Published in Neohelicon
In 1983, when the discovery of AIDS was publicly disclosed, many readers and admirers of William S. Burroughs pointed out how he had described the disease in his work. AIDS is very similar to the scarlet fever of Cities of the Red Night as reported by Burroughs (Cities of the red night, Picador, London 1981). Those who spoke of prophecy highlighted...
Published in Neohelicon
Published in Neohelicon
Throughout literary history the event of a plague has been an interpretation event typically split into two mutually exclusive stances. On one side, the plague is interpreted as the manifestation of divine punishment (for example, Homer’s Iliad ) or, more ambiguously, as a test of faith. On the other side, it is understood in terms of its material ...
Published in Neohelicon
Pandemic literature (and there is a sprawling canon of it) tells us much about the past so that we can learn for our future, but we have been poor students. We should have been better prepared for Covid-19, and even merely scratching the surface of pandemic literature by examining Albert Camus’s The Plague and Phillip Roth’s Nemesis is very reveali...
Are representations of pandemics in fiction always bleak dystopian tales understood as natures revenge on the modern Faustian man, or could they also express hope and expand our imagination in a time of environmental crisis? In this article, we analyse the young adult novel Pandemic (Swedish title: Pandemi, 2018) by Swedish author Maths Claesson. P...
Published in Neohelicon
This paper considers a rare yet meaningful case of poetry translation where one historically well-circulated piece becomes identified with a native creation with the change of time. Upon introduction to a revolutionizing China, the renowned Hungarian poet Sándor Petőfi’s poetry was celebrated as an exemplar of patriotic verse and was fervently acce...
Published in Neohelicon
While digital tools and platforms have become part of our everyday life, authors of fictional narratives voice the emerging hopes and fears resulting from interactive digital media. In this paper, I analyze two recently-published French novels, namely Un amour d’espion by Clément Bénech (2017) and Licorne by Nora Sandor (2019), in terms of how soci...
Published in Neohelicon
This article is an afterword (in every sense of that word) on a special collection about “materiality and literature.” It follows up on a promise that Thomas Bremer makes at the end of the Introduction to the special issue, where he acknowledges that there are “new horizons” waiting to be explored in theorizing about the topic. Most prominently vis...
Published in Neohelicon
In the light of the material turn in the Humanities some aspects of Julio Cortázar’s (1914–1984) work become very evident today as a laboratory of the future. For Cortázar, reading was a transforming impulse, part of a process of liberation from mental ties to which he contributed as an author, challenging the barrier between the fantastic and the ...
Published in Neohelicon
Bibliotheken bewahren und verwalten nicht nur Bücher, sondern auch Gegenstände verschiedener Art. Kataloge, die in erster Linie der Erfassung und Auffindbarkeit von Büchern dienen, werden auch zur Erfassung von Objekten als Teilen von Sammlungen verwendet. Anhand von drei historischen Katalogen mit Büchern und Anhängen von Gegenständen und Objekten...
