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The book deals with the reception of Georgian national literature in the context of the world literary process. It depicts the place of Georgian literature on the world literary map, starting from Middle Ages and going through the different periods including the Soviet and Post-soviet epochs. Important terms are world literature, literary canon, Georgian literary canon, and periodization. The research is based upon a comparative approach, using modern theoretical methodologies. The Author provid...

Because of their visibility in society and ability to shape public opinion, prominent literary figures were among the first targets of Communist repression, torture, and incarceration. Authors such as Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn famously documented the experience of internment in Soviet gulags. Little, however, has been published in the English language on the work of writers imprisoned by other countries of the Soviet bloc. For the first time, The Walls Behind the Curtain presents a collection of...

The Orange Revolution in November/December 2004 has unambiguously determined the future orientation of Ukraine: Joining the European Union has obtained top priority. "Europe" is understood here not as a geographical or historical term, but as a normative concept including respect for human and civil rights, rule of law, division of powers, parliamentary democracy, open and pluralistic society and so on. The publication has two aims: a critical analysis and evaluation of the efforts of Ukraine un...

This comparative study analyzes the ways that Central European writers used stereotypes of the Turks to develop their national identities from the early modern period to the present. Charles D. Sabatos uses Andre Gingrich's concept of "frontier Orientalism" to foreground his analysis of Central European Orientalism, designating the Russian Empire and the Balkans as the occident and the Turks as the oriental "Other." This study applies theoretical approaches to literary history-as developed by sc...

The Narratologia series publishes state-of-the-art monographs and collective volumes devoted to modern narrative theory and its historical reconstruction in all the philological disciplines. It is the first narratological forum of its kind in Germany. In addition to literary texts, the series focuses on narration in everyday contexts, in pictorial media, in film and in the new media as well as on narration in historiography, ethnology, medicine, and the law. The series publishes in German and...

More than 700 `utopian’ novels are published in Russia every year. These utopias – meaning here fantasy fiction, science fiction, space operas or alternative history – do not set out merely to titillate; instead they express very real Russian anxieties: be they territorial right-sizing, loss of imperial status or turning into a `colony’ of the West. Contributors to this innovative collection use these narratives to re-examine post-Soviet Russian political culture and identity. Interrogating the...

The five year friendship and marriage of the writer Anton Chekhov and the actress Olga Knipper, who created many of the central female roles in his plays, is one of the most extraordinary love stories in the history of the theatre. Because of Knipper's work at the Moscow Art Theatre and Chekhov's illness which bound him to Yalta, their relationship flourished through a constant stream of letters between them. Temperamentally, the actress and writer were at odds and the letters reflect their life...

The author of Clinical Lessons on Life and Madness: Dostoevsky’s Characters draws on Dostoevsky's universe to illuminate psychoanalytic theory and practice. Using Dostoevsky’s characters as case studies, the author discusses the various psychoanalytic concepts they embody, and shows how these insights can be applied to therapeutic understanding. By considering the people who populate Dostoevsky’s world as personifying a whole spectrum of human possibilities and modes of relation, Heitor O'Dwyer...

Der Anfang und das Ende geben einer jeden Erzahlung einen Rahmen. Bisher ist jedoch nur unzureichend untersucht worden, wie sich der Anfang, das Ende sowie deren Zusammenhang gestalten. Durch eine strukturalistische Zugangsweise zum Text zeigt der Band je eigene Modelle fur die Analyse des Anfangs und des Endes. Eine UEbersicht zeigt zudem, wie der Residualtext vom Anfang zum Ende uberleiten kann. Der Adoleszenzroman eignet sich als konventionalisierte Kommunikationsform als Grundlage fur die Ko...

Throughout much of the 20th century, literary theory came to be considered the queen discipline of literary studies. It failed, though, to deliver the promises it carried from its onset as an academic field of inquiry and, came to be shrunk and side-lined in the last three or four decades. The author describes and discusses 20th century literary theory and its appeal to scientific methodology. His aim is to depict the intrinsic motives of its downfall. The book focuses on the appeal to scientifi...

Being Poland offers a unique analysis of the cultural developments that took place in Poland after World War One, a period marked by Poland's return to independence. Conceived to address the lack of critical scholarship on Poland's cultural restoration, Being Poland illuminates the continuities, paradoxes, and contradictions of Poland's modern and contemporary cultural practices, and challenges the narrative typically prescribed to Polish literature and film. Reflecting the radical changes, ri...

Failure as a pervasive occurrence in life has rarely been investigated by sociology, even though the collapse of plans, unattainability of goals and breakdown of vital relationships are ordinary experiences. The study of early-21st-century fiction reveals that imaginative literature at present explores the lacunae of failure, disillusionment and collapse as central narrative themes. About fifty years after Samuel Beckett, in whose works the failing of expression became a major concern, postmille...

In "Reading Chekhov" Janet Malcolm takes on three roles: literary critic, biographer and journalist. Her close readings of the stories and plays are interwoven with episodes from Chekhov's life and framed by an account of a recent journey she made to St Petersburg. Writing of Chekhov's life, Malcolm demonstrates how the shadow of death that hovered over most of his literary career - he became consumptive in his 20s and died in his 40s - is almost everywhere reflected in the work. She writes of h...

Writing Travel investigates the ways in which two major Latin American authors, Roberto Bolano and Juan Jose Saer, engage with travel and space in their literary work. Travel and space are structures of representation within which cultural traditions are interrogated, reassessed and reformulated and therefore fundamental to the understanding of the critical fabric of the texts themselves. The book enquires into the politics of representation in Bolano's and Saer's work and the cultural and ideol...

Las llamadas literaturas indigenas comprenden uno de los campos mas investigados en el contexto de las denominadas literaturas latinoamericanas. Representaciones y funcionalizaciones literarias de las dinamicas de encuentros, desencuentros, convivencias, malvivencias, dialogos posibles y frustrados entre las sociedades autoctonas de Sudamerica e Isla de Pascua y los grupos hegemonicos de sus respectivos contextos constituyen algunos de los ejes que guian las reflexiones de las contribuciones con...

The tender plant of Albanian literature grew in a rocky soil. It was late to evolve and its development, indeed its very existence, was threatened in many periods. "Albanian Literature: A Short History" tells the story of the survival and growth of Albanian creative writing beginning with the earliest thirteenth century texts of Theodor of Shkodra, tracing the development of the modern literature of Buzuku, Budi and Bogdani, the incorporation of the Muslim influences of Frakulla and Kycyku and c...

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature examines key aspects and manifestations of 20th- and 21st-century Bulgarian literature by way of the global literary landscape. The first volume to bring together in English the perspectives of prominent writers, translators, and scholars of Bulgarian literature and culture, this long-overdue collection identifies correlations between national and world aesthetic ideologies and literary traditions. It situates Bulgarian literature within an array of cont...