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Catherine Clay's persuasively argued and rigorously documented study examines women's friendships during the period between the two world wars. Building on extensive new archival research, the book's organizing principle is a series of literary-historical case-studies that explore the practices, meanings and effects of friendship within a network of British women writers, who were all loosely connected to the feminist weekly periodical Time and Tide. Clay considers the letters and diaries, as well as fiction, poetry, autobiographies and journalistic writings, of authors such as Vera Brittain, Winifred Holtby, Storm Jameson, Naomi Mitchison, and Stella Benson, to examine women's friendships i...
Zoran Zivkovic weaves four mysterious encounters around philosophical questions at the core of human existence. Provocative and original, Time Gifts is a meditation on the nature of time and, especially, on the nature of those at its mercy.
In this pair of short novels, The Abyss and The Porgress, Arnost Lustig continues his lifelong project of creating a universe--at once concrete and dreamlike--to examine the horrors of the Holocaust and the impossible burden of living as a survivor.
Jaan Kross's historical novel Sailing Against the Wind fictionalizes the life of Bernhard Schmidt (1879–1935), an Estonian-born inventor. Schmidt lost an arm in his youth while experimenting with a homemade rocket, resulting in psychological trauma that would plague him for the rest of his life. Largely self-taught, Schmidt was driven to seek recognition of his talents. He moved to Germany in the 1930s, where, after perfecting techniques for polishing lenses, he began developing ideas for improving astronomical telescopes. He was arrested for selling one to the Russians, and although he got off with only a warning, he later suffered a breakdown and was sent to a mental hospital, where he soon died. Sailing Against the Wind becomes a meditation on national identity, the relationship between history and the individual life, and the mechanisms of the historical novel as a genre.
Shelled into ruins at the onset of the Bosnian War (1993), Treca Gimnazija, a high school in central Sarajevo, became a Owar school, O adapting to wartime conditions by conducting classes in the dispersed basement classrooms in neighborhoods across the city. Education scholar David M. Berman, who interviewed many of Treca GimnazijaOs students, teachers, and administrators during the siege of Sarajevo, 1992-1995, as well as after the war, chronicles the human drama of everyday life in a high school operating under the constant threat of enemy guns and mortar fire. The real story of the siege of Sarajevo, put in educational terms, is the localized adaptation of the staff and students of the school who implemented administrative resolutions and directives to keep the physically damaged school open. These educators and students of Treca Gimnazija, one of 13 secondary schools that were destroyed during the siege, tell the stories of their own personal war in the Obattle for the mindO and chronicle their shared experience in this important and inspiring book
David Albahari is one of the most prominent writers to emerge from the former Yugoslavia in the last twenty years. His serious, understated explorations of the self have influenced many writers of his native land's younger generation. The narrator of Bait has just exiled himself to Canada after the collapse of Yugoslavia and the death of his mother. As he listens to a series of audio tapes recorded by the mother years before, the narrator ponders her life and their relationship while simultaneously trying to come to terms with a new life of his own-one of exile and the confusion of a new language and culture. Bait is an exquisitely crafted novel that exhibits the wit and raw honesty Albahari's readers have long admired.
This book engages with current developments in postcolonial research, exploring notions of cultural transmission, tradition and modernity, authenticity, cross-cultural aesthetics and postcolonial ethics. The author considers the ethical responsibility of the postcolonial intellectual, enhancing our understanding of this topic through the concept of custodianship, which may be defined as a responsibility towards the other in forms of cultural and literary inheritance. The author introduces custodianship as a central theme and a vital question for the committed intellectual today, proposing original interpretations of major postcolonial texts by key figures including Anita Desai, Gayatri Chakr...
This novel, set in the 1970s, tells the story of the "author" - a middle-aged Polish professor who lives abroad but who earlier survived the Nazi concentration camps - and Rudolf, an old man. In the 1930s Rudolf, the son of Germans living in Poland, rebelled against the expectations of both his parents and Polish society by leading an openly gay life in Paris. Rudolf and the author meet by chance in Brussels, and the novel unfolds as Rudolf attempts to convince the author - and himself - that his choices were good ones, that his life and the memories he has of it were worth whatever he gave up for them.
For more than 1,300 years Slovenes had lived in Eastern Europe without having a separate Slovene state, but in December of 1990, they voted for independence, or, put more appropriately, for "disassociation" from Yugoslavia. Unfortunately, Slovenia had to fight for its independence, which it did not fully achieve until 1995 after its bloody disintegration with Yugoslavia was over. Since independence, however, Slovenia has prospered; its economy is far ahead of other former communist states and in 2004 Slovenia acceded to both NATO and the European Union, the only republic of former Yugoslavia to do so. The A to Z of Slovenia covers the history of Slovenia and its struggle to gain independence from communism. This is done through a detailed chronology, an introduction, appendixes, a bibliography, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on some of the more significant persons, places, and events; institutions and organizations; and political, economic, social, cultural, and religious facets.
In 1977, the Gardzienice Theatre Association, an experimental theatre company was founded in a tiny Polish village. By 1992 The Observer was hailing "Brilliant Gardzienice...and orgy of joy, anguish, prayer and lamentation performed in candlelight with hurtling energy and at breakneck speed...Physically reckless, thrillingly well sung...On no account to be missed. " Today the Gardzienice Theatre Association is hailed as Poland's leading theatre group, training Royal Shakespeare Company actors and touring the world. Paul Allain describes and analyses their sung performances, strenuous physical and vocal training, and anthropological fieldwork amongst marginalized European minorities. This is one of the first detailed attempts to assess developments in Polish experimental theatres since 1989. The author questions whether those artists can maintain their vision in the face of Poland's economic difficulties and increased commercialization of the arts.