Relatively few works of ancient literature survive intact. Many more are known only as fragments or through the testimony of other authors. How should literary history acknowledge the fact and the consequences of such extensive loss? This chapter reviews the difficulties in identifying and presenting the evidence for lost works, explores what (besides their hypothetical reconstruction) can be learned from their remains, and considers how accommodation of the lost and the fragmentary challenges historians of literature to rethink the objectives and the methods of their enterprise.

This chapter situates Smith scholarship in a long historical view. It highlights the kaleidoscopic nature of reading and writing about Smith from the eighteenth century to the present. A brief survey of the early reception of Smith’s works in the anglophone world demonstrates how and why Smith was initially read as a practical resource before being transformed into an intellectual and political authority. Interpretive problems like “Das Adam Smith Problem” and the Chicago School Smith, introduced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, then became starting points for critical and revisionist historiography. Contemporary scholarship has been marked by several distinctive features: an increasing interest in Smith as a philosophical thinker, the centrality of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, engagements with Smith to proliferate new defenses and critiques of liberalism, and the reformulation of older categories of analysis. I suggest that the ambiguity and contestability of Smith’s intentions as well as the slipperiness of the conceptual categories that he inspired have engendered shifting meanings, emergent problematics, and the enduring political relevance of his works and ideas.

This chapter focuses on the history of three Mozart monuments in Prague: a Mozart foundation in Prague’s university library established in 1837 to compete with the plans for a Mozart monument in Salzburg; a German Mozart monument that was to be built in the city center in 1914; and Bertramka, a suburban estate where Mozart supposedly lived during his Bohemian visits and where he purportedly finished Don Giovanni. All three commemorative sites were embroiled in various Czech–German national conflicts. The chapter focuses on the process through which Bertramka transformed into a national shrine and the patriotic myths that contributed to this transformation. Whereas Czech commentators viewed Bertramka as a monument to Mozart’s ties to the Czechs, German Bohemians considered it a symbolic site of German culture. Patriotic and nationalist concerns eventually imbued the myths about Mozart and Bertramka with an aura of truth.

Tracing the contours of the internationalization of Roberto Bolaño’s writing across various Asian and African locales, the volume’s concluding essay explores the question of the limits of Bolaño’s world-making imagination when confronted with contexts, translations, and referents beyond Europe and the Americas. Surveying a broad swath of Eastern Hemisphere Bolañiana, it explores to what degree and in what ways we may “extend the eventfulness of literature” (Whitehead) while accounting for the de facto Western-centrism of the Chilean author. Through a consideration of key passages, selected translations, and reception case-studies, the essay shows how Bolaño’s bodily cosmopolitics continues to produce contradiction and spark collaboration as it disseminates among a younger, transnational, literary intelligentsia.

The article contributes to the unsettling of the Western paradigm of “law and religion,” by examining the overlapping of the two categories in the context of Jewish, Islamic, and Zoroastrian discussions of legality and revelation in the early Abbasid period. With regard to all three legal traditions, the article traces a process of theologization of the law (and minimization of the role of human agency in effecting the content of revelation), on the one hand, and one of textual demarcation and confinement of the law (in line with the principle of “legality”), on the other hand.

The article argues that Sherira, Shāfiʽī and Manuščihr played a particularly significant role in framing and articulating these broad processes, by insisting on the textual confinement of God’s revelation as pronounced at the initial revelatory moment in the Mishnah-cum-Talmud, Hadith, and Zand (alongside the Torah, Quran and Avesta). This, in turn, paved the way for regarding these corpora as the exclusive, complete, and authoritative articulation of the law. Indeed, the parallel diachronic shifts evident in the three religious traditions points to a broader legal-theological turn in the early Abbasid period, which bears significant implications on the history of the dynamics of law and religion.

This introductory chapter uses the framework of pedagogical choice to articulate and compare competing visions of how the field should be conceptualized and taught. Part 2 explicates the practical challenge that renders pedagogy in the field of comparative constitutional law unusually difficult – namely, the problem of capacity. Part 3 articulates and evaluates five competing models of pedagogy, which might be called instrumentalism, tourism, immersion, abstraction, and representation. Each model is defined by a distinctive set of pedagogical goals and a practical strategy for pursuing those goals in the face of the problem of capacity. Part 4 uses the contents of Constitutionalism in Context to illustrate how the representation model might be implemented in textbook form, and what intellectual and pedagogical benefits might result. Many of the representation model’s unique benefits stem from the fact that it invites and even demands that we explore what might be called boundary cases – namely, extreme, novel, or otherwise nonstandard cases that require us to test or apply familiar concepts and strategies in unfamiliar ways. Part 5 concludes by arguing that the challenges of teaching comparative constitutional law call for pedagogical pluralism.

Saints and relics are not particularly prominent in classical canon law. Canons dealing with the subject are few, and they focus above all on the authenticity of saints and relics and the liturgy surrounding their worship. The historical relevance of these regulations depends less on canon law itself than on the outstanding importance of saints in medieval life.

The design and redesign of various editions of Invisible Man serves as an index of Ellison's fluctuating status in the literary marketplace. From Random House’s modernist dust jackets to Signet’s eye-catching pulps to Vintage’s “hip” reprints, the designs of Ellison’s books reveal the surprising turns by which his work (and midcentury modernism generally) has been incorporated into institutions of reading. This chapter approaches the history of those designs as a privileged site for examining Ellison’s canonization as an American author.

A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (1881) represented major reorientations of Ibsen’s dramatic authorship, initiating a turn to middle-class life treated with tragic seriousness and radicalism. These plays made Ibsen the spearhead of the Scandinavian ‘Modern Breakthrough’, reaffirming his literary superiority, while at the same time bringing new levels of commercial success. The reorientation was made possible by the literary dynamics unfolding in Scandinavia at the time. By the early 1880s, Ibsen gave up on his ambition to get a foothold in Germany, moved back to Italy (1880–5) and once more prioritized his home markets. His association with the Literary Left was not a lasting one, however. With An Enemy of the People (1882) and The Wild Duck (1884), he distanced himself from social criticism and gradually established a position all his own. Moving back again to Munich (1885–91), he eventually experienced a breakthrough also in German literature and theatre from 1887, followed by Britain from 1889. After Ibsen again settled in Norway in 1891, he wrote for a European market, concluded his production with a series of self-reflective plays, and tried to frame his oeuvre as a continuously unfolding and self-sufficient whole.

The eighteenth century is defined as the definitive period of modern Kabbalah, echoing revolutionary changes in Europe and America. The natural focus here is on the first three generations of Hasidism, as the first enduring kabbalistic social movement. Magic and sociology join theology and ideology to convey the richness of the movement. Extensive analysis is also devoted to the movement's opponents, spearheaded by R. Eliyahu, the Gaon of Vilna. The chapter's main innovation is the extensive treatment of R. Shalom Shar‘abi (Rashash) and the hegemony that he and his close students established in Near Eastern communities. Here the stress is on the three-dimensional depiction of the kabbalistic universe, and the accompanying doctrines of relativity, interchangeability, temporality and nominalism. Another innovation is the exposure of lesser known circles. The chapter concludes with discussions of the role of Kabbalah in the general and Jewish philosophical wave, as well as a summary of general characteristics of the century's Kabbalah, such as individualization, greater focus on everyday life and a search for totality.

This chapter assesses the impact of co-rule on the duchess’ political networks, using this external perspective which rarely features in studies of shared power to concretize the contemporary perceptions of joint authority. The stability, composition, and affiliations of two well-documented groups within the administration – the ducal council and the regional officials across Brittany – differentiate Jeanne and Charles’ scope of administration according to both chronological and geographic circumstances. Despite these differences, Jeanne actively worked together with Charles to reward their followers’ loyalty and maintain these political relationships; correspondingly, service to the duchess and duke was largely interchangeable, even for formal relationships such as homage. This relatively level hierarchy further links spousal co-rule to the other power-sharing structures in the medieval aristocracy, which promoted the idea (if not always the practice) of equality between lords.

Borges uses his celebrity as a writer to make public statements about the political situation in Argentina, at the same time as he continues the work of re-defining Argentine culture that he had initiated in the 1920s. From 1980 and then at the time of the Falklands War (1982), he criticized the dictatorship’s domestic policy. There is coherence between the literary conceptions expressed at this time and Borges’s public statements.

The final chapter of the book puts forward a new theory about the canonization of royal saints in early Rus. I suggest that there was a long-overlooked dimension to the creation of these sacred heroes: one that was not exclusively a matter of miracles and investigations, but of narratives and ritual myth-making. Indeed, the medieval hymnography for Vladimir and his kin indicates that an important, and hitherto undiscovered, process had taken place in Rus in the first few centuries after the conversion. The baptismal rites of the Byzantine church had informed the story of Olga’s baptism, and this story later became a part of her liturgical office. The episcopal prayers said during the divine liturgy had helped to inspire the chronicle accounts for Vladimir, which had in turn helped to inspire the hymns chanted on his feast day. The Eucharistic rites had shaped the writing of the chronicle tale of Boris and Gleb, which then subsequently shaped the writing of their early liturgical offices. Hymns became history and became hymns again. Prayers became the written past and became prayers again. Ultimately, it was this liturgical-historiographical-liturgical loop that permitted select members of the Rurikid dynasty to enter into the liturgical past.