Product Description: The end of communism in Europe has tended to be discussed mainly in the context of political science and history. This book, in contrast, assesses the cultural consequences for Europe of the disappearance of the Soviet bloc. Adopting a multi-disciplinary approach, the book examines the new narratives about national, individual and European identities that have emerged in literature, theatre and other cultural media, investigates the impact of the re-unification of the continent on the mental landscape of Western Europe as well as Eastern Europe and Russia, and explores the new borders in the form of divisive nationalism that have reappeared since the disappearance of the Iron Curtain...read more

Product Description: It has seemed at times that there is no neutral territory between those who see Bakhtin as the practitioner of a kind of neo-Marxist, or at least materialist, deconstruction and those who look at the same texts and see a defender of traditional, liberal humanist values and classical conceptions of order, a conservative in the true sense of the term...read more

Gender and Sexuality in Russian Civilisation considers gender and sexuality in modern Russia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Chapters look individually at gender and sexuality through history, art, folklore, philosophy or literature,but are also arranged into sections according to the arguments they develop. A number of chapters also consider Russia in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. Thematic sections include:*Gender and Power*Gender and National Identity*Sexual Identity and Artistic Impression*Literary Discourse of Male and Female Sexualities*Sexuality and Literature in Contemporary Russian Society

Product Description: It has seemed at times that there is no neutral territory between those who see Bakhtin as the practitioner of a kind of neo-Marxist, or at least materialist, deconstruction and those who look at the same texts and see a defender of traditional, liberal humanist values and classical conceptions of order, a conservative in the true sense of the term...read more

Product Description: Modern Russia has been shaped by Peter the Great's sudden attempt to transform it into a European country. Since shapeshifting and identity are so closely linked in Russian history, the same theme of metamorphosis is prevalent in Russian literature and is examined here as a Russian theme, structuring principle and source of artistic identity...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Examines metamorphoses in the works of prominent representatives of the divided Russian intelligentsia: the Symbolists; the most famous emigre writer, Nabokov; Olesha, the 'fellow traveller' attempting to find his place in the Soviet state; the enthusiastic poet of the Bolshevik movement, Mayakovsky; and finally, Russia's greatest film director, Sergei Eisenstein...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description:  Peter Barta offers a new perspective on the narrative apparatus in three prominent modernist European city novels.  He argues that the narrative combination of rambling, thinking, observing, and talking creates a "peripatetic" perspective, a manner of facing oneself and the world...read more

Russian Literature and the Classics attempts to fill a gap. To date there has been no book-length, systematic study of the impact of antiquity on Russian literature and culture. While by no means claiming to offer a comprehensive approach, the authors focus on various aspects of the influence which the Classics have had on Russian literature at particularly significant junctures - the beginning of the nineteenth century; the age of the great Russian realist novel; the "Silver Age"; Stalin's terror; the "Thaw" after 1956; and the period just before the collapse of Soviet society. In their introductory essay the editors offer an overview of the Classical Tradition. In it, they provide an insight into the contrasting ways in which that tradition manifested itself in the literatures of Western Europe and of Russia.

Product Description: The 10 articles in this volume present a comparative examination of 19th and 20th-century Russian literature. While the focus of each study is on the fo reign moorings of Russian literature, the volume also interprets prominent European texts from a comparative perspective.