This article is an introduction to the thematic cluster “Literary Trend Studies.” It begins with Nicholas Birns’s observation in his book Theory after Theory: An Intellectual History of Literary Theory from 1950 to the Early 21st Century (2010). The main body of the article is devoted to explicating the major arguments of all the contributions. In doing so, it reveals that if theory means a reasonably systematic reflection on our guiding assumptions, it remains as indispensable as ever. However, we are now living in the aftermath of what one might call high theory. We can never be “after theory,” in the sense that there can be no reflective human life without it. Thus, it is quite possible for literary trend after theory to find a new way or revisit particular styles of thinking to meet the demands of the changing situation.

This article explores some of the issues that are of crucial importance for any attempt to come to grips with the logic of the fictions which provided the ideological backbone of British imperialism. After briefly delineating the continuity of the imperial past in the present, section 2 provides a preliminary exploration of the meanings of the term “fictions of empire,” i.e. of the ambiguous title of this essay. Section 3 then provides an attempt to conceptualize the relationship between fiction and reality, and between culture and imperialism, emphasizing the creative or performative role that works of fiction can play in the construction and deconstruction of the ideological fictions of imperialism. Section 4 presents a narratologically informed revision of colonial discourse analysis and post-colonial criticism, which is the approach that informs this article. Section 5 discusses six of the main functions that both literary and conceptual fictions can fulfill with regard to the making, and unmaking, of imperialist mentalities, while the last section provides a brief conclusion.

Russian literature challenges both Paris-centered accounts of “world literature” such as Pascale Casanova’s and what Arjun Appadurai terms “Eurochronology.” It does so by interrogating Russia’s supposed provinciality (provintsial’nost’), a word with especially complex resonances in Russian. Russia’s unique situation — peripheral but not small, European yet also Asian, Christian but not exactly “Christendom” — underscores the importance of the provintsiia trope, in which provincial places are marked by an ambiguous, mixed temporality that shows Russia to be neither fully “modern” nor simply “backward.” When writers like Gogol depict provintsiia as a jumble of objects, styles, words, and times, they suggest that Russia may exist permanently outside normative European chronology. By linking chaotic simultaneity with creative potential, they contradict Casanova’s view (drawing on Wallerstein) that peripheries are sterile and dependent. Russia’s embrace of its own provinciality thus highlights how its literary tradition resists assimilation into the framework of “world literature.”

My paper addresses both Bulgarian (more widely, East-European) literature (especially in the first two parts) and developments that bear on the larger framework in which literary history operates today. I revisit the notion of “minor literatures” and show it to be a historical construct with a specific lifespan. I also examine the ambiguity of the project of “minor literatures,” poised as it has lately been between an understanding of “minor” as a potential social and political energy that originates in the writing of a minority within a dominant majority (“minoritäre Literatur”), and an evaluative notion that sees “minor literatures” as small (“kleine Literatur”), derivative, deprived of originality when measured by the yardstick of “mainstream literatures.” The first of these two perspectives is sustained in Deleuze and Guattari’s classic book Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature; the second one has a longer pedigree that goes back to the intricate history of Eurocentrism since the 18th century.

In my article I deal with the modernization of Nordic literature in the 20th century and show the reasons why the aesthetic transition from imitation to construction produced completely new forms of literary expression. In order to illuminate the paradigmatic turn I have analysed five Nordic novels, which through the introduction of new literary techniques aim at transcending the visible world and finding access to the complex reality beyond the reach of human perception. As it proves impossible to imitate what you cannot see or hear, the author is dependent on showing the reality behind reality with the help of constructions and models, which serve as door-openers into hidden connections and all things “what link the world in its depths together” or in Goethe’s original text: “was die Welt im Innersten zusammenhält.”

This paper analyzes the (sub)urban time-space relationship in the early postwar American drama. In so doing, special attention is given to how various dramatic forms give rise to different conceptions and experiences of (sub)urban time as it is manifested in dream and illusion and in memory and nostalgia. It also argues that the various dramatic canvases on which time is materially embodied, in their totality, point to a multi-layered experience of time which in turn opens up, to different degrees, an ethical space of reading. In the immediate postwar American drama, we can observe an interesting relationship between dramatic form and time. Despite this interesting array of temporal conceptions, what is missing in all these plays is the acutely self-conscious sense of the theatricality of social life that is deeply embedded in the modern(ist) drama. The fundamentally conservative nature of the early postwar American drama and its general confidence in the representational validity of the realistic-naturalistic form reflects the overall sociocultural confidence in the American conception of the postwar world and itself.

William Shakespeare’s popularity as a poet and a playwright deserves scrutiny when we come to the question of his morality and justice represented in his works. His popularity is often considered as the effect of his condescension to the crude taste of his audience wanting some raw and bloody sensationalism. The purpose of this paper is to critically review some of the major ethical criticism of Shakespeare from Samuel Johnson to Ludwig Wittgenstein, and to suggest an alternative idea of imaginative ethics in Shakespeare as a man of imagination. Jonson, Tolstoy, and Wittgenstein, in their respective differences, all together find fault with Shakespeare’s lack of morality and high seriousness. However, as Wilson Knight’s defense of Shakespeare as a visionary poet demonstrates well, Shakespeare’s moral judgments are placed in his poetry which demands a detached observation on various human dispositions. The Shakespearean principle of ‘poetic’ justice is more than the Johnsonian poetic justice in that the former puts a moral judgment in the design of artistic threads: Shakespeare’s “mingled yarn” is more than a melodramatic and bipolar black and white. Shakespeare’s music of forgiveness is touched by his creative mercy beyond the earthly idea of morality. Shakespearean living ethics is the ethics of sympathetic imagination and tolerance oriented towards the realization of transcendental co-presence and musical harmony, as is represented in his final plays of romantic reconciliation and forgiveness.

The studies of trope and literature have been closely connected on both theoretical and textual levels ever since antiquity, and many great literary works were written by writers who were well versed in tropes. It is therefore worthwhile to examine thoroughly what these writers know about tropes and how literary creation and literary criticism have been enriched through rhetorical knowledge. As early as the 16th century, Richard Sherry had already realized the relations between trope and literature. In his groundbreaking monograph A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes (1550), Richard suggests that trope is the tool for “achieving ornateness” in both secular and religious writing and speaking (Hildebrandt 2). In this mode of thought, tropes like metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche are basic human tools of understanding, and they are both mentally and physically anchored in literature.

The Danish novelists Kirsten Thorup, Jette Drewsen, and Vibeke Grønfeldt had their breakthrough as storytellers in the 1970s and today they are among the most celebrated contemporary Danish authors. The article examines how some of their works engage with the development of the Danish welfare state that emerged during their youth. The welfare home and the welfare family serve as core metaphors in their narratives, thereby illustrating how their novels interact with the political welfare rhetoric of the period.

Paul Auster’s Sunset Park is an experiment in realism that seeks to dissolve and then reconstruct the relationship between thing and sign (res and signum). To achieve this, the narrative centers on characters—mostly artists and intellectuals—who have in various ways become victims of the 2008 economic crisis. Four of them squat in an abandoned house in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, where they attempt to create an alternative lifestyle. One of them, Ellen, a young painter, extends the experiment into a series of nude sketches that merge realism with abstract form, striving to capture pure “thingness” and the in-betweenness of things. Pain, loss, and their remembrance are transmuted into a new existence through Ellen’s unfinished portraits.

The etiology of the American Dream reaches back to the historical period of massive migration from the Old Continent to the New World. Well-being, freedom, and prosperity were the major constituents of the dream, but its fulfillment required identity redefinition. Out of this process emerged conceptualizations of Euro-American superiority and African-American inferiority. In Toni Morrison’s novel A Mercy, the author reconstructs the interior lives of subjects and objects affected by racial stratification within mainstream American society. In doing so, Morrison contemplates the emotions that likely accompanied Euro-American pursuit of patriarchal capitalism, which laid the groundwork for racialized slavery and, subsequently, the systemic subjugation of the majority of the black population.