Download or read book Eastern Europeans in Contemporary Literature and Culture written by Vedrana Veličković and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-04-08 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eastern Europeans in Contemporary Literature and Culture: Imagining New Europe provides a comprehensive study of the way in which contemporary writers, filmmakers, and the media have represented the recent phenomenon of Eastern European migration to the UK and Western Europe following the enlargement of the EU in the 21st century, the social and political changes after the fall of communism, and the Brexit vote. Exploring the recurring figures of Eastern Europeans as a new reservoir of cheap labour, the author engages with a wide range of both mainstream and neglected authors, films, and programmes, including Rose Tremain, John Lanchester, Marina Lewycka, Polly Courtney, Dubravka Ugrešić, Kapka Kassabova, Kwame Kwei-Armah, Mike Phillips, It’s a Free World, Gypo, Britain’s Hardest Workers, The Poles are Coming, and Czech Dream. Analyzing the treatment of Eastern Europeans as builders, fruit pickers, nannies, and victims of sex trafficking, and ways of resisting the stereotypes, this is an important intervention into debates about Europe, migration, and postcommunist transition to capitalism, as represented in multiple contemporary cultural texts.
Download or read book Facing the East in the West written by Barbara Korte and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2010-01 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last decade, migration flows from Central and Eastern Europe have become an issue in political debates about human rights, social integration, multiculturalism and citizenship in Great Britain. The increasing number of Eastern Europeans living in Britain has provoked ambivalent and diverse responses, including representations in film and literature that range from travel writing, humorous fiction, mockumentaries, musicals, drama and children's literature to the thriller. The present volume discusses a wide range of representations of Eastern and Central Europe and its people as reflected in British literature, film and culture. The book offers new readings of authors who have influenced the cultural imagination since the nineteenth century, such as Bram Stoker, George Bernard Shaw, Joseph Conrad and Arthur Koestler. It also discusses the work of more contemporary writers and film directors including Sacha Baron Cohen, David Cronenberg, Vesna Goldsworthy, Kapka Kassabova, Marina Lewycka, Ken Loach, Mike Phillips, Joanne K. Rowling and Rose Tremain. With its focus on post-Wall Europe, Facing the East in the Westgoes beyond discussions of migration to Britain from an established postcolonial perspective and contributes to the current exploration of 'new' European identities.
Download or read book History of the Literary Cultures of East Central Europe written by Marcel Cornis-Pope and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2004-05-28 with total page 670 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National literary histories based on internally homogeneous native traditions have significantly contributed to the construction of national identities, especially in multicultural East-Central Europe, the region between the German and Russian hegemonic cultural powers stretching from the Baltic states to the Balkans. History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe, which covers the last two hundred years, reconceptualizes these literary traditions by de-emphasizing the national myths and by highlighting analogies and points of contact, as well as hybrid and marginal phenomena that traditional national histories have ignored or deliberately suppressed. The four volumes of the History configure the literatures from five angles: (1) key political events, (2) literary periods and genres, (3) cities and regions, (4) literary institutions, and (5) real and imaginary figures. The first volume, which includes the first two of these dimensions, is a collaborative effort of more than fifty contributors from Eastern and Western Europe, the US, and Canada.The four volumes of the History comprise the first volume in the new subseries on Literary Cultures.
Download or read book Eastern European Youth Cultures in a Global Context written by Matthias Schwartz and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-29 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The demise of state Socialisms caused radical social, cultural and economic changes in Eastern Europe. Since then, young people have been confronted with fundamental disruptions and transformations to their daily environment, while an unsettling, globalized world substantially reshapes local belongings and conventional values. In times of multiple instabilities and uncertainties, this volume argues, young people prefer to try to adjust to given circumstances than to adopt the behaviour of potential rebellious, adolescent role models, dissident counter-cultures or artistic breakings of taboo. Eastern European Youth Cultures in a Global Context takes this situation as a starting point for an examination of generational change, cultural belongings, political activism and everyday practices of young people in different Eastern European countries from an interdisciplinary perspective. It argues that the conditions of global change not only call for a differentiated evaluation of youth cultures, but also for a revision of our understanding of 'youth' itself – in Eastern Europe and beyond.
Download or read book After Memory written by Matthias Schwartz and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Even seventy-five years after the end of World War II, the commemorative cultures surrounding the War and the Holocaust in Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe are anything but fixed. The fierce debates on how to deal with the past among the newly constituted nation states in these regions have already received much attention by scholars in cultural and memory studies. The present volume posits that literature as a medium can help us understand the shifting attitudes towards World War II and the Holocaust in post-Communist Europe in recent years. These shifts point to new commemorative cultures shaping up ‘after memory’. Contemporary literary representations of World War II and the Holocaust in Eastern Europe do not merely extend or replace older practices of remembrance and testimony, but reflect on these now defunct or superseded narratives. New narratives of remembrance are conditioned by a fundamentally new social and political context, one that emerged from the devaluation of socialist commemorative rituals and as a response to the loss of private and family memory narratives. The volume offers insights into the diverse literatures of Eastern Europe and their ways of depicting the area’s contested heritage.
Download or read book Imagining the West in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union written by Gyorgy Peteri and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 2010 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents work from an international group of writers who explore conceptualizations of what defined “East” and “West” in Eastern Europe, imperial Russia, and the Soviet Union. The contributors analyze the effects of transnational interactions on ideology, politics, and cultural production. They reveal that the roots of an East/West cultural divide were present many years prior to the rise of socialism and the Cold War.
The chapters offer insights into the complex stages of adoption and rejection of Western ideals in areas such as architecture, travel writings, film, music, health care, consumer products, political propaganda, and human rights. They describe a process of mental mapping whereby individuals “captured and possessed” Western identity through cultural encounters and developed their own interpretations from these experiences. Despite these imaginaries, political and intellectual elites devised responses of resistance, defiance, and counterattack to defy Western impositions.
Socialists believed that their cultural forms and collectivist strategies offered morally and materially better lives for the masses and the true path to a modern society. Their sentiments toward the West, however, fluctuated between superiority and inferiority. But in material terms, Western products, industry, and technology, became the ever-present yardstick by which progress was measured. The contributors conclude that the commodification of the necessities of modern life and the rise of consumerism in the twentieth century made it impossible for communist states to meet the demands of their citizens. The West eventually won the battle of supply and demand, and thus the battle for cultural influence.
Download or read book Socialist Realism in Central and Eastern European Literatures under Stalin written by Evgeny Dobrenko and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2018-02-15 with total page 634 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Socialist Realism in Central and Eastern European Literatures' is the first published work to offer a variety of alternative perspectives on the literary and cultural Sovietization of Central and Eastern Europe after World War II and emphasize the dialogic relationship between the ‘centre’ and the ‘satellites’ instead of the traditional top-down approach. The introduction of the Soviet cultural model was not quite the smooth endeavour that it was made to look in retrospect; rather, it was always a work in progress, often born out of a give-andtake with the local authorities, intellectuals and interest groups. Relying on archival resources, the authors examine one of the most controversial attempts at a cultural unification in Europe by providing an overview with a focus on specific case-studies, an analysis of distinct particularities with attention to the patterns of negotiation and adaptation that were being developed in the process.
Download or read book The Story Smuggler written by Georgi Gospodinov and published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. This book was released on 2024-02-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Some smuggle cigarettes, others alcohol - or weapons. Our contraband, being invisible, is more dangerous. Our contraband is undetectable by scanners. What we carry as concealed excess baggage is stories.' In this exquisite literary gem, Georgi Gospodinov, winner of the International Booker Prize, invites the reader on a winding journey through his own memories. He shows us a childhood under Communism, a particularly Bulgarian variety of melancholy, the freedom and thrills found in reading and writing, and the coming of age of one extraordinary writer. Ultimately, this profound, playful and deeply moving autobiographical text offers resounding proof of the power and importance of storytelling. TRANSLATED FROM THE BULGARIAN BY KRISTINA KOVACHEVA AND DAN GUNN
Download or read book Reader s Encyclopedia of Eastern European Literature written by Robert B. Pynsent and published by HarperCollins Publishers. This book was released on 1993 with total page 632 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes brief histories of the oral traditions and literatures of Eastern Europe and biographies of leading figures. Languages include: Albanian; Armenian; Bulgarian; Byelorussian (Belarussian); Croatian; Czech; Estonian; Finnish; Georgian; Greek; Hungarian; Latvian; Lithuanian; Macedonian; Polish; Roumanian; Serbian; Slovak; Slovene; Sorbian (Wendish); Ukrainian; Yiddish.
Download or read book Description of a Struggle written by Michael March and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1994 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of contemporary East European writing. In Ants, a Russian learns to love the bugs which infest his body, in Retina, the son of a Polish concentration camp survivor becomes a terrorist, in Big Business, people pose as Rumanian beggars in the Paris Metro in order to earn a living.
Download or read book Looking Forward Looking Back written by Jana Pohl and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2011 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How is the life-altering event of migration narrated for children, especially if it was caused by Anti-Semitism and poverty? What of the country of origin is remembered and what is forgotten, and what of the target country when the migration is imagined there a century later? Looking Forward, Looking Back examines today’s representation of Jewish mass migration from Eastern Europe to America around the turn of the last century. It explores the collective story that emerges when American authors look back at this exodus from an Eastern European home to a new one to be established in America. Focusing on children’s literature, it investigates a wide range of texts including young adult literature as well as picture books and hence sheds light on the dynamics of the verbal and the visual in generating images of the self and other, the familiar and the strange. This book is of interest to scholars in the field of imagology, children’s literature, cultural studies, American studies, Slavic studies, and Jewish studies.
Download or read book Sankirtos written by Robert Bird and published by Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften. This book was released on 2008 with total page 568 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 16 contributions are published in Russian and 14 contributions in English. This volume is published in celebration of the seventieth birthday of Tomas Venclova, Lithuanian poet, literary scholar, essayist on contemporary culture and politics of Eastern Europe, and professor of Russian literature at Yale University. Thomas Venclova is one of the towering figures of contemporary intellectual and cultural life. A passionate proponent of human rights and member of the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, he also made a substantial contribution to the liberation of Eastern Europe. The essays presented include studies of Russian literature, Russian and Eastern European cultural history, and the culture of the Baltic states. The authors of this volume span the entire range of Tomas Venclova's interests and contributions. They include colleagues from many countries, among them Michel Aucouturier (Paris), Nikolay Bogomolov (Moscow), Stefano Garzonio (Pisa), Viach. Vs. Ivanov (Los Angeles-Moscow), Lev Loseff (Dartmouth), Adam Michnik (Warsaw), Boris Ravdin (Riga), Stephanie Sandler (Harvard), Alexander Schenker (Yale), Roman Timenchik (Jerusalem), Michael Wachtel (Princeton), and others.
Download or read book Postcolonial Perspectives on Postcommunism in Central and Eastern Europe written by Dorota Kołodziejczyk and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-10-02 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A quarter of a century after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and from the vantage point of a post-Cold War, globalised, world, there is a need to address the relative neglect of postcommunism in analysis of postcolonial and neo-colonial configurations of power and influence. This book proposes new critical perspectives on several themes and concepts that have emerged within, or been propagated by, postcolonial studies. These themes include structures of exclusion/ inclusion; formations of nationalism, structures of othering, and representations of difference; forms and historical realisations of anti-colonial/anti-imperial struggle; the experience of trauma (involving issues of collective memory/amnesia and the re-writing of history); resistance as a complex of cultural practices; and concepts such as alterity, ambivalence, self-colonisation, dislocation, hegemonic discourse, minority, and subaltern cultures. Taken together, this volume suggests that some of the methodological instruments of postcolonial criticism can be fruitfully applied to the study of postcommunist cultures and, conversely, that the experience of the Soviet brand of imperialist rule in the form of communism in East-Central Europe can function as an ideological moderator in Third-World oriented, Marxist-inspired, postcolonial discourses. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.
Download or read book Memory and Theory in Eastern Europe written by Uilleam Blacker and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-09-11 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is the aim of this volume to investigate how academic practices of Memory Studies are being applied, adapted, and transformed in the countries of East-Central Europe and the former Soviet Union. It affords a new, startlingly different perspective for scholars of both Eastern European history and Memory Studies.
Download or read book Imaging and Mapping Eastern Europe written by Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-05-10 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imaging and Mapping Eastern Europe puts images centre stage and argues for the agency of the visual in the construction of Europe’s east as a socio-political and cultural entity. This book probes into the discontinuous processes of mapping the eastern European space and imaging the eastern European body. Beginning from the Renaissance maps of Sarmatia Europea, it moves onto the images of women in ethnic dress on the pages of travellers’ reports from the Balkans, to cartoons of children bullied by dictators in the satirical press, to Cold War cartography, and it ends with photos of protesting crowds on contemporary dust jackets. Studying the eastern European ‘iconosphere’ leads to the engagement with issues central for image studies and visual culture: word and image relationship, overlaps between the codes of othering and self-fashioning, as well as interaction between the diverse modes of production specific to cartography, travel illustrations, caricature, and book cover design. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, visual culture, and central Asian, Russian and Eastern European studies.
Download or read book Polish Culture in Britain written by Maggie Ann Bowers and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-09-07 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited volume explores the historical, cultural and literary legacies of Polish Britain, and their significance for both the British and Polish nations. The focus of the book is twofold. First, it investigates the history of Polish immigration and the ways in which Polish immigrants have conceptualised their own experiences and encounters with Britain and the British. Second, it examines how Poles and Poland have been represented by Anglophone writers in both fictional and non-fictional forms of discourse. Inevitably, these issues are intertwined. Polish experiences of Britain have been shaped, in part, by British ideas about Poland, just as British notions of Poland have been transformed by the emergence of large and culturally active Polish communities in the UK. By studying these issues together, this volume develops a wide-ranging and original analysis of Polish Britain.
Download or read book Eastern Europe 3 volumes written by Richard Frucht and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2004-12-22 with total page 951 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A contemporary analysis of the people, cultures, and society within the regions that make up Eastern Europe. Eastern Europe: An Introduction to the People, Lands, and Culture sheds light on modern-day life in the 16 nations comprising Eastern Europe. Going beyond the history and politics already well documented in other works, this unique three-volume series explores the social and cultural aspects of a region often ignored in books and curricula on Western civilization. The volumes are organized by geographic proximity and commonality in historical development, allowing the countries to be both studied individually and juxtaposed against others in the region. The first volume covers the northern tier of states, the second looks at lands that were once part of the Hapsburg empire, and the third examines the Balkan states. Each chapter profiles a single country—its geography, history, political development, economy, and culture—and gives readers a glimpse of the challenges that lie ahead. Vignettes on various topics of interest illuminate the unique character of each country.
