalls German Romanticism's formal innovations: non-closure, fragmentation, genre subversion, and translation as linguistic reinvention. These become modes of resistance to a world literary market that replicates on an aesthetic level the colonial relationship between the viewer and the viewed.In its wide-ranging exploration of these cultural affinities, this volume introduces and analyses a sub-field of world literature that transcends linguistic, temporal and spatial borders.Jenny Haase is Professor of Spanish and Latin American Literatures and Cultures at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. Joanna Neilly is Associate Professor in German at the University of Oxford, and a Tutorial Fellow of St Peter's College.

A porous boundary zone between Europe and Africa, a space at once liminal and peripheral, both a gateway and a border defined through cultural and religious alterity - medieval Iberia challenges post-medieval notions of East, West, nationhood and Europe. Examining the ideological implications of real and fictional travels to the Peninsula in German-language texts ranging from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, Doriane Zerka considers the construction of individual and collective identities, religious, cultural and political. Combining the work of Michel Foucault, postcolonialism and network theory, she sheds light on the ideological processes contributing to the construction of any cultural entity modern audiences might call 'Spanish', 'German' or 'European'.Doriane Zerka is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics, University of Cambridge. Imagining Iberia is her first book, and has been awarded the 2020 Women in German Studies Book Prize and the 2020 Preis der Gesellschaft für interkulturelle Germanistik für jüngere Forscherinnen und Forscher.

How and why do we write about mourning? How does narrative assist us when we dwell on, in, and with grief? What forms of community and even consolation do mournful texts offer? In this broad-ranging volume, twelve contributors grapple with these questions from a variety of disciplinary perspectives: Comparative Literature, Modern Languages, English, Music, Politics, and Biology. Chapters reflect upon different forms and expressions of grief across a very broad expanse of time, from the earliest evidence of human burial to contemporary grief memoirs, environmental mourning, and the coronavirus pandemic. In between, particular attention is paid both to medieval poetic traditions of mourning and to the responses of later readers to such texts. Four creative critical contributions are interspersed throughout the volume as witnesses to the imbrication of life and art in grief.Simona Corso is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Roma Tre; Florian Mussgnug is Professor of Comparative Literature and Italian Studies at University College London; Jennifer Rushworth is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at University College London.

Petrarch is arguably the most influential poet in Western culture. Throughout the centuries, other poets have imitated him or drawn inspiration from what they know of his work: his poetry has been discussed, set to music, illustrated, fictionalized, parodied, cannibalized. Furthermore, through translations of Petrarch, the sonnet has soared across Europe, remodelling its poetic landscape - so much so that even the most avant-garde poetry still finds itself in debt to the author of the Canzoniere.Ranging through five centuries of translations, adaptations and imitations of the father of Humanism, this transcultural, transdisciplinary study considers the echoes of a major figure, whose reach goes beyond borders and eras to resonate singularly into our times.Carole Birkan-Berz is Senior Lecturer in Translation and Literature at the Sorbonne Nouvelle, Guillaume Coatalen Senior Lecturer in Early Modern English Literature at the University of Cergy-Pontoise and Thomas Vuong holds a doctorate in Comparative Literature from the University Paris-13 (Sorbonne-Paris-Cité).

Both comparative criticism and translation cross borders, yet borders that have been crossed still exist. Even a border that has been dismantled is likely to reappear in a different place, or as a less obvious set of limiting practices: migrant texts and migrant ideas, like migrant people, may not achieve full citizenship in their new locations. Of course, there is a creative aspect to borders too, as postcolonial theory in particular has emphasized. Borders are contact zones, generators of hybridity, spaces of exchange, cross-fertilization, and enrichment. For all these reasons, borders require minding - thinking about, managing, even in a sense policing.Rather than celebrating the crossing of borders, or dreaming of their abolition, Minding Borders traces their troubling and yet generative resilience. It explores how borders define as well as exclude, protect as well as violate, and nurture some identities while negating others. The contributors range comparatively across geography, politics, cultural circulation, creativity, and the structuration of academic disciplines, hoping that the analysis of borders in one domain may illuminate their workings in another. Whatever other form a border takes it is always also a border in the mind.

Transgressive by nature, erotic literature engages the reader in a dialogue informed by the social and aesthetic conventions that it playfully disregards or happily reproduces. But once this intimate, arousing and, often, disturbing dialogue transitions into another language, culture or medium, it must reposition itself within new conventions. How does this happen in practice?Examining erotic literature from multiple angles, this volume starts off with an ethical evaluation of the most recent rendering of Marquis de Sade into English. Other inquiries into European letters include the works of Goethe, Georges Bataille, Pierre Guyotat and E. L. James, and the films of Michael Haneke and Patrice Chéreau. Studies of Chinese and Japanese erotic traditions complement the picture by addressing the different functions of the erotic in discrete cultural settings.Johannes D. Kaminski is Marie Sk¿odowska-Curie Fellow at University of Vienna.