Traces the history of the European cabaret, discusses the types of entertainment that developed in cabarets, and explains their connection with avant-garde movements.

For nearly half a century, the Iron Curtain obscured from Western eyes a vital group of national and regional writers. Seen as a whole, the literatures of Eastern Europe during the second half of the twentieth century are extraordinarily rich, and in recent years many Eastern European novelists, poets, and playwrights have attracted wider attention and broader publication in the West. And yet no reference work, embracing all the countries of this region, including the former East Germany, has brought synoptic analysis to bear on these literatures--until now.

Featuring lucid analyses of...

A vibrant Jewish community flourished in Poland from late in the tenth century until it was virtually annihilated in World War II. In this remarkable anthology, the first of its kind, Harold B. Segel offers translations of poems and prose works mainly fiction by non-Jewish Polish writers. Taken together, the selections represent the complex perceptions about Jews in the Polish community in the period 1530-1990."

Covering Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, East Germany, Hungary, Lithuania, Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Ukraine, Harold B. Segel, a longtime scholar of Slavic literatures and of comparative literature, writes a clear, concise, and balanced history of Eastern European literature. Segel not only examines the literary response to the quasi-colonial oppression that stretched across Eastern Europe between 1945 and 1991 but also details the impact of the downfall of communism and the way in which the challenges of the postcommunist...

Justinus Kerner (1786-1862) was one of the most celebrated figures in nineteenth-century German culture. A physician by training, he was also a leading member of the Swabian Romantic circle of poets which included, among others, Ludwig Uhland and Gustav Schwab. Kerner's international fame rests primarily on his contributions to the investigation of paranormal phenomena. The most important of these was his exhaustive case study, Die Seherin von Prevorst (The Seeress of Prevorst, 1829). The book was translated into English in 1849 by the English writer, Catherine Crowe (1803-76). Until the...