Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> European - General

Georg Lukacs stands as a towering figure in the areas of critical theory, literary criticism, aesthetics, ethical theory and the philosophy of Marxism and German Idealism. Yet, despite his influence throughout the twentieth century, his contributions to the humanities and theoretical social sciences are marked by neglect. What has been lost is a crucial thinker in the tradition of critical theory, but also, by extension, a crucial set of ideas that can be used to shed new light on the major problems of contemporary society.
This book reconsiders Lukacs' intellectual contributions in...

This book provides the first detailed study in English of the religious philosophy of Vasilii Rozanov, one of the most influential and controversial thinkers of Russia's Silver Age. It examines his subversion of traditional Russian Orthodoxy, including his reverence for the Creation, his focus on the family, and his worship of sex.

Rozanov is one of the towering figures of Russian culture, a major influence on thinkers and writers such as Bakhtin, Maiakovskii, and Mandelshtam, as well as many European writers. He critiqued Orthodox theology, and wrote extensively on philosophy,...

The period between the First World War and the fall of the Berlin Wall is often characterized as the age of extremes--while this era witnessed unprecedented violence and loss of human life, it also saw a surge in humorous entertainment in both democratic and authoritarian societies. The Politics of Humour examines how works such as satirical magazines and comedy films were used both to reaffirm group identity and to exclude those who did not belong.

The essays in this collection analyse the political and social context of comedy in Europe and the United States,...

This deeply persuasive book presents a new and profound approach to the testimony of the Holocaust. Nicholas Chare offers a critical reassessment of the writings on the abject by Julia Kristeva, including her best known, highly influential work Powers of Horror, first translated into English in 1982. He re-appraises the value the concept of abjection holds for the study of the witnessing and representation of the Holocaust. Chare also provides fresh interpretations of, for example, the poetic prose of Charlotte Delbo and the paintings of Francis Bacon, and he explores the Scrolls...

This edition of Pushkin's tragedy "Boris Godunov" is part of the Bristol Classical Press Russian Texts series. The series is designed to meet the needs of the growinghigh school and undergraduate market for texts in the Russian language. Each text comes with English notes and vocabulary, and with an introduction by an editor with an expert knowledge both of the work and of its literary and cultural context

This book provides a systematic analysis of the innovations that occurred in the display of royal power during John II s four years in English captivity. Neil Murphy shows how the French king s competition with Edward III led to a revolution in the presentation of the royal image, manifesting through developments to the sacral character of the French monarchy, lavish displays of gift giving, and the use of courtly display. Showing that the Hundred Years War was not just fought on the battlefields of France, this book unravels how the war played out daily in the competition for status...

This collection of essays is a critical reexamination of Joyce's famed book of short stories, Dubliners. Despite the multifaceted critical attention Dubliners has received since its publication more than a century ago, many readers and teachers of the stories still rely on and embrace old, outdated readings that invoke metaphors of paralysis and stagnation to understand the book. Challenging these canonical notions about mobility, paralysis, identity, and gender in Joyce's work, the ten essays here suggest that Dubliners is full of incredible movement. By embracing...

The Belgian Surrealist artist Rene Magritte (1898 1967) is well known for his thought-provoking and witty images that challenge the observer s preconditioned perceptions of reality. Magritte and Literature examines some of the artist's major paintings whose titles were influenced by and related to works of literature. Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil, Goethe's Elective Affinities, and Poe's The Domain of Arnheim are representative examples of Magritte's interarts dialogue with literary figures.

Despite these convergences, the titles subvert the...

Renaissance humanists were often engaged in a wide variety of polemics, ranging from matter-of-fact debate to scathing invective. The programmatic nature of Renaissance humanism, intent on a fundamental reform of language, education, and society at large, led the humanists almost inevitably to conflicts with those who represented other intellectual traditions, first and foremost the Scholastics. In addition, internal competition among humanists sparked violent quarrels, in which opponents walked a thin line between defensive self-preservation and aggressive self-promotion.

In the...

The idea of the tragic has permeated Western culture for millennia, being closely bound with the concept of the limit of inescapable necessity that has been embodied in and expressed through theatre since the time of the ancient Greeks. This book addresses the question of how the twentieth century one of the most violent periods of human history dealt with the fundamental structure that is the tragic. Examining the consciousness of the era through an in-depth analysis of some of the twentieth century s most outstanding texts including works by Ibsen, Claudel, O Neill, Brecht, Camus,...

This book resituates the ghost story as a matter of literary hospitality and as part of a vital prehistory of modernism, seeing it not as a quaint neo-gothic ornament, but as a powerful literary response to the technological and psychological disturbances that marked the end of the Victorian era. Linking little-studied authors like M. R. James and May Sinclair to such canonical figures as Dickens, Henry James, Woolf, and Joyce, Thurston argues that the literary ghost should be seen as no mere relic of gothic style but as a portal of discovery, an opening onto the central modernist problem...

In the early 1990s, Stephen Nichols introduced the term -new medievalism- to describe an alternative to the traditional philological approach to the study of the romantic texts in the medieval period. While the old approach focused on formal aspects of language, this new approach was historicist and moved beyond a narrow focus on language to examine the broader social and cultural contexts in which literary works were composed and disseminated. Within the field, this transformation of medieval studies was as important as the genetic revolution to the study of biology and has had an...