Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preliminary Material / Editor: Christine Arkinstall -- Introduction / Editor: Christine Arkinstall -- Acknowledgements / Editor: Christine Arkinstall -- 1. The Scholar in the Labyrinth / Rosemary Lloyd -- 2. Getting There or Not - the Fortunes of the Initiatic Journey and the Crisis of Culture / Paul Gifford -- 3. Journey, Quest and (Self-)Discovery in the Narrative of Stanislao Nievo / Gaetano Rando -- 4. Victor Segalens Quest in Siddhartha / Isabelle Gros -- 5. In Search of the Other Subjectivity: Autobiography in the Works of Sibilla Aleramo / Susan Jacobs -- 6. Quest or Question: Female Identity in Dacia Maraini’s La lunga vita di Marianna Ucrìa / Pauline Dagnino -- 7. At Sea on a Desert Island: Defoe, Tournier and Coetzee / Victoria Carchidi -- 8. Chiasmus of the Woman Writer: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz / Alfred Arteaga -- 9. Social Exorcisms: Cuba’s Quest for an American Discourse / Ivan A. Schulman -- 10. Learning to Die: The Poetic Quest of Pablo Armando Fernández / John Brotherton -- 11. Quest, Voyage and Escape in Hubert Aquin and Anne Hébert / Virginia Harger-Grinling -- 12. The Transformation of the Quest from Modernity to Postmodernity and the Third Industrial Revolution / Philip R. Wood.

What does the word “quest” conjure up? A journey in the hope of fulfillment, an exploration of identities, questions, the nature of research itself, or the darker side of quest in the form of conquest, colonisation and displacement? These are some of the threads taken up and developed in this collection of essays by established and emerging scholars. Germaine Greer, Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, Serge Doubrovsky, A. S. Byatt, Novalis, Melville, Valéry, Beckett, Stanislao Nievo, Victor Segalen, Sibilla Aleramo, Dacia Maraini, Defoe, Tournier, Coetzee, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Cintio Vitier, Domingo del Monte, Ramón de Palma, Pablo Armando Fernández, Hubert Aquin, Anne Hébert, Homer, Proust, Balzac and Robbe-Grillet provide the literary voices that invite these scholars to embark on their own quests into subjects as diverse as the relationships between texts, authors and readers, the initiatic journey, spirituality and enlightenment, female autobiography and identity, oppression, imperialism and postcolonial discourses, not to mention the history of the quest itself. The result is a rich tapestry of thought-provoking insights into the inexhaustible connections between literature and quest.

English

Description based on print version record.