Download or read book History in a Grotesque Key written by Kevin M. F. Platt and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines Russian literary works—some canonical but most obscure—since the time of Peter the Great that bring the lens of the grotesque to bear on the theory and practice of revolutionary social transformation in Russia.
Download or read book Grotesque Revisited written by Laurynas Katkus and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2013-07-26 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays aims to recapitulate the state of grotesque poetics in modern and post-modern writing. It concentrates on Central and Eastern Europe, introducing the Western reader to the variety and ingenuity of this region’s literary traditions, ranging from German and Russian to Lithuanian and Romanian literatures. At the same time, it seeks to highlight the importance of the grotesque mode of writing in the region. It includes new insights and interpretations of theories on grotesque and Menippean satire including (but not limited to) the works of Mikhail Bakhtin. The historic scope of the volume ranges from the legacies of Nazi dictatorship and exile to the post-communist times, but it is especially focused on the Soviet era. Scholars, not only from Central and Eastern Europe, but also from Great Britain, Ireland, and Turkey, analyze the literary devices of the grotesque, examining the relationship between the socio-political background and subversive representations of the grotesque. Many studies take on a comparative and transnational approach. Alternatively, some studies aim to present important and innovative creators of grotesque texts in greater detail. This book, which features, among others, contributions by Professor Galin Tihanov, George Steiner Chair of Queen Mary College at the University of London; Professor Alexander Ivanitsky of the Russian State University of Humanities; Professor Algis Kalėda of the Lithuanian Institute of Literature and Folklore; Professor Peter Arnds of Trinity College, Dublin; and Dr Carmen Popescu of the University of Craiova, Romania, will appeal to a broad academic readership, including both students and professors wanting to discover more about the literary grotesque and modern Central and Eastern European literature and culture.
Download or read book Medievalism written by David Matthews and published by Boydell & Brewer Ltd. This book was released on 2015 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An accessibly-written survey of the origins and growth of the discipline of medievalism studies.
Download or read book Gargoyles and Grotesques written by Alex Woodcock and published by Shire Publications. This book was released on 2011-05-24 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gargoyles are an architectural feature designed to throw rainwater clear of the walls of a building. Widely used on medieval churches, these water spouts were often richly decorated, and fashioned as serpents' heads and other fanciful shapes. Today, the term gargoyle is also popularly applied to any carved decorative head or creature high up on a building and this book is an exploration of all of these enchanting features. Written by an academic and stonecarver, it is the perfect introduction to this fascinating subject. Gargoyles aims to provide a concise introduction to the stone carvings often found on religious and secular buildings in Britain from the medieval period to the modern. It will explore the typical imagery, some of the theories put forward to explain them, as well as consider the carvings within their architectural and social contexts. Incorporating recent and current research, the book will nevertheless be accessible to the general reader.
Download or read book Grotesque written by Justin Edwards and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-05-29 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Grotesque provides an invaluable and accessible guide to the use (and abuse) of this complex literary term. Justin D. Edwards and Rune Graulund explore the influence of the grotesque on cultural forms throughout history, with particular focus on its representation in literature, visual art and film. The book: presents a history of the literary grotesque from Classical writing to the present examines theoretical debates around the term in their historical and cultural contexts introduce readers to key writers and artists of the grotesque, from Homer to Rabelais, Shakespeare, Carson McCullers and David Cronenberg analyses key terms such as disharmony, deformed and distorted bodies, misfits and freaks explores the grotesque in relation to queer theory, post-colonialism and the carnivalesque. Grotesque presents readers with an original and distinctive overview of this vital genre and is an essential guide for students of literature, art history and film studies.
Download or read book Edoardo Sanguineti written by John Picchione and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-12-02 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Poet, novelist, theorist, playwright, translator, politician, and teacher, Edoardo Sanguineti (1930-2010) is one of the most original and influential Italian intellectuals of the second post-war period. An ardent and unremitting historical materialist, he investigated the links between language and ideology, literature and the other arts, together with their functions within the logic of late capitalism. The extraordinary range of his creative work persistently defies conventional aesthetic notions. With their variety of topics and critical perspectives, the essays assembled in this volume explore both the relevance of his theoretical postures and the ideological and formal fabric of his literary production. They highlight his subversive objectives, the complexity of the language, the astonishing linguistic ingenuity, metaliterary significance, whimsical disposition, and provocative social critique. Testimonials by Sanguineti's colleagues and students, presented here in English translation, offer a portrait of the man, his temperament and his distinctiveness, and provide a personal view of the life and work of a brilliant intellectual."
Download or read book Terror and Greatness written by Kevin M. F. Platt and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-05-15 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this ambitious book, Kevin M. F. Platt focuses on a cruel paradox central to Russian history: that the price of progress has so often been the traumatic suffering of society at the hands of the state. The reigns of Ivan IV (the Terrible) and Peter the Great are the most vivid exemplars of this phenomenon in the pre-Soviet period. Both rulers have been alternately lionized for great achievements and despised for the extraordinary violence of their reigns. In many accounts, the balance of praise and condemnation remains unresolved; often the violence is simply repressed. Platt explores historical and cultural representations of the two rulers from the early nineteenth century to the present, as they shaped and served the changing dictates of Russian political life. Throughout, he shows how past representations exerted pressure on subsequent attempts to evaluate these liminal figures. In ever-changing and often counterposed treatments of the two, Russians have debated the relationship between greatness and terror in Russian political practice, while wrestling with the fact that the nation’s collective selfhood has seemingly been forged only through shared, often self-inflicted trauma. Platt investigates the work of all the major historians, from Karamzin to the present, who wrote on Ivan and Peter. Yet he casts his net widely, and "historians" of the two tsars include poets, novelists, composers, and painters, giants of the opera stage, Party hacks, filmmakers, and Stalin himself. To this day the contradictory legacies of Ivan and Peter burden any attempt to come to terms with the nature of political power—past, present, future—in Russia.
Download or read book The Pedagogy of Images written by Marina Balina and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 569 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1920s, with the end of the revolution, the Soviet government began investing resources and energy into creating a new type of book for the first generation of young Soviet readers. In a sense, these early books for children were the ABCs of Soviet modernity; creatively illustrated and intricately designed, they were manuals and primers that helped the young reader enter the field of politics through literature. Children’s books provided the basic vocabulary and grammar for understanding new, post-revolutionary realities, but they also taught young readers how to perceive modern events and communist practices. Relying on a process of dual-media rendering, illustrated books presented propaganda as a simple, repeatable narrative or verse, while also casting it in easily recognizable graphic images. A vehicle of ideology, object of affection, and product of labour all in one, the illustrated book for the young Soviet reader emerged as an important cultural phenomenon. Communist in its content, it was often avant-gardist in its form. Spotlighting three thematic threads – communist goals, pedagogy, and propaganda – The Pedagogy of Images traces the formation of a mass-modern readership through the creation of the communist-inflected visual and narrative conventions that these early readers were meant to appropriate.
Download or read book A Companion to Russian Cinema written by Birgit Beumers and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2016-05-17 with total page 672 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Companion to Russian Cinema provides an exhaustive and carefully organised guide to the cinema of pre-Revolutionary Russia, of the Soviet era, as well as post-Soviet Russian cinema, edited by one of the most established and knowledgeable scholars in Russian cinema studies. The most up-to-date and thorough coverage of Russian, Soviet and post-Soviet cinema, which also effectively fills gaps in the existing scholarship in the field This is the first volume on Russian cinema to explore specifically the history of movie theatres, studios, and educational institutions The editor is one of the most established and knowledgeable scholars in Russian cinema studies, and contributions come from leading experts in the field of Russian Studies, Film Studies and Visual Culture Chapters consider the arts of scriptwriting, sound, production design, costumes and cinematography Provides five portraits of key figures in Soviet and Russia film history, whose works have been somewhat neglected
Download or read book Empire De Centered written by Maxim Waldstein and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-06 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1991 the Soviet empire collapsed, at a stroke throwing the certainties of the Cold War world into flux. Yet despite the dramatic end of this 'last empire', the idea of empire is still alive and well, its language and concepts feeding into public debate and academic research. Bringing together a multidisciplinary and international group of authors to study Soviet society and culture through the categories empire and space, this collection demonstrates the enduring legacy of empire with regard to Russia, whose history has been marked by a particularly close and ambiguous relationship between nation and empire building, and between national and imperial identities. Parallel with this discussion of empire, the volume also highlights the centrality of geographical space and spatial imaginings in Russian and Soviet intellectual traditions and social practices; underlining how Russia's vast geographical dimensions have profoundly informed Russia's state and nation building, both in practice and concept. Combining concepts of space and empire, the collection offers a reconsideration of Soviet imperial legacy by studying its cultural and societal underpinnings from previously unexplored perspectives. In so doing it provides a reconceptualization of the theoretical and methodological foundations of contemporary imperial and spatial studies, through the example of the experience provided by Soviet society and culture.
Download or read book The Reading of Russian Literature in China written by M. Gamsa and published by Springer. This book was released on 2010-05-24 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the profound influence that Russian literature, which was tied inseparably to the political victory of the Russian revolution, had on China during a period that saw the collapse of imperial rule and the rise of the Communist Party.
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 Grotesque written by Justin Edwards and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-05-29 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Grotesque provides an invaluable and accessible guide to the use (and abuse) of this complex literary term. Justin D. Edwards and Rune Graulund explore the influence of the grotesque on cultural forms throughout history, with particular focus on its representation in literature, visual art and film. The book: presents a history of the literary grotesque from Classical writing to the present examines theoretical debates around the term in their historical and cultural contexts introduce readers to key writers and artists of the grotesque, from Homer to Rabelais, Shakespeare, Carson McCullers and David Cronenberg analyses key terms such as disharmony, deformed and distorted bodies, misfits and freaks explores the grotesque in relation to queer theory, post-colonialism and the carnivalesque. Grotesque presents readers with an original and distinctive overview of this vital genre and is an essential guide for students of literature, art history and film studies.
Download or read book Maximilian Voloshin s Poetic Legacy and the Post Soviet Russian Identity written by M. Landa and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-06-10 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Famed and outspoken Russian poet, Maximilian Voloshin's notoriety has grown steadily since his slow release from Soviet censorship. For the first time, Landa showcases his vast poetic contributions, proving his words to be an overlooked solution both to the political and cultural turmoil engulfing the Soviet Union in the early twentieth century.
Download or read book Post Soviet Nostalgia written by Otto Boele and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-07-24 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together scholars from Russia, the United States and Europe, this collection of essays is the first to explore the slippery phenomenon of post-Soviet nostalgia by studying it as a discursive practice serving a wide variety of ideological agendas. The authors demonstrate how feelings of loss and displacement in post-Soviet Russia are turned into effective tools of state building and national mobilization, as well as into weapons for local resistance and the assertion of individual autonomy. Drawing on novels, memoirs, documentaries, photographs and Soviet commodities, Post-Soviet Nostalgia is an invaluable resource for historians, literary scholars and anthropologists interested in how Russia comes to terms with its Soviet past.
Download or read book Language and Culture in the Growth of Imperialism written by Sharron Gu and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2012-09-13 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Political science interpretations of international relations tend to focus on abstract terms of economic interest, domination, rights and justice. Trapped within this limited horizon, the discipline fails to explain why nations of similar economic structure would have variant ideas for their foreign policies, and why nations with different economic structures and ideologies could develop a similar global posture during certain periods of their histories. This innovative study examines imperialism from a cultural and linguistic perspective, portraying the rise and fall of ancient Greek, Roman, medieval Islamic, modern British, Russian and American empires as a part of the natural life of world civilizations. As these imperial cultures matured through centuries of literary accumulation and interaction with other cultures, they finally found their confidence on the world stage and transitioned from an aggressive policy towards others to a more tolerant one.
Download or read book Nightmare From Literary Experiments to Cultural Project written by Dina Khapaeva and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2012-11-13 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is a nightmare as a psychological experience, a literary experiment and a cultural project? Why has experiencing a nightmare under the guise of reading a novel, watching a film or playing a video game become a persistent requirement of contemporary mass culture? By answering these questions, which have not been addressed by literary criticism and cultural studies, we can interpret anew the texts of classic authors. Charles Maturin, Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Thomas Mann, Howard Philips Lovecraft and Victor Pelevin carry out bold experiments on their heroes and readers as they seek to investigate the nature of nightmare in their works. This book examines their prose to reveal the unstudied features of the nightmare as a mental state and traces the mosaic of coincidences leading from literary experiments to today’s culture of nightmare consumption.
