Christine Chism
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Lost worlds
Encyclopaedism and riddles in the tale of Tawaddud/Theodor
in Bestsellers and masterpieces
Chapter DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7765/9781526147493.00016
Online Publication Date:
16 Aug 2022
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This chapter tracks the pre-modern popularity of a tale of a scholarly slave girl who wins a knowledge contest over the greatest scholars of her time. It investigates what made the tale of Tawaddud/Teodor so gripping to its medieval readers and translators. The argument is simple: that the tale’s medieval appeal lay in its encyclopaedic capacity for making knowledge into worlds, with the added benefit of moral inculcation into the world it creates. However, this worlding is double-faced – so intimately translatable is this tale that it can be levied not only in the service of colonial indoctrination but also to spur decolonising popular resistance. The translations of this tale, then, enact a literal war of the worlds. The tale seems to have struck a global chord that resonated long beyond the medieval period, only to dwindle to relative obscurity in modern times. Tawaddud in Arabic means ‘To show love or affection, to attract, captivate.’ A looser translation might be ‘Beloved’, and like her counterpart in Toni Morrison’s novel, Tawaddud’s uncanny medieval afterlife is filled with translators who seem unable to let go of her. The chapter ends by charting the ripples of Tawaddud’s post-medieval translations and transculturations – to Spain and Europe, but also to the New World of the Maya, to nineteenth-century Brazil and to the Philippines.
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Bestsellers and masterpieces

The changing medieval canon

eISBN:
9781526147493
Publisher:
Manchester University Press
Cover Bestsellers and masterpieces
Subjects:
Literature and Theatre
Keywords:
medieval; literature; European; Arabic; canon; bestsellers; masterpieces; Middle East; literary history; manuscript
Page Count:
289
Publisher:
Manchester University Press

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Cover Hartly House, Calcutta

Hartly House, Calcutta

Phebe Gibbes

Book

Publication History:

Online Publication Date:
13 Feb 2019
Subjects:
  1. Literature and Theatre
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This novel is a designedly political document. Written at the time of the Hastings impeachment and set in the period of Hastings’s Orientalist government, Hartly House, Calcutta (1789) represents a dramatic delineation of the Anglo-Indian encounter. The novel constitutes a significant intervention in the contemporary debate concerning the nature of Hastings’s rule of India by demonstrating that it was characterised by an atmosphere of intellectual sympathy and racial tolerance. Within a few decades the Evangelical and Anglicising lobbies frequently condemned Brahmans as devious beneficiaries of a parasitic priestcraft, but Phebe Gibbes’s portrayal of Sophia’s Brahman and the religion he espouses represent a perception of India dignified by a sympathetic and tolerant attempt to dispel prejudice.
Cover Crossing borders and queering citizenship

Crossing borders and queering citizenship

Civic reading practice in contemporary American and Canadian writing

Author:
Zalfa Feghali

Book

Publication History:

Online Publication Date:
16 Apr 2019
Subjects:
  1. Literature and Theatre
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Can reading make us better citizens? This book sheds light on how the act of reading can be mobilised as a powerful civic tool in service of contemporary civil and political struggles for minority recognition, rights, and representation in North America. Crossing borders and queering citizenship reimagines the contours of contemporary citizenship by connecting queer and citizenship theories to the idea of an engaged reading subject. This book offers a new approach to studying the act of reading, theorises reading as an integral element of the basic unit of the state: the citizen. By theorising the act of reading across borders as a civic act that queers citizenship, the book advances an alternative model of belonging through civic readerly engagement. Exploring work by seven US, Mexican, Canadian, and Indigenous authors, including Gloria Anzaldúa, Dorothy Allison, Gregory Scofield, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Erín Moure, Junot Díaz, and Yann Martel, the book offers sensitive interpretations of how reading can create citizenship practices that foreground and value recognition, rights, and representation for all members of a political system.
Cover Howard Jacobson

Howard Jacobson

Author:
David Brauner

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Online Publication Date:
12 Jan 2021
Subjects:
  1. Literature and Theatre
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This is a comprehensive and definitive study of the Man Booker Prize-winning novelist Howard Jacobson. It offers lucid, detailed and nuanced readings of each of Jacobson’s novels, and makes a powerful case for the importance of his work in the landscape of contemporary fiction. Focusing on the themes of comedy, masculinity and Jewishness, the book emphasises the richness and diversity of Jacobson’s work. Often described by others as ‘the English Philip Roth’ and by himself as ‘the Jewish Jane Austen’, Jacobson emerges here as a complex and often contradictory figure: a fearless novelist; a combative public intellectual; a polemical journalist; an unapologetic elitist and an irreverent outsider; an exuberant iconoclast and a sombre satirist. Never afraid of controversy, Jacobson tends to polarise readers; but, love him or hate him, he is difficult to ignore. This book gives him the thorough consideration and the balanced evaluation that he deserves.