Other Renaissances A New Approach to World Literature

Other Renaissances is a collection of twelve essays discussing renaissances outside the Italian and Italian prompted European Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The collection proposes an approach to reframing the Renaissance in which the European Renaissance becomes an imaginative idea, rather than a particular moment in time.

Brenda Deen Schildgen is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California Davis. She has published on Dante, Chaucer, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Augustine, and on the reception of Dante in India. She is the author of books on the Gospel of Mark, one of which won a Choice Award in 1999, one on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (Pagans, Tartars, Jews, and Moslems in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales) and another on Dante (Dante and the Orient). Schildgen is the recipient of numerous fellowships including NEH, PEW Foundation, and the National Humanities and is presently writing a book on European iconoclastic outbreaks and preservation movements entitled Heritage or Heresy: Destruction and Preservation of Cultural Legacy. Gang Zhou received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Davis in 2003. She taught at UC Davis, George Mason University and is presently an Assistant Professor of Chinese at the Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge. Her recent essay “The Chinese Renaissance: A Transcultural Reading” appeared in PMLA. Currently she is at work on a larger project concerning diglossia and world literature. Sander L. Gilman is Distinguished Professor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences at Emory University as of 2005. A cultural and literary historian, he is the author or editor of over seventy books. His biography of Franz Kafka appeared in 2005; his most recent edited volume Body and Mind in the History of Psychiatry appeared in 2006. He is the author of the basic study of the visual stereotyping of the mentally ill, Seeing the Insane, published in 1982 (reprinted: 1996) as well as the standard study of Jewish Self-Hatred, published in 1986.