How Russian Literature Became Great (NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies)
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- Synopsis
- How Russian Literature Became Great explores the cultural and political role of a modern national literature, orchestrated in a Slavonic key but resonating far beyond Russia's borders. Rolf Hellebust investigates a range of literary tendencies, philosophies, and theories from antiquity to the present: Roman jurisprudence to German Romanticism, French Enlightenment to Czech Structuralism, Herder to Hobsbawm, Samuel Johnson to Sainte-Beuve, and so on. Besides the usual Russian suspects from Pushkin to Chekhov, Hellebust includes European writers: Byron and Shelley, Goethe and Schiller, Chateaubriand and Baudelaire, Dante, Mickiewicz, and more. As elsewhere, writing in Russia advertises itself via a canon of literary monuments constituting an atemporal "ideal order among themselves" (T.S. Eliot). And yet this is a tradition that could only have been born at a specific moment in the golden nineteenth-century age of historiography and nation-building. The Russian example reveals the contradictions between immutability and innovation, universality and specificity at the heart of modern conceptions of tradition from Sainte-Beuve through Eliot and down to the present day. The conditions of its era of formation—the prominence of the crucial literary-historical question of the writer's social function, and the equation of literature with national identity—make the Russian classical tradition the epitome of a unified cultural text, with a complex narrative in which competing stories of progress and decline unfold through the symbolic biographical encounters of the authors who constitute its members. How Russian Literature Became Great thus offers a new paradigm for understanding the paradoxes of modern tradition.
- Copyright:
- 2023
Book Details
- Book Quality:
- Publisher Quality
- Book Size:
- 252 Pages
- ISBN-13:
- 9781501773426
- Related ISBNs:
- 9781501773419, 9781501773433
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- Date of Addition:
- 01/14/24
- Copyrighted By:
- Cornell University
- Adult content:
- No
- Language:
- English
- Has Image Descriptions:
- No
- Categories:
- Literature and Fiction, Language Arts
- Grade Levels:
- Graduate Student
- Submitted By:
- Bookshare Staff
- Usage Restrictions:
- This is a copyrighted book.