The Czech writer Karel Capek (1890-1938) was renowned for his satirical play R.U.R., in which he coined the word "robot" (from the Czech word for "peasant")--a blistering attack on technology in the service of regimentation. Perhaps surprisingly, Capek was also a dedicated gardener. In THE GARDENER'S YEAR, his classic, month-by-month walk through ...
"The Arabian Nights" has become a synonym for the fabulous and the exotic. Every child is familiar with the stories of Aladdin, Sinbad the Sailor and Ali Baba. Yet very few people, even specialists in oriential literature, have a clear idea of when the book was written or what exactly it is. Far from being a batch of stories for children, "The ...
Russian literature arrived late on the European scene. Within several generations, its great novelists had shocked - and then conquered - the world. In this introduction to the rich and vibrant Russian tradition, Caryl Emerson weaves a narrative of recurring themes and fascinations across several centuries. Beginning with traditional Russian ...
For nearly half a century, the Iron Curtain obscured from Western eyes a vital group of national and regional writers. Seen as a whole, the literatures of Eastern Europe during the second half of the twentieth century are extraordinarily rich, and in recent years many Eastern European novelists, poets, and playwrights have attracted wider ...
This text examines how capitalism affected the culture of literature, publishing, book markets and readership in the turn-of-the-century Russia and the Kingdom of Poland. It draws parallels with and assesses literary developments in Russia and Poland in the late 20th century.
Developments in cultural history and literary criticism have suggested alternative ways of addressing the interpretation of reading. How did people read in the past? Where and why did they read? How were the manner and purpose of reading envisaged and recorded by contemporaries - and why? Drawing on fields as diverse as medieval pedagogy, textual ...
This text documents a virtually unknown chapter in the history of the refusal of Jews throughout the ages to surrender. The author employs wide-ranging scholarship to the Holocaust and the memories associated with it, in affirmation of both continuities and violent endings.
Now available in paperback, this is the first full-scale history of early modern English literature in nearly a century. It offers new perspectives on English literature produced in Britain between the Reformation and the Restoration. While providing the general coverage and specific information expected of a major history, its twenty-six chapters ...
This volume addresses the multiple, complex and overlapping, sometimes contradictory and frequently strange forms of knowledge in circulation during a period which has always been recognized as a turning point in the intellectual history of Western Europe, and which is described alternatively as "early modern" or "Renaissance". The problems of the ...
The largest anthology of its kind, Contemporary East European Poetry features 130 poets from ten countries and translated from fifteen languages, including Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, German, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Romanian, Croatian, Macedonian, Serbian, Slovenian, Bulgarian, and Yiddish. Focusing on poetry from the 1960s and 1970s, ...
For at least the last half-century, Strehler has been an influential and integral part of European theatrical life; today he is most closely associated with the Teatro Piccolo in Milan, Italy's foremost repertory theatre. Outside Italy, Strehler is best known through his directorship of the Paris-based Theatre de l'Europe, his opera productions, ...
Contesting the argument that Restoration and early eighteenth-century drama referred almost exclusively to domestic social and political issues, Empire on the English Stage 1660-1714 shows that the theatre was a crucial location for debates over England's contemporaneous colonial expansion. The book provides a comprehensive account of colonialism, ...
Johnson, Writing, and Memory demonstrates the importance of memory in Samuel Johnson's oeuvre. Greg Clingham argues that this is a notion of memory that is derived from the process of historical and creative writing, and is found to be embodied in works of literature and other cultural forms. He examines Johnson's writing, including his ...
Featuring 20th-century writers, including Nobel Prize winners Czeslaw Milosz and Wislawa Szymborska, as well as celebrated poet Zbigniew Herbert and internationally renowned Bruno Schulz, this collection captures the brilliance and originality of a literary culture rightly considered one of the most important and influential of our time. These ...
Samuel Johnson, one of the most renowned authors of the eighteenth century, became virtually a symbol of English national identity in the century following his death in 1784. In Samuel Johnson and the Making of Modern England Nicholas Hudson argues that Johnson not only came to personify English cultural identity but did much to shape it. Hudson ...
As the subject of ideological, aesthetic, and existential manipulations, the Polish home and its representation is an ever-changing phenomenon that absorbs new tendencies and, at the same time, retains its centrality to Polish literature, whether written in Poland or abroad. Framing the Polish Home is a pioneering work that explores the idea of ...
This book is intended to capture the interest of anyone who has been attracted to Russian culture through the greats of Russian literature, either through the texts themselves, or encountering them in the cinema, or opera. Rather than a conventional chronology of Russian literature, the book will explore the place and importance of literature of ...
For writers in the early modern period, thinking about royal favorites inevitably meant thinking about the uneasy intersection of the personal and the public in a political system traditionally organized around patronage and intimacy. Depictions of favoritism - in a variety of texts including plays, poems, libels, and pamphlets - explore the most ...
This comprehensive critical survey introduces readers to the principal themes and styles of literature in England since 1945. John Brannigan examines the complex nature of the relationship between literature and history, society and place, and argues that postwar literature is especially concerned with themes of social and cultural change. ...
This critical study assess the impact that contemporary writings concerning the philosophy of revolution had on the work of John Milton (1608-1674) and Andrew Marvell (1621-1678).
Martyrdom and Literature in Early Modern England provides a comprehensive comparison of how Protestant and Catholic martyrs were represented during the Reformation, the most intense period of religious persecution in English history. Through its focus on martyrs, it argues that Catholic and Protestant texts are produced by dialogue, even ...
Survivors of political violence give testimonies in families and communities, trials and truth commissions, religious institutions, psychotherapies, newspapers, documentaries, artworks, and even in solitude. Through spoken, written, and visual images, survivors' testimonies tell stories that may change history, polities, and life itself. In this ...
In Russian poetry, Boris Pasternak's "My Sister-Life" is the equivalent of "The Waste Land", "Spring", and "Harmonium". Written in 1917, the cycle of poems in "My Sister-Life" concentrates on personal journeys and loves, but is permeated by the tension and promise of the impending October revolution. Pasternak is an uncompromisingly complex poetic ...
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