Author: Jonathan Stone Publisher: Springer Nature ISBN: 3030344525 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 228
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: Johns Hopkins University Press ISBN: 1421426412 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 388
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 : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 351
Book Description
The legendary Russian biography series, The Lives of Remarkable People, has played a significant role in Russian culture from its inception in 1890 until today. The longest running biography series in world literature, it spans three centuries and widely divergent political and cultural epochs: Imperial, Soviet, and Post-Soviet Russia. The authors argue that the treatment of biographical figures in the series is a case study for continuities and changes in Russian national identity over time. Biography in Russia and elsewhere remains a most influential literary genre and the distinctive approach and branding of the series has made it the economic engine of its publisher, Molodaia gvardiia. The centrality of biographies of major literary figures in the series reflects their heightened importance in Russian culture. The contributors examine the ways that biographies of Russia's foremost writers shaped the literary canon while mirroring the political and social realities of both the subjects’ and their biographers' times. Starting with Alexander Pushkin and ending with Joseph Brodsky, the authors analyze the interplay of research and imagination in biographical narrative, the changing perceptions of what constitutes literary greatness, and the subversive possibilities of biography during eras of political censorship.
Author: Stephen C. Hutchings Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 0521580099 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 314
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
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: 9781316358979 Category : Decadence in literature Languages : en Pages : 304
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: Irina Shevelenko Publisher: ISBN: 0299320405 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 272
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
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
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.
Author: Andrei Bely Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 0231552939 Category : Literary Collections Languages : en Pages : 611
Book Description
Andrei Bely is best known for the modernist masterwork Petersburg, a paradigmatic example of how modern writers strove to evoke the fragmentation of language, narrative, and consciousness. In the early twentieth century, Bely embarked on his life as an artist with texts he called “symphonies”—works experimenting with genre and sound, written in a style that shifts among prosaic, poetic, and musical. This book presents Bely’s four Symphonies—“Dramatic Symphony,” “Northern Symphony,” “The Return,” and “Goblet of Blizzards”—fantastically strange stories that capture the banality of life, the intimacy of love, and the enchantment of art. The Symphonies are quintessential works of modernist innovation in which Bely developed an evocative mythology and distinctive aesthetics. Influenced by Russian Symbolism, Bely believed that the role of modern artists was to imbue seemingly small details with cosmic significance. The Symphonies depict the drabness of daily life with distinct irony and satire—and then soar out of turn-of-the-century Moscow into the realm of the infinite and eternal. They conjure worlds that resemble our own but reveal elements of artifice and magic, hinting at mystical truths and the complete transfiguration of life. Showcasing the protean quality of Bely’s language and storytelling, Jonathan Stone’s translation of the Symphonies features some of the most captivating and beguiling writing of Russia’s Silver Age.
Author: Jonathan Stone
Author: Leonid Livak
Author: Carol Ueland
Author: Stephen C. Hutchings
Author: Kathryn N. McDaniel
Author: Katherine Bowers
Author: Irina Shevelenko
Author: University of California, Berkeley. Center for Slavic and East European Studies
Author: Michael St John
Author: Andrei Bely