2024 Excellence Award for Collaborative Research awarded to four Academia Europaea members#
Four AE members, Dirk Göttsche, Robert Weninger, Svend Erik Larsen and the late Patrizia Lombardo, have spearheaded the international project, Landscapes of Realism: Rethinking Literary Realism in Comparative Perspective 2015–20. It was funded by the Leverhulme Foundation and published by John Benjamins in two volumes for the ICLA’s series “Comparative History of Literature in European Languages” 2021–22. The project has received the 2024 Excellence Award for Collaborative Research.
The prize is awarded by the European Society of Comparative Literature
for “an outstanding edited volume which makes an original contribution to the field of Comparative Literature” and recognizes “the often undervalued creative work of editors”.
Over five years in the making, Landscapes of Realism was edited by Dirk Göttsche, Rosa Mucignat and Robert Weninger (vol. 1), and by Svend Erik Larsen, Steen Bille Jørgensen and Margaret R. Higonnet (vol. 2). It is a collaborative, interdisciplinary investigation of realism as a literary and cultural phenomenon that is fundamental to many forms of representation and yet eludes stable definitions. The volumes include contributions by 50 scholars and covers material from 4 continents and in over 20 languages, taking a transmedial and transhistorical approach to the question of “what is realism”. This large-scale, comparative project provides a novel understanding of realism as an ongoing experiment permanently transcending its own boundaries to capture a world in transition.
