Examining both familiar and under appreciated texts, Hassan Melehy foregrounds the relationships that early modern French and English writers conceived with both their classical predecessors and authors from flourishing literary traditions in neighboring countries. In order to present their own avowedly national literatures as successfully surpassing others, they engaged in a paradoxical strategy of presenting other traditions as both inspiring and dead. Each of the book's four sections focuses on one early modern author: Joachim Du Bellay, Edmund Spenser, Michel de Montaigne, and William Shakespeare. Melehy details the elaborate strategies that each author uses to rewrite and overcome the work of predecessors. His book touches on issues highly pertinent to current early modern studies: among these are translation, the relationship between classicism and writing in the vernacular, the role of literature in the consolidation of the state, attitudes toward colonial expansion and the "New World," and definitions of modernity and the past. "In The Poetics of Literary Transfer in Early Modern France and England, Hassan Melehy moves through subtle readings of Joachim Du Bellay, Spenser, Montaigne, and Shakespeare toward some of the most profound reflections on literary transmission since Thomas Greene's Light in Troy (1982). Whereas Greene's early modern poets experienced pathos in their descent from an ever-receding Roman origin, Melehy's poets find in it a liberating energeia." --John Watkins, University of Minnesota, Studies in English Literature "Hassan Melehy's brilliant and innovative The Poetics of Literary Transfer in Early Modern France and England is the first to offer precise accounts of the literary relationships between four Renaissance authors: Du Bellay, Spenser, Montaigne, and Shakespeare. Staging their ongoing discussion on the subject of Rome and its legacy, this fascinating book brings to light a myriad of textual engagements and intertextual moments. Melehy's sensitive and erudite readings revivify the humanist ideals of friendship and dialogue, recasting them as inspiring and galvanzing 'mutual regards and intermeshings.'" --Deanne Williams, York University, Canada

The Poetics of Literary Transfer in Early Modern France and England

Literature & Fiction

Melehy, Hassan

British & Irish

Routledge

Combines literary theory and history with detailed textual analysis in order to consider a question that involves both literature and philosophy, namely, the foundation of the human subject.Combining literary theory and history with detailed textual analysis, Melehy examines a series of events at the outset of modernity involving both literature and philosophy. Through the work of Michel de Montaigne and Rene Descartes, Melehy considers the question of the foundation of the human subject, in the context of contemporary debates in literature and philosophy. Montaigne, through writing, examines the many possibilities of subjective experience, and finds that the subject takes shape in writing. Descartes comes to the subject in search of a principle to circumvent the uncertainty of language--"I think, therefore I am," the cogito. But Descartes, Melehy shows, must continually depend on literary devices, on the properties of language whose effects he is so eager to escape--also deploying the devices to disguise the fact that they permeate his work.

Writing Cogito: Montaigne, Descartes, and the Institution of the Modern Subject (Margins of Literature (Dis))

Biographies & Memoirs

Leaders & Notable People

State University of New York Press

French Connections in the English Renaissance

The study of literature still tends to be nation-based, even when direct evidence contradicts longstanding notions of an autonomous literary canon. In a time when current events make inevitable the acceptance of a global perspective, the essays in this volume suggest a corrective to such scholarly limitations: the contributors offer alternatives to received notions of 'influence' and the more or less linear transmission of translatio studii, demonstrating that they no longer provide adequate explanations for the interactions among the various literary canons of the Renaissance. Offering texts on a variety of aspects of the Anglo-French Renaissance instead of concentrating on one set of borrowings or phenomena, this collection points to new configurations of the relationships among national literatures. Contributors address specific borrowings, rewritings, and appropriations of French writing by English authors, in fields ranging from lyric poetry to epic poetry to drama to political treatise. The bibliography presents a comprehensive list of publications on French connections in the English Renaissance from 1902 to the present day.

Martin, Catherine Gimelli

The study of literature still tends to be nation-based, even when direct evidence contradicts longstanding notions of an autonomous literary canon. In a time when current events make inevitable the acceptance of a global perspective, the essays in this volume suggest a corrective to such scholarly limitations: the contributors offer alternatives to received notions of 'influence' and the more or less linear transmission of translatio studii, demonstrating that they no longer provide adequate explanations for the interactions among the various literary canons of the Renaissance. Offering texts on a variety of aspects of the Anglo-French Renaissance instead of concentrating on one set of borrowings or phenomena, this collection points to new configurations of the relationships among national literatures. Contributors address specific borrowings, rewritings, and appropriations of French writing by English authors, in fields ranging from lyric poetry to epic poetry to drama to political treatise. The bibliography presents a comprehensive list of publications on French connections in the English Renaissance from 1902 to the present day.

Given Jack Kerouac's enduring reputation for heaving words onto paper, it might surprise some readers to see his name coupled with the word “poetics.” But as a native speaker of French, he embarked on his famous “spontaneous prose” only after years of seeking techniques to overcome the restrictions he encountered in writing in a single language, English. The result was an elaborate poetics that cannot be fully understood without accounting for his bilingual thinking and practice.Of the more than twenty-five biographies of Kerouac, few have seriously examined his relationship to the French language and the reason for his bilingualism, the Québec Diaspora. Although this background has long been recognized in French-language treatments, it is a new dimension in Anglophone studies of his writing. In a theoretically informed discussion, Hassan Melehy explores how Kerouac's poetics of exile involves meditations on moving between territories and languages. Far from being a naïve pursuit, Kerouac's writing practice not only responded but contributed to some of the major aesthetic and philosophical currents of the twentieth century in which notions such as otherness and nomadism took shape. Kerouac: Language, Poetics, and Territory offers a major reassessment of a writer who, despite a readership that extends over much of the globe, remains poorly appreciated at home.

Kerouac: Language, Poetics, and Territory

History & Criticism

Bloomsbury Academic

Poetry. Hassan Melehy's debut collection is a blistering retort to the Eisenhower America that drove his literary heroes half-mad, expressed in a taut, sometimes furious, savage lyricism of a man born with a Muslim name at a time of growing hate. Exploring sexual desire, love, literary taste, and diving into the franco-American lingo of Kerouac, this is a discomfiting, passionate, and original expression of the Beat world for a 21st century in need of voices of protest.

A Modest Apocalypse

Poetry

Eyewear Publishing Ltd

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Melehy, Hassan. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Melehy, Hassan

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Melehy, Hassan. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Poetics of Literary Transfer in Early Modern France and England

Writing Cogito: Montaigne, Descartes, and the Institution of the Modern Subject (Margins of Literature (Dis))

Writing Cogito: Montaigne, Descartes, and the Institution of the Modern Subject (Margins of Literature (Dis))

French Connections in the English Renaissance

French Connections in the English Renaissance

Kerouac: Language, Poetics, and Territory

Kerouac: Language, Poetics, and Territory

A Modest Apocalypse