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This rich, in-depth exploration of Dada’s roots in East-Central Europe is a vital addition to existing research on Dada and the avant-garde. Through deeply researched case studies and employing novel theoretical approaches, the volume rewrites the history of Dada as a story of cultural and political hybridity, border-crossings, transitions, and transgressions, across political, class and gender lines. Dismantling prevailing notions of Dada as a “Western” movement, the contributors to this volume present East-Central Europe as the locus of Dada activity and techniques. The articles explore how artists from the region pre-figured Dada as well as actively “cannibalized”, that is, reabsorbed and further hybridized, a range of avant-garde techniques, thus challenging “Western” cultural hegemony.
Editors / Translators: and
Larisa Reisner (1895--1926), fighter, commissar, diplomat, was one of the most brilliant and popular writers of the Russian Revolution, whose journalism from her travels in Russia and Ukraine, Germany, Persia and Afghanistan was read by millions in the new mass circulation Soviet press. Together here for the first time in translation are the six books of her journalism, The Front, Afghanistan, Berlin October 1923, Hamburg at the Barricades and In Hindenburg’s Country, all written in the last nine years of her life, before her death at the age of thirty, published as the companion volume to Cathy Porter’s Larisa Reisner. A Biography.
Volume Editors: and
Editors Robert Reid and Joe Andrew present eleven contributions by international scholars which highlight Tolstoi’s influence on his contemporaries and posterity through his fiction and thought. A figure of Tolstoi’s intellectual stature has naturally inspired an impressive range of responses. These encompass stage versions of his novels (War and Peace and Resurrection), communes founded in his name, and translations which have sought to capture the essence of his works for successive generations. Tolstoi is also compared in this volume with his contemporaries in chapters on Dostoevskii, Veselitsakaia, Rozanov and Elizabeth Gaskell. The reader of this work will gain new and unique insights into an unparalleled genius of world literature, especially into his immense cultural reach which continues to this day.

Contributors: Carol Apollonio, Katherine Jane Briggs, Elena Govor, Nel Grillaert, Susan Layton, Cynthia Marsh, Henrietta Mondry, Richard Peace, Alexandra Smith, Olga Sobolev, Willem Weststeijn, Kevin Windle.
This volume offers insight into Vladimir Nabokov as a reader and a teacher, and sheds new light on the relationship of his views on literary aesthetics to the development of his own oeuvre. The essays included focus on the lectures on European and Russian literature that Nabokov gave at a number of American universities in the years between his arrival in the United States and the publication of Lolita. Nabokov’s treatment of literary masterpieces by Austen, Cervantes, Chekhov, Dickens, Flaubert, Gogol, Kafka, Joyce, Proust and Stevenson is assessed by experts on these authors.

Contributors are: Lara Delage-Toriel, Ben Dhooge, Yannicke Chupin, Roy Groen, Luc Herman, Flora Keersmaekers, Arthur Langeveld, Geert Lernout, Vivian Liska, Ilse Logie, Jürgen Pieters, Gerard de Vries.
Volume Editor:
Russia is an enigmatic, mysterious country, situated between East and West not only spatially, but also mentally. Or so it is traditionally perceived in Western Europe and the Anglophone world at large. One of the distinctive features of Russian culture is its irrationalism, which revealed itself diversely in Russian life and thought, literature, music and visual arts, and has survived to the present day. Bridging the gap in existing scholarship, the current volume is an attempt at an integral and multifaceted approach to this phenomenon, and launches the study of Russian irrationalism in philosophy, theology, literature and the arts of the last two hundred years, together with its reflections in Russian reality.

Contributors: Tatiana Chumakova, David Gillespie, Arkadii Goldenberg, Kira Gordovich, Rainer Grübel, Elizabeth Harrison, Jeremy Howard, Aleksandr Ivashkin, Elena Kabkova, Sergei Kibalnik, Oleg Kovalov, Alexander McCabe, Barbara Olaszek, Oliver Ready, Oliver Smith, Margarita Odesskaia, Ildikó Mária Rácz, Lyudmila Safronova, Marilyn Schwinn Smith, Henrieke Stahl, Olga Stukalova, Olga Tabachnikova, Christopher John Tooke, and Natalia Vinokurova.
Volume Editor:
Questions of collective identity and nationhood dominate the memory debate in both the high and popular cultures of postsocialist Russia, Poland and Ukraine. Often the ‘Soviet’ and ‘Russian’ identity are reconstructed as identical; others remember the Soviet regime as an anonymous supranational ‘Empire’, in which both Russian and non-Russian national cultures were destroyed. At the heart of this ‘empire talk’ is a series of questions pivoting on the opposition between constructed ‘ethnic’ and ‘imperial’ identities. Did ethnic Russians constitute the core group who implemented the Soviet Terror, e.g. the mass murders of the Poles in Katyn and the Ukrainians in the Holodomor? Or were Russians themselves victims of a faceless totalitarianism? The papers in this volume explore the divergent and conflicting ways in which the Soviet regime is remembered and re-imagined in contemporary Russian, Polish and Ukrainian cinema and media.
Anti-Portraits: Poetics of the Face in Modern English, Polish and Russian Literature (1835-1965) is a study of a-physiognomic descriptions of the face. It demonstrates that writers such as George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy, Edgar Allan Poe, Nicolay Gogol, Virginia Woolf and Witold Gombrowicz vigorously resisted the belief that facial features reflect character.

While other studies tend to focus on descriptions which affirm physiognomy, this book examines portraits which question popular face-reading systems and contravene their common premise – the surface-depth principle. Such portraits reveal that physiognomic formula is a cultural construct, invented to abridge, organise and regulate legibility of the human face. Most importantly, strange and ‘unreadable’ fictional faces frequently expose the connection between physiognomic judgement and stereotyping, prejudice and racism.
Lithuanian Literature in the Post-Soviet Period
Volume Editor:
In 1990, Lithuania was the first of fifteen Soviet Republics to proclaim its independence from the USSR and, in doing so, dealt a fatal blow to this superpower. Overnight, this small country, whose very existence had been erased from the world map for 50 years, became Post-Soviet and proclaimed its return to a multicultural Europe. So, what happened then in the lives of Lithuanians? How did they survive the collapse of a planned economy and the crisis of values? How does Lithuania, together with the other Baltic countries, which had once been the most prosperous Republics in the USSR, come to terms with the fact that they are now among the poorest member nations in another transnational configuration – the European Union? These issues are actively addressed in the works of contemporary Lithuanian writers, whose texts are analyzed in the collection of articles, Transitions of Lithuanian Postmodernism: Lithuanian Literature in the Post-Soviet Period. Utilizing various perspectives, leading Lithuanian literary scholars discuss identity transformations and the discourse of reinterpretations of the past in contemporary Lithuanian prose, poetry, essay writing, and memoir. This book reveals both existentially universal dramas and specific experiences that arise from this unique double-post (Post-Soviet and postmodern) condition.
Author:
The manner in which south-east Europe is viewed by western cultures has been an increasingly important area of study over the last twenty years. During the 1990s, the wars in the former Yugoslavia reactivated denigratory images of the region that many commentators perceived as a new, virulent strain of intra-European prejudice. British Literature and the Balkans is a wide-ranging and original analysis of balkanist discourse in British fiction and travel writing. Through a study of over 300 texts, the volume explores the discourse’s emergence in the imperial nineteenth century and its extensive transformations during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. There will be a particular focus on the ways in which the most significant currents in western thought – Romanticism, empiricism, imperialism, nationalism, communism – have helped to shape the British concept of the Balkans.
The volume will be of interest to those working in the area of European cross-cultural representation in the disciplines of Literary Studies, Cultural Studies, European Studies, Anthropology and History.
Author:
The domestic theme has a tremendous anthropological, literary and cultural significance. The purpose of this book is to analyse and interpret the most important realisations and tendencies of this thematic complex in the history of Russian literature. It is the first systematic book-length exploration of the meaning and development of the House theme in Russian literature of the past 200 years. It studies the ideological, psychological and moral meanings which Russian cultural and literary tradition have invested in the house or projected on it in literary texts. Central to this study’s approach is the concept of the House Myth, consisting of a set of basic fabular elements and a set of general types of House images. This House Myth provides the general point of reference from which the literary works were analyzed and compared. With the help of this analytical procedure characteristics of individual authors could be described as well as recurrent patterns and features discerned in the way Russian literature dealt with the House and its thematics, thus reflecting characteristics of Russian literary world pictures, Russian mentalities and Russian attitudes towards life. This book is of interest for students of Russian literature as well as for those interested in the House as a cultural and literary topic, in the semiotics of literature, and in relations between culture, anthropology and literature.