Decadence and Modernism in European and Russian Literature and Culture PDF Download

Author: Jonathan Stone
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030344525
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Decadence and Modernism in European and Russian Literature and Culture: Aesthetics and Anxiety in the 1890s rewrites the story of early modernist literature and culture by drawing out the tensions underlying its simultaneous engagement with Decadence and Symbolism, the unsustainable combination of this world and the other. With a broadly framed literary and cultural approach, Jonathan Stone examines a shift in perspective that explodes the notion of reality and showcases the uneasy relationship between the tangible and intangible aspects of the surrounding world. Modernism quenches a growing fascination with the ephemeral and that which cannot be seen while also doubling down on the significance of the material world and finding profound meaning in the physical and the corporeal. Decadence and Symbolism complement the broader historical trajectory of the fin de siècle by affirming the novelty of a modernist mindset and offering an alternative to the empirical and positivistic atmosphere of the nineteenth century. Stone seeks to recreate a significant historical and cultural moment in the development of modernity, a moment that embraces the concept of Decadence while repurposing its aesthetic and social import to help navigate the fundamental changes that accompanied the dawn of the twentieth century.

Author: Leonid Livak
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421426420
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
Aiming to open an overdue debate about the academic fields of Russian and transnational modernist studies, this book is intended for an audience of scholars in comparative literary and cultural studies, specialists in Russian and transnational modernism, and researchers engaged with European cultural historiography.

Author: Carol Ueland
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793618305
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
This book examines the Russian biography series, The Lives of Remarkable People, and its role in Russian culture. The contributors examine the interplay of research and imagination in biographical narratives, the changing perceptions of what constitutes literary greatness, and the subversive possibilities of biography during eras of censorship.

Author: Stephen C. Hutchings
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521580099
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
This book explores the unique way in which Russian culture constructs the notion of everyday life, or byt, and offers the first unified reading of Silver-age narrative which it repositions at the centre of Russian modernism. Drawing on semiotics and theology, Stephen C. Hutchings argues that byt emerged from a dialogue between two traditions, one reflected in western representational aesthetics for which daily existence figures as neutral and normative, the other encapsulated in the Orthodox emphasis on iconic embodiment. Hutchings identifies early 'Decadent' formulations of byt as a milestone after which writers from Chekhov to Rozanov sought to affirm the iconic potential hidden in Russian realism's critique of representationalism. Provocative, yet careful, textual analyses reveal a consistent urge to redefine art's function as one not of representing life, but of transfiguring the everyday.

Author: Kathryn N. McDaniel
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476651272
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
Potterversity: Essays Exploring the World of Harry Potter presents a written companion to the popular, "Hermione-Approved" MuggleNet podcast by the same name. Selected from the top Potter Studies scholars in the field, the diverse authors in the volume provide a range of interpretations of wizarding world stories. Essays include analysis of genre conventions, literary and religious symbolism, the role of games in the series, pedagogical approaches, and politically challenging issues like U.S. race relations, colonialism, and gender and sexuality--including direct attention to J.K. Rowling's controversial statements about trans people. Grouped into the sections "Occult Knowledge," "Ancient Magic," "A Question of Character," "Self and Other," "Playing Potter," and "Teaching, the Hogwarts Way," partnered essays precede transcripts of podcast conversations, led by the hosts of Potterversity. The book's essays and conversations aim to engage not only the mind but the spirit as well--the emotional, personal, and moral responses the Potterverse has evoked in so many people around the world. Fundamentally, this book demonstrates that the characters, stories, and situations of the magical realm promote thinking that helps us navigate our more mundane but no less dangerous world. Perhaps even more importantly, they help us to recognize the magic amid our everyday Muggle realities.

Author: Katherine Bowers
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781316359570
Category : Decadence in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Russian literature has a reputation for gloomy texts, especially during the late nineteenth century. This volume argues that a 'fin-de-siècle' mood informed Russian literature long before the chronological end of the nineteenth century, in ways that had significant impact on the development of Russian realism. Some chapters consider ideas more readily associated with fin-de-siècle Europe such as degeneration theory, biodeterminism, Freudian psychoanalysis or apocalypticism alongside earlier Russian realist texts by writers such as Turgenev, Dostoevsky or Tolstoy. Other chapters explore the changes that realism underwent as modernism emerged, examining later nineteenth-century or early twentieth-century texts in the context of the earlier realist tradition or their own cultural moment. Overall, a team of emerging and established scholars of Russian literature and culture present a wide range of creative and insightful readings that shed new light on later realism in all its manifestations.

Author: Colleen McQuillen
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
ISBN: 029929613X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
Masked and costume balls thrived in Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries during a period of rich literary and theatrical experimentation. The first study of its kind, The Modernist Masquerade examines the cultural history of masquerades in Russia and their representations in influential literary works. The masquerade's widespread appearance as a literary motif in works by such writers as Anna Akhmatova, Leonid Andreev, Andrei Bely, Aleksandr Blok, and Fyodor Sologub mirrored its popularity as a leisure-time activity and illuminated its integral role in the Russian modernist creative consciousness. Colleen McQuillen charts how the political, cultural, and personal significance of lavish costumes and other forms of self-stylizing evolved in Russia over time. She shows how their representations in literature engaged in dialog with the diverse aesthetic trends of Decadence, Symbolism, and Futurism and with the era's artistic philosophies.

Author: Irina Shevelenko
Publisher:
ISBN: 0299320405
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Presents modernism in Russia through the lens of its engagement with politics, science, religion, and other social practices. In the early twentieth century, when many Russian social institutions looked to the past, modernist arts powerfully amplified a gamut of new ideas about individual and collective transformation.

Author: University of California, Berkeley. Center for Slavic and East European Studies
Publisher: Berkeley : University of California Press
ISBN: 9780520069985
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 494

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Book Description
The twenty-two essays in Cultural Mythologies of Russian Modernism, six of which appear in Russian, display the enormous advances that have taken place among Slavists in the study of the fascinating, but tragically circumscribed period in Russian literature that extends from the turn of the century to the Stalinist holocaust. This collection offers a definitive statement of how features of the Pushkin era were transformed during the Modernist age into a cultural mythology that encompassed personal and literary behavior, and such far-reaching issues as national identity and cultural destiny.

Author: Michael St John
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351902563
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
This collection of fifteen essays looks at the theme of decadence and its recurring manifestations in European literature and literary criticism from medieval times to the present day. Various definitions of the term are explored, including the notion of decadence as physical decay. Some of the essays draw parallels between modernist and postmodernist notions of decadence. Similarities are detected between fin de siècle decadence at the end of the nineteenth century (which reaches its apotheosis in the character of Eugene Wrayburn in Our Mutual Friend) and depictions of decadence in our own age as we enter the new millennium.