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Few literary phenomena are as elusive and yet as persistent as realism. While it responds to the perennial impulse to use literature to reflect on experience, it also designates a specific set of literary and artistic practices that emerged in response to Western modernity. Landscapes of Realism is a two-volume collaborative interdisciplinary exploration of this vast territory, bringing together leading-edge new criticism on the realist paradigms that were first articulated in nineteenth-century Europe but have since gone on globally to transform the literary landscape. Tracing the manifold ways in which these paradigms are developed, discussed and contested across time, space, cultures and media, this first volume tackles in its five core essays and twenty-five case studies such questions as why realism emerged when it did, why and how it developed such a transformative dynamic across languages, to what extent realist poetics remain central to art and popular culture after 1900, and how generally to reassess realism from a twenty-first-century comparative perspective.
This volume is a comprehensive Handbook of Russian thought that provides an in-depth survey of major figures, currents, and developments in Russian intellectual history, spanning the period from the late eighteenth century to the late twentieth century. Written by a group of distinguished scholars as well as some younger ones from Russia, Europe, the United States, and Canada, this Handbook reconstructs a vibrant picture of the intellectual and cultural life in Russia and the Soviet Union during the most buoyant period in the country's history. Contrary to the widespread view of Russian modernity as a product of intellectual borrowing and imitation, the essays collected in this volume reveal the creative spirit of Russian thought, which produced a range of original philosophical and social ideas, as well as great literature, art, and criticism. While rejecting reductive interpretations, the Handbook employs a unifying approach to its subject matter, presenting Russian thought in the context of the country's changing historical landscape. This Handbook will open up a new intellectual world to many readers and provide a secure base for its further exploration.
Many are familiar with European modernists' interest in Chinese art and poetry, however less well known is that Russian literature and art at the turn of 20th century also flourished in a sustained dialogue with China. In Fin-de-siècle Russia and Chinese Aesthetics, Jinyi Chu reconsiders the place of Russia in the genealogy of global modernism by exploring the enduring impact of China on pre-revolutionary Russian culture. This book argues that fin-de-siècle Russian ideas about increasing global cultural and socioeconomic interconnectedness emerged from their unsettling encounters with China. Drawing on literary texts, paintings, advertisements, official documents, and archival work in Russ...
Contemporary Russia is often viewed as a centralised regime based in Moscow, with dependent provinces, made subservient by Putin’s policies limiting regional autonomy. This book, however, demonstrates that beyond this largely political view, by looking at Russia’s regions more in cultural and social terms, a quite different picture emerges, of a Russia rich in variety, with different regional identities, cultures, traditions and memories. The book explores how identities are formed and rethought in contemporary Russia, and outlines the nature of particular regional identities, from Siberia and the Urals to southern Russia, from the Russian heartland to the non-Russian republics.
Tapping into the emergence of scholarly comedy studies since the 2000s, this collection brings new perspectives to bear on the Dostoevskian light side. Funny Dostoevksy demonstrates how and why Dostoevsky is one of the most humorous 19th-century authors, even as he plumbs the depths of the human psyche and the darkest facets of European modernity. The authors go beyond the more traditional categories of humor, such as satire, parody, and the carnivalesque, to apply unique lenses to their readings of Dostoevsky. These include cinematic slapstick and the body in Crime and Punishment, the affective turn and hilarious (and deadly) impatience in Demons, and ontological jokes in Notes from Undergr...
Relations between the Russian nobility and the state underwent a dynamic transformation during the roughly one hundred-year period encompassing the reign of Catherine II (1762–1796) and ending with the Great Reforms initiated by Alexander II. This period also saw the gradual appearance, by the early decades of the nineteenth century, of a novelistic tradition that depicted the Russian society of its day. In Noble Subjects, Bella Grigoryan examines the rise of the Russian novel in relation to the political, legal, and social definitions that accrued to the nobility as an estate, urging readers to rethink the cultural and political origins of the genre. By examining works by Novikov, Karamzi...
In Editing Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy, Susanne Fusso examines Mikhail Katkov's literary career without vilification or canonization, focusing on the ways in which his nationalism fueled his drive to create a canon of Russian literature and support its recognition around the world. In each chapter, Fusso considers Katkov's relationship with a major Russian literary figure. In addition to Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy, she explores Katkov's interactions with Vissarion Belinsky, Evgeniia Tur, and the legacy of Aleksandr Pushkin. This groundbreaking study will fascinate scholars, students, and general readers interested in Russian literature and literary history.
An alternative version – the one Tolstoy originally intended, but has been hitherto unpublished – of Russia’s most famous novel; with a different ending, fewer digressions and an altered view of Napoleon – it’s time to look afresh at one of the world’s favourite books.
"The nineteenth-century novel is generally assumed to be concerned with private lives and social relations. But Russian fiction, obsessively focused on scenarios of state power, was an exception to the rule. In Sovereign Fictions, Ilya Kliger shows that this encounter between realist fiction and political authority gave Russian novels a form unlike their counterparts in the west. Kliger explores Russian realism's distinctive construals of sociality through a broad range of texts from the 1830s to the 1870s, including works by Dostoevsky, Gogol, and Pushkin, and several lesser-known but influential books of the period, including Mikhail Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time (1840), Ivan Goncharov's The Same Old Story (1847), Ivan Turgenev's Rudin (1856), Aleksei Pisemsky's One Thousand Souls (1858), and Vasily Sleptsov's Hard Times (1865). Kliger's book offers an important intervention in socially inflected theories of the novel and in current thinking on representations of power and historical poetics"--