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This highly original book imitates the protagonist, Agnes, of Kundera's novel Immortality. Like all readers of fiction, when Agnes steps out of the car, she steps out of the world of planned routes, responsibilities, and social self, and gives herself up to the discovery of a new landscape, an experience that will transform her. Francois Ricard's beautiful essay enters into the writings of Milan Kundera in much the same way. The landscape he explores in Agnes's Final Afternoon includes a chain o...

This new collection views Russian music through the Greek triad of "the Good, the True, and the Beautiful" to investigate how the idea of "nation" embeds itself in the public discourse about music and other arts with results at times invigorating, at times corrupting. In our divided, post-Cold War, and now post-9/11 world, Russian music, formerly a quiet corner on the margins of musicology, has become a site of noisy contention. Richard Taruskin assesses the political and cultural stakes that at...

Boleslaw Prus and the Jews shows the complexity of the so-called "Jewish question" in nineteenth-century Congress Poland and especially its significance in Prus' social concept reflected in his extensive body of journalistic work, fiction, and treatises. The book traces Prus' evolving worldview toward Jews, from his support of the Assimilation Program in his early years to his eventual support of Zionism. These contrasting ideas show us the complexity of the discourse on Jewish issues from the i...

Das Buch bringt religioese Konflikte in der galizischen Literatur zur Darstellung. Der Schwerpunkt liegt dabei auf der Analyse von literarischen Werken, die zwischen 1848 und 1914 entstanden, als Galizien noch "oesterreichisch" und durch eine grosse ethnisch-konfessionelle Vielfalt gepragt war. Zugleich stellt die Studie den Versuch dar, die literarische Deutung konfessioneller Beziehungen zwischen der roemisch-katholischen, griechisch-katholischen und judischen Bevoelkerung in Galizien unter Be...

Disputed Titles: Ireland, Scotland, and the Novel of Inheritance, 1798-1832 argues for the centrality of inheritance-often impeded, disrupted inheritance-to the novel's rise to preeminence in Britain during the Romantic period. Novels by Maria Edgeworth, Sydney Owenson, Charles Maturin, Walter Scott, and John Galt are densely populated by orphans, changelings, and lost and kidnapped heirs, and privilege a romance plot of dispossession that undermines the illusion of continuity implicit in the ve...

Sienkiewicz's Bodies focuses on the work of the most popular Polish writer from the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. It discusses the surprising success of Sienkiewicz's writing in relation to the dissection of optimistic illusion that takes place during a reading of its cruel prose. Sienkiewicz is seen as something more than a juggler of genius in narrative prose. This conservative writer, like the modernists, knew that there was no longer any way to construct a...

Franz Kafka is among the most intriguing and influential writers of the last century. During his lifetime he worked as a civil servant and published only a handful of short stories, the best known being The Transformation. His other three novels, published after his death, helped to found his reputation as a uniquely perceptive interpreter of the twentieth century. Discussing both Kafka's crisis-ridden life and the subtleties of his art, Ritchie Robertson provides an intriguing and accessible lo...

The Poetics of the Avant-garde in Literature, Arts, and Philosophy presents a range of chapters written by a highly international group of scholars from disciplines such as literary studies, arts, theatre, and philosophy to analyze the ambitions of avant-garde artists. Together, these essays highlight the interdisciplinary scope of the historic avant-garde and the interconnected of its artists. Contributors analyze topics such as abstraction and estrangement across the arts, the imaginary dial...

For more than 40 years Eastern European culture came under the sway of Soviet rule. What is the legacy of this period for cultural attitudes to the environment and the contemporary battle to confront climate change? This is the first in-depth study of the legacy of the Soviet era on attitudes to the environment in countries such as Poland, Hungary and Ukraine. Exploring responses in literature, culture and film to political projects such as the collectivisation of agricultural land, the expansi...

Comparing the affinities between the writers Capek and Chekhov, the author provides us with a thorough study that is long overdue. The parallels between the two great writers were first observed almost half a century ago, and commented on in passing by no less than seven scholars. The critics' allusions would suggest that similarity exists in the stories' quality, in the writers' artistic method, stylistic structure, and language, as well as in the atmosphere, or mood, of the narratives. The aff...

This collection of eight essays reassess Russian literature, paying particular attention to writings by women and to popular culture, and challenge conventional readings of the Russian "great tradition". The status of the literary canon is questioned and the position of the critic re-evaluated. The radical standpoint of the eight writers takes its orientation in particular from the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin and from western feminism.

Romanticism was always culturally diverse. Though English-language anthologies have previously tended to see Romanticism as predominantly British, the term itself actually originated in Germany, where it became the banner of a Europe-wide movement involving the profound intellectual and aesthetic changes which we now associate with modernity. This anthology is the first to place British Romanticism within a comprehensive and multi-lingual European context, showing how ideas and writers interconn...

Daniil Kharms (1905-42), Leningrad absurdist of the 1920s and 30s, was just about the last representative of the Russian literary avant-garde, whose careers and lives were blighted and curtailed amid the cultural and historical excesses of Stalinism. Unpublished and undiscussed for decades, Kharms's works gradually began to emerge from obscurity or from desk drawers in the 1960s, appearing at first mainly abroad, until glasnost brought them to the Soviet reader in the late 1980s. Research on Kha...