This volume represents the 'state of the art' in Comparative Literature as it has developed in the half century since 1945. Peter Szondi was one of the leading spirits in the urgent move towards the reclamation of the literary text from ideology in post-war Germany; Geoffrey Hartman this year delivered the first lecture in his name to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the Institute of General and Comparative Literature at the Free University, Berlin, of which Szondi was Director. Hartman, one of the major comparatists of this period, whose subtle phenomenological readings have transformed Romantic studies in English, gives a lapidary account of those poets of the Holocaust Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs, whose refusal of traditional imagery is a last fragile link with it. We also mark the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the British Comparative Literature Association in 1975 at Norwich, with the publication of the plenary papers from the Seventh Triennial Congress held in Edinburgh in 1995.
Anne Barton opens on the strange 'Wild Man' figure who haunts the literary and iconographical spaces of Europe, with notable examples in Shakespeare's Caliban and Timon; John Dixon Hunt counters with the civilized garden that is staked out and continuously retheorized in the midst of the forest wilderness; Gerald Gillespie, president of the International Comparative Literature Association, amplifies on the ambivalent image of the city, half utopia, half human