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The novelist Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883) is known primarily as a chronicler of his age and crafter of elegant prose--like the simplest painting of daily artifacts, his works have pleased partly because they shape a recognizable world and partly because their form gives to the content its resonant signifying power. Here Jane Costlow accounts for both the historicity and aesthetic elegance of Turgenev's realist novels in close readings of Rudin, A Nest of Gentry, On the Eve, and Fathers and Children, all written between 1855 and 1861. Each essay focuses on a particular aspect of Turgenev's art as it relates to his human and aesthetic concerns. This study challenges traditional views of Turgenev ...
Aharon David Gordon (1856--1922) is increasingly being recognized as the first Jewish environmentalist. Long before global warming became a major threat, Gordon warned against the mounting dangers of human assault on nature and urged us to open ourselves to nature and re-attune with it. The First Jewish Environmentalist introduces Gordon's ideas and sets them in their historical context, shedding new light on the interconnections between religion, culture, education, and the environment. The book expands Gordon's canonical status beyond the realm of Hebrew culture, and extracts from Gordon's philosophy empowerment and inspiration for seekers advocating the protection of our planet.
In Life Is Elsewhere, Anne Lounsbery shows how nineteenth-century Russian literature created an imaginary place called "the provinces"—a place at once homogeneous, static, anonymous, and symbolically opposed to Petersburg and Moscow. Lounsbery looks at a wide range of texts, both canonical and lesser-known, in order to explain why the trope has exercised such enduring power, and what role it plays in the larger symbolic geography that structures Russian literature's representation of the nation's space. Using a comparative approach, she brings to light fundamental questions that have long gone unasked: how to understand, for instance, the weakness of literary regionalism in a country as la...
The lives of animals in Russia are intrinsically linked to cultural, political and psychological transformations of the imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet eras. Other Animals examines the interaction of animals and humans in Russian literature, art, and life from the eighteenth century until the present. The chapters explore the unique nature of the Russian experience in a range of human-animal relationships through tales of cruelty, interspecies communion and compassion, and efforts to either overcome or establish the human-animal divide. Four themes run through the volume: the prevalence of animals in utopian visions; the ways in which Russians have incorporated and sometimes challenged Wes...
Twelve groundbreaking essays show the varied and complex ways in which ideas about sexuality, gender, and the body have shaped and been influenced by Russian literature, history, art, and philosophy from the medieval period to the present day.
A collection of linked stories on the life of a rebellious girl in Russia at the turn of the century. They follow her between boarding school and her country estate, where she finds happiness with animals.
A Study Guide for Ivan Turgenev's "Fathers and Sons," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism offers fresh interpretations of the artistic and political challenges of representing life accurately. It is the first book to treat the subject topically and thematically, in wide scope, with essays that draw upon recent scholarship in literary and cultural studies to offer an authoritative and in-depth reassessment of major and minor figures and the contexts that shaped their work.
Bringing together a team of scholars from the diverse fields of geography, literary studies, and history, this is the first volume to study water as a cultural phenomenon within the Russian/Soviet context. Water in this context is both a cognitive and cultural construct and a geographical and physical phenomenon, representing particular rivers (the Volga, the Chusovaia in the Urals, the Neva) and bodies of water (from Baikal to sacred springs and the flowing water of nineteenth-century estates), but also powerful systems of meaning from traditional cultures and those forged in the radical restructuring undertaken in the 1930s. Individual chapters explore the polyvalence and contestation of m...