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Vladimir Nabokov described the literature course he taught at Cornell as ""a kind of detective investigation of the mystery of literary structures."" Leona Toker here pursues a similar investigation of the enigmatic structures of Nabokov's own fiction. According to Toker, most previous critics stressed either Nabokov’s concern with form or the humanistic side of his works, but rarely if ever the two together. In sensitive and revealing readings of ten novels, Toker demonstrates that the need to reconcile the human element with aesthetic or metaphysical pursuits is a constant theme of Nabokov’s and that the tension between technique and content is itself a key to his fiction. Written with verve and precision, Toker’s book begins with Pnin and follows the circular pattern that is one of her subject’s own favored devices.

Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin, Lolita, literary structures, Russian literature, humanism

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Described by the sixteenth-century English poet George Turbervile as "a people passing rude, to vices vile inclin’d", the Russians waited some three centuries before their subsequent cultural achievements—in music, art and particularly literature—achieved widespread recognition in Britain.The essays in this stimulating collection attest to the scope and variety of Russia’s influence on British culture. They move from the early nineteenth century—when Byron sent his hero Don Juan to meet Catherine the Great, and an English critic sought to come to terms with the challenge of Pushkin—to a series of Russian-themed exhibitions at venues including the Crystal Palace and Earls Court. The collection looks at British encounters with Russian music, the absorption with Dostoevskii and Chekhov, and finishes by shedding light on Britain’s engagement with Soviet film.Edited by Anthony Cross, one of the world’s foremost authorities on Anglo-Russian relations, A People Passing Rude is essential reading for anyone with an interest in British and Russian cultures and their complex relationship.

Russian literature --- Russian art --- Russian history --- Anglo-Russian relations --- Russian music --- Russia --- United Kingdom

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"Placing itself within the burgeoning field of world literary studies, the organising principle of this book is that of an open-ended dynamic, namely the cosmopolitan-vernacular exchange. As an adaptable comparative fulcrum for literary studies, the notion of the cosmopolitan-vernacular exchange accommodates also highly localised literatures. In this way, it redresses what has repeatedly been identified as a weakness of the world literature paradigm, namely the one-sided focus on literature that accumulates global prestige or makes it on the Euro-American book market. How has the vernacular been defined historically? How is it inflected by gender? How are the poles of the vernacular and the cosmopolitan distributed spatially or stylistically in literary narratives? How are cosmopolitan domains of literature incorporated in local literary communities? What are the effects of translation on the encoding of vernacular and cosmopolitan values? Ranging across a dozen languages and literature from five continents, these are some of the questions that the contributions attempt to address."

World literature --- African literature --- Chinese literature --- Scandinavian literature --- Russian literature --- Caribbean and American literature

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Marina Grishakova belongs to the younger generation scholars of the Tartu-Moscow school of semiotics. Her book is part of a semio-narratological tradition of a single author or a single work research that tackles issues of wider theoretical import: applicability of the concept of “modeling” in the humanities, theory of mimesis and the function of experimental literature in (post)modernist culture. By drawing on Y. Lotman’s conception of artistic models, the book adopts the semiotic perspective on modeling as an open-ended heuristic process underlying the logic of discovery and creative thinking. The book discusses the models of time and memory in modernist culture (Nietzsche’s and Bergson’s philosophy of time, Minkowski’s research on the psychopathological types of temporality) and their relevance to Nabokov’s fiction; popular-scientific notions of serialism and the fourth dimension; thematizations of the observer in modernist philosophy and arts; visual “prostheses” and “machines” (Eco), particularly the “camera vision” metaphor, its relation to Bergson’s notion of automatism and the popular idea of the criminal use of hypnosis. Vision is thematized also as a means of seduction and noncoercive control. Even before Foucault, Baudrillard and other critics of modernity, Nabokov noticed that advertising, political propaganda and erotic seduction alike employ implicit forms of suggestion. The book revises Rorty’s dilemma of “autonomy” and “solidarity” as applied to Nabokov’s work and offers new readings. It considers categories of narrative poetics as forms of cultural encoding that broaden and transform reader’s modes of perception and sense-making. Micro-models active in certain contexts or in the works of certain authors function as mobile interfaces between individual sensibilities and complex cultural chrono- and spatio-types where time and space take on conceptual meaning. (This title is the second revised edition, available online only. The web shop refers to the first edition, which is available as a paper monograph.)

time and space in literature and philosophy --- semiotics --- vladimir nabokov --- semiotic models --- narratology --- russian literature --- modernism --- visual studies --- american literature

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Since the publication of formerly forbidden und unpublished texts constitutes the main trend of Glasnost', this study has as ist aim the isolation of main trends in the process of the re-evaluation of the cultural heritage of the past by Soviet literary scholarship. The analysed authors will be divided into four main groups: 1. Accepted 19th century classics (e.g. Goncharov); 2. Formerly forbidden 20th century writers (e.g. Zamiatin); 3. Formerly forbidden 19th century writers (e.g. Rozanov and Leontiev); 4. Hagiographic classics of the 20th century Soviet period (e.g. Gorkij).

Evaluation --- Glasnost --- Ideological --- Literary --- Mondry --- Perestroika --- Recent --- Russian literature --- Scholarship --- Sovie --- Soviet --- Soviet literature --- the Lenin-Plekhanov Formula --- Trends