Race Theory and Literature

Book excerpt: This study is based on the primary assumption that literature and racial theories have a peculiar, if not unique, interplay, offering an in-depth exploration of the very specific way in which literature and conceptions dealing with race interact. Recent scholarship has started to examine this relationship, although either with a general focus on a specific literary tradition or period, or belong more to historiography than to an aesthetic analysis. This volume, on the other hand, presents recent and stimulating scholarship extending from the eighteenth century into the twentieth. Furthermore, the literary traditions explored here differ from a geographical and cultural point of view (encompassing French, British, German, and French-Lithuanian literatures), but also from the perspective of their genre (namely, prose fiction, poetry, ethnographic literature, and essays). Among others, the reader will find reflections on authors such as Bataille, Schlegel, Coleridge, Oscar V. de L. Milosz, Kafka, Kleist, Voltaire and Buffon.