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Europe is a broad and multifaceted construct, variously understood as a geographical, political, legal, institutional, social, or cultural formation. It is characterized by numerous conflicts and processes of negotiation that have accompanied or sustained the development of normative orders and divergent conceptions of law, both in relation to individual states and to Europe as a whole. The same applies to the field of literature, language, and aesthetics; numerous myths and ideologies have shaped today’s understanding of Europe and still support it today. This volume examines how such processes were legally structured, and literarily addressed, criticized, and complemented. Its interdisci...
Otakar Zich’s Aesthetics of the Dramatic Art. Theoretical Dramaturgy (1931) laid the foundation of systematic modern theatre theory and helped establish theatre studies as an academic discipline. With an introduction, a contextual afterword and a glossary, this volume is the first complete translation into any language. Alongside Theatre Theory Reader. Prague School Writings (2016), it provides a thorough insight into Czech theatre thinking and a theory of theatre as a time-based art, perceived in the moment by an audience. Covering spoken drama and opera, Zich uniquely analyses the individual creative works that participate in making theatre.
This book revisits the modern history of Poland, from the perspective of its social sciences. The book makes this case study a model for the application of Bourdieu’s approach to the historical analysis of non-core Western societies. The book is, in other words, a reflexive study of the application of Bourdieu’s social theory. At the same time, it also critically studies the application of Western social theory in Poland, which is largely seen as a peripheral country. The study of Polish social sciences, with particular emphasis on linguistics and literary studies, points to the peculiar dynamics of peripheral intellectual and academic fields and their external dependencies. These insigh...
Modern Czech culture has experienced a series of political traumas starting in the 1930s. Despite the difficult, shifting conditions, Czech writers have not only managed to contend with the situation, but have produced many fine literary efforts. This volume consists of seven articles by an international team of authors who are specialists in Czech literature. The first four chapters treat very well-known writers. There is one chapter on Karel Čapek and his play "The White Plague." There are three chapters on Milan Kundera, the internationally best-known Czech writer, with one of these chapters covering both Kundera and Bohumil Hrabal. The last three chapters deal with more recent and/or le...
Now in its fourth edition, Literary Theory: The Basics is an essential guide to the complicated and often confusing world of literary theory. Readers will encounter a broad range of topics from Marxist and feminist criticism to postmodernism, queer studies, and ecocriticism. Literary Theory: The Basics shows, in an always lucid and accessible style, how literary theory and practice are connected, and considers key theories and approaches including: humanist criticism; structuralist and poststructuralist theory; postcolonial theory; posthumanism, ecocriticism, and animal studies; digital humanities and print culture studies. Literary theory has much to say about the wider world of humanities and beyond, and this guide helps readers to approach the many theories and debates with confidence. Expanded with updates throughout, this is the go-to guide for understanding literary theory today.
From the nineteenth century to the present, literary entanglements between Latin America and East Central Europe have been socio-politically and culturally diverse, but never random. The Iron Curtain, in particular, forced both regions to negotiate transatlantic «elective affinities», to take a stance in relation to the West, and to position themselves within world literature. As a result, the intellectual fields and creative productions of these regions have critically engaged with notions such as «post-imperial», «marginal», or «peripheral». In this edited volume, scholars from Germany, Brazil, Czech Republic, Hungary, Mexico, Poland, Slovenia, and Spain cross the globe from South to East and back to uncover transcultural and transareal convivialities. Their papers explore literary history, poetics, intellectual networks, and aesthetic theory, while discussing new key concepts in global literary history.
This book is a short introduction to Witold Gombrowicz’s life and work as one of the most prominent figures in twentieth-century literature and theater, providing intertextual perspectives that allow readers to analyze his short stories, plays, and novels in broad contexts. Gombrowicz (1904–1969) was a writer and philosopher whose experimental literary works belong to the stream of European existentialism and simultaneously mark the birth of postmodernism. In Gombrowicz’s grotesque universe, there is no separation between literature, biography, sexuality, and philosophy. His novels, including Ferdydurke, Trans-Atlantyk, and Pornography, contain autobiographical elements, whereas in his renowned Diary, daily life becomes an object of sophisticated philosophical reflection that links introspection with humor and a gift for observation. Gombrowicz: An Introduction is an approachable guide for students and instructors of Slavic literature and culture, comparative literature, philosophy, and theater studies.
Literary drafts are a constant in literatures of all ages and linguistic areas, and yet their role in writing processes in various traditions has seldom been the subject of systematic comparative scrutiny. In 38 chapters written by leading experts in many different fields, this book charts a comparative history of the literary draft in Europe and beyond. It is organised according to eight categories of comparison distributed over the volume’s two parts, devoted respectively to ‘Text’ (i.e. the textual aspects of creative processes) and ‘Beyond Text’ (i.e. aspects of creative processes that are not necessarily textual). Across geographical, temporal, linguistic, generic and media boundaries, to name but a few, this book uncovers idiosyncrasies and parallels in the surviving traces of human creativity while drawing the reader’s attention to the materiality of literary drafts and the ephemerality of the writing process they capture.
A concise, readable and up-to-date introduction to Bakhtin, which provides students with an accessible but sophisticated guide to his work.
This book is the first major study exploring archival and memorial practices of the Soviet unofficial culture. The creation of counter-archives was one of the most important forms of cultural resistance in the Soviet Union. Unofficial artists and poets had to reinvent the possibilities of maintaining art and literature that "did not exist". Against the background of archival theories and memory studies, the volume explores how the culture of the Soviet underground has become one of the most striking cases of scholarly and artistic (self-)archiving, which - although being half-isolated from the outer world - reflected intellectual and artistic trends characteristic of its time. The guiding qu...