Catálogo en línea

Illuminating Darkness presents a series of essays variously connected to notions of negation and obscurity in literature and literary theory. The essays are wide-ranging, across literary periods and languages, as well as philosophical, theoretical, and religious engagements - all of which introduce variations of the notions of nothingness. No consistent definition or understanding of negation in literature emerges from the collection, but such a definition is also clearly not its goal. Rather, each essay examines the shapes of negation in different literary contexts. One unifying strength in the collection, despite its variety of approach, is the very high level of scholarship and the very up-to-date bibliographies and discussions in each essay. Anyone interested in how topics of negation are being addressed in contemporary discourses would benefit from reading this book.The first group of essays, under the heading "Myths of the Unknown and the Materiality of Language," are largely literary-historical. They examine writers from Dante to Early Modern English corpus, from Dryden to German Romanticism, as well as considerations of genre, such as aphorism, and of topoi, such as literary uses of Pan. Thus, the first essay by PekkaKuusisto, "Closing in Sublunary Darkness? On the 'Material Vision' in Dante's and Paul de Man's Cosmos,"