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Power and Literature
At the core of this book lies the relation between Power (as socio-political phenomenon) and the novel (as literary discourse). It shows that, in a society facing the excess of power in its various forms, novelistic fiction mediates knowledge about societal Power structures and uses specific strategies to subvert and denounce them. The first part of the study is theoretical: it presents some of the most prominent theories of Power, from Plato, Machiavelli, Nietzsche to Weber, Dahl, Lukes, Parsons, Bourdieu or Foucault. After offering a critical approach to the concepts of Power defined in the social, political and philosophical fields, it articulates the relations of Power imprinted in literary discourse within a typology of four categories. In the second part of the book, this taxonomy of Power is applied to four key novels in the context of Romanian "literary crossroads", showing how novelistic fiction not only assume a critical and subversive position against the excess of Power, but also unveils our fragility when experiencing History.
Entangled Histories of the Balkans - Volume One
The authors in this volume seek to treat the modern history of the Balkans from a transnational and relational perspective in terms of shared and connected, as well as entangled, histories, transfers and crossings.
Earthly Delights
Earthly Delights brings together a number of substantial and original scholarly studies by international scholars currently working on the history of food in the Ottoman Empire and East-Central Europe. It offers new empirical research, as well as surveys of the state of scholarship in this discipline, with special emphasis on influences, continuities and discontinuities in the culinary cultures of the Ottoman Porte, the Balkans and East-Central Europe between the 17th and 19th centuries. Some contributions address economic aspects of food provision, the development and trans-national circulation of individual dishes, and the role of merchants, diplomats and travellers in the transmission of culinary trends. Others examine the role of food in the construction of national and regional identities in contact zones where local traditions merged or clashed with imperial (Ottoman, Habsburg) and West-European influences.
Manele in Romania
This edited volume examines manele (sing. manea), an urban Romanian song-dance ethnopop genre that combines local traditional and popular music with Balkan and Middle Eastern elements. The genre is performed primarily by male Romani musicians at weddings and clubs and appeals especially to Romanian and Romani youth. It became immensely popular after the collapse of communism, representing for many the newly liberated social conditions of the post-1989 world. But manele have also engendered much controversy among the educated and professional elite, who view the genre as vulgar and even “alien” to the Romanian national character. The essays collected here examine the “manea phenomenon” as a vibrant form of cultural expression that engages in several levels of social meaning, all informed by historical conditions, politics, aesthetics, tradition, ethnicity, gender, class, and geography.
Steamboat Modernity
Through a skillful combination of economic and cultural history, this book describes the impact on Moldavia and Wallachia of steam navigation on the Danube. The Danube route integrated the two principalities into a dense network of European roads and waterways. From the 1830s to the 1860s, steamboat transport transformed time and space for the areas that benefited from regular services. River traffic accelerated urban development along the Lower Danube and contributed directly to institutional modernization in one of Europe’s peripheries. Beyond technological advances and the transportation of goods on a trans-imperial waterway, steamboat travel revolutionized human interactions, too. The ...
Inventing the Jew
Inventing the Jew follows the evolution of stereotypes of Jews from the level of traditional Romanian and other Central-East European cultures (their legends, fairy tales, ballads, carols, anecdotes, superstitions, and iconographic representations) to that of "high" cultures (including literature, essays, journalism, and sociopolitical writings), showing how motifs specific to "folkloric antisemitism" migrated to "intellectual antisemitism." This comparative perspective also highlights how the images of Jews have differed from that of other "strangers" such as Hungarians, Germans, Roma, Turks.
Memory, Humanity, and Meaning
On the 23rd of August 2008, Professor Andrei Pleşu has marked his sixtieth birthday. In view of his distinguished service to the public welfare and his manifold contributions to academic life, the editors of this volume have invited a number of Romanian and international scholars to celebrate this event with a Festschrift. Colleagues, friends, and former students of Andrei Pleşu joined together to offer a critical appreciation of his understanding of culture in today’s world. The participants in this volume explore the continuing debates around the place of philosophy, politics, aesthetics, ethics, and religion in shaping the identity of Western civilization. CONTENTS Acknowledgements Bi...
The Fairy-Tale Vanguard
Ever since its early modern inception as a literary genre unto its own, the fairy tale has frequently provided authors with a textual space in which to reflect on the nature, status and function of their own writing and that of literature in general. At the same time, it has served as an ideal laboratory for exploring and experimenting with the boundaries of literary convention and propriety. While scholarship pertaining to these phenomena has focused primarily on the fairy-tale adaptations and deconstructions of postmodern(ist) writers, this essay collection adopts a more diachronic approach. It offers fairy-tale scholars and students a series of theoretical and literary-historical expositions, as well as case studies on English, French, German, Swedish, Danish, and Romanian texts from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century, by authors as diverse as Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, Rikki Ducornet, Hans Christian Andersen and Robert Coover.
