Download or read book Russian Grotesque Realism written by Ani Kokobobo and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A rereading of the Russian realist novel that proposes a hybrid genre, grotesque realism, to describe changes during the postreform era"--

Download or read book Rabelais and His World written by Mikhail Mikhaĭlovich Bakhtin and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1984 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This classic work by the Russian philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) examines popular humor and folk culture in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. One of the essential texts of a theorist who is rapidly becoming a major reference in contemporary thought, Rabelais and His World is essential reading for anyone interested in problems of language and text and in cultural interpretation.

Download or read book The Spirit of Carnival written by David Danow and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The world of literature responds to the "spirit of carnival" in ways that are both social and cultural, mythological and archetypal. Literature provides a mirror in which carnival is reflected and refracted through the multifarious perspectives of verbal art. In his original, wide-ranging book, David K. Danow catches the various reflections in that mirror, from the bright, life-affirming magical side of carnival, as revealed in the literature of Latin American writers, to its dark, grotesque, death-embracing aspect as illustrated in numerous novels depicting the dire experience of the Second World War. The remarkable meshing of these two diametrically opposed yet inextricably intertwined facets of literature (and of life) makes for an intriguing sphere of investigation, for the carnival spirit is animated by a human need to dissolve borders and eliminate boundaries—including, symbolically, those between life and death—in an ongoing effort to merge opposing forces into new configurations of truth and meaning. Expanding upon the seminal ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin, carnival, argues Danow, is designed to allow one extreme to flow into another, to provide for one polarity (official culture) to confront its opposite (unofficial culture), much as individuals engage in dialogue. In this case the result is "dialogized carnival" or "carnivalized dialogue." In their artmaking, Danow claims, human beings are animated by a periodic predisposition toward the bright side of carnival, matched by an equally strong, far darker predilection. Carnival forms of thinking are firmly embedded within the human psyche as archetypal patterns. In this engaging exploratory book, we are shown the distinctive imprint of these primordial structures within a multitude of seemingly disparate literary works.

Download or read book Febris Erotica written by Valeria Sobol and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2011-05-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The destructive power of obsessive love was a defining subject of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian literature. In Febris Erotica, Sobol argues that Russian writers were deeply preoccupied with the nature of romantic relationships and were persistent in their use of lovesickness not simply as a traditional theme but as a way to address pressing philosophical, ethical, and ideological concerns through a recognizable literary trope. Sobol examines stereotypes about the damaging effects of romantic love and offers a short history of the topos of lovesickness in Western literature and medicine. Read an interview with the author: http://www.rorotoko.com/index.php/article/valeria_sobol_interview_febris_erotica_lovesickness_russian_literary_imagin/

Download or read book Russian Writers and the Fin de Si cle written by Katherine Bowers and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-17 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An essay collection that explores Russian literature and culture in relation to the late nineteenth-century fin de siècle.

Download or read book Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism written by Donald Fanger and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism is Donald Fanger's groundbreaking study of the art of Dostoevsky and the literary and historical context in which it was created. Through detailed analyses of the work of Balzac, Dickens, and Gogol, Fanger identifies romantic realism, the transformative fusion of two generic categories, as a powerful imaginary response to the great modern city. This fusion reaches its aesthetic and metaphysical climax in Dostoevsky, whose vision culminating in Crime and Punishment is seen by Fanger as the final synthesis of romantic realism.

Download or read book Maxim Gorky written by Cynthia Marsh and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2006 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Maxim Gorky was dubbed the father of socialist realism in the Soviet period, but he had forged his career as an internationally known novelist and dramatist some three or more decades earlier. Posing questions that Soviet critics found difficult to confront, the author examines the effects of exile and religion on the content and form of the plays as well as the role played by women, and the personal and political implications of motherhood. All sixteen of Gorky's published plays are covered, and the book explores whether this body of work has themes and styles to unify it. While conflict is central to the core political themes and also infiltrates many aspects of the dramatic style (cartoonish and grotesque), other less expected themes and styles emerge. Viewing the post-revolutionary plays as a development of earlier work leads to a question rarely posed: are the plays written by Gorky in the process of defining the new Party-inspired socialist realism in fact less about socialist realist issues of conformity, and more about Gorky's own painful life experience? And what is equally under the microscope is a search for the monumental style frequently associated with socialist realist theatre: the proposed origins of the spatial grandeur in Gorky's plays come as a surprise.

Download or read book Mikhail Bakhtin s Heritage in Literature Arts and Psychology written by Slav N. Gratchev and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-07-07 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Art and Answerability, the work that would become Mikhail Bakhtin’s literary manifesto, was first published in Den Iskusstva (The Day of the Art) on September 13, 1919. Mikhail Bakhtin’s Heritage in Literature, Arts, and Psychology: Art and Answerability celebrates one hundred years of Bakhtin’s heritage. This unique book examines the heritage of Mikhail Bakhtinin a variety of disciplines.To articulate the enduring relevance and heritage of the varied works of Bakhtin, sixteen scholars from eight countries have come together, and each has brought his/her unique perspective to the subject. Bakhtin’s work in aesthetics, moral philosophy, linguistics, psychology, carnival, cognition, contextualism, and the history and theory of the novel are present here, as understood by a wide variety of distinguished scholars.

Download or read book Soviet Grotesque written by Natasha Perova and published by Glas. This book was released on 1991-01-01 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This issue of Glas has a subtitle--Soviet Grotesque"--and our subsequent numbers will follow a similar pattern, dealing with such themes as The Woman's View and The Jews in Russia. We hope this approach will increase our reader's enjoyment by offering them an integrated reading experience which gives us a clear insight into some aspect of life in Russia. The sense of the grotesque has a long and distinctive history in Russian literature. It can be argued that the Soviet period has provided particularly fertile ground for its development--many Russians would certainly think so. Grotesque literature has flourished here--without official acknowledgement or encouragement, of course--but only now can it be openly published and freely read. The pieces offered here clearly demonstrate the grotesque's ability to manifest itself in an unlimited range of style and form--the following pages offer lapidary jargon sketches, urbane self-referential prose, frantic stream of consciousness, surreal naturalistic detail and realistic narrative with lyrical interludes. In every case we feel the writer has something to say to the Western reader.

Download or read book The Master and Margarita written by Mikhail Bulgakov and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2016-03-18 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Satan comes to Soviet Moscow in this critically acclaimed translation of one of the most important and best-loved modern classics in world literature. The Master and Margarita has been captivating readers around the world ever since its first publication in 1967. Written during Stalin’s time in power but suppressed in the Soviet Union for decades, Bulgakov’s masterpiece is an ironic parable on power and its corruption, on good and evil, and on human frailty and the strength of love. In The Master and Margarita, the Devil himself pays a visit to Soviet Moscow. Accompanied by a retinue that includes the fast-talking, vodka-drinking, giant tomcat Behemoth, he sets about creating a whirlwind of chaos that soon involves the beautiful Margarita and her beloved, a distraught writer known only as the Master, and even Jesus Christ and Pontius Pilate. The Master and Margarita combines fable, fantasy, political satire, and slapstick comedy to create a wildly entertaining and unforgettable tale that is commonly considered the greatest novel to come out of the Soviet Union. It appears in this edition in a translation by Mirra Ginsburg that was judged “brilliant” by Publishers Weekly. Praise for The Master and Margarita “A wild surrealistic romp. . . . Brilliantly flamboyant and outrageous.” —Joyce Carol Oates, The Detroit News “Fine, funny, imaginative. . . . The Master and Margarita stands squarely in the great Gogolesque tradition of satiric narrative.” —Saul Maloff, Newsweek “A rich, funny, moving and bitter novel. . . . Vast and boisterous entertainment.” —The New York Times “The book is by turns hilarious, mysterious, contemplative and poignant. . . . A great work.” —Chicago Tribune “Funny, devilish, brilliant satire. . . . It’s literature of the highest order and . . . it will deliver a full measure of enjoyment and enlightenment.” —Publishers Weekly

Download or read book Russia s Capitalist Realism written by Vadim Shneyder and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-15 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Russia’s Capitalist Realism examines how the literary tradition that produced the great works of Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Anton Chekhov responded to the dangers and possibilities posed by Russia’s industrial revolution. During Russia’s first tumultuous transition to capitalism, social problems became issues of literary form for writers trying to make sense of economic change. The new environments created by industry, such as giant factories and mills, demanded some kind of response from writers but defied all existing forms of language. This book recovers the rich and lively public discourse of this volatile historical period, which Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov transformed into some of the world’s greatest works of literature. Russia’s Capitalist Realism will appeal to readers interested in nineteenth‐century Russian literature and history, the relationship between capitalism and literary form, and theories of the novel.

Download or read book Chimes of a Lost Cathedral written by Janet Fitch and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2019-07-02 with total page 752 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A young Russian woman comes into her own in the midst of revolution and civil war in this "brilliant" novel set in "a world of furious beauty" (Los Angeles Review of Books). After the loves and betrayals of The Revolution of Marina M., young poet Marina Makarova finds herself alone amid the devastation of the Russian Civil War -- pregnant and adrift, forced to rely on her own resourcefulness to find a place to wait out the birth of her child and eventually make her way back to her native city, Petrograd. After two years of revolution, the city that was once St. Petersburg is almost unrecognizable, the haunted, half-emptied, starving Capital of Once Had Been, its streets teeming with homeless children. Moved by their plight, though hardly better off herself, she takes on the challenge of caring for these orphans, until they become the tool of tragedy from an unexpected direction. Shaped by her country's ordeals and her own trials -- betrayal and privation and inconceivable loss -- Marina evolves as a poet and a woman of sensibility and substance hardly imaginable at the beginning of her transformative odyssey. Chimes of a Lost Cathedral is the culmination of one woman's s journey through some of the most dramatic events of the last century -- the epic story of an artist who discovers her full power, passion, and creativity just as her revolution reveals its true direction for the future.

Download or read book Russian Writers and the Fin de Si cle written by Katherine Bowers and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-17 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Russian literature has a reputation for gloomy texts, especially during the late nineteenth century. This volume argues that a 'fin-de-siècle' mood informed Russian literature long before the chronological end of the nineteenth century, in ways that had significant impact on the development of Russian realism. Some chapters consider ideas more readily associated with fin-de-siècle Europe such as degeneration theory, biodeterminism, Freudian psychoanalysis or apocalypticism, alongside earlier Russian realist texts by writers such as Turgenev, Dostoevsky or Tolstoy. Other chapters explore the changes that realism underwent as modernism emerged, examining later nineteenth-century or early twentieth-century texts in the context of the earlier realist tradition or their own cultural moment. Overall, a team of emerging and established scholars of Russian literature and culture present a wide range of creative and insightful readings that shed new light on later realism in all its manifestations.

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 The Winterlings written by Cristina Sánchez-Andrade and published by Restless Books. This book was released on 2016-11-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A reckoning with violent history, the occult, and death set against the broodingly romantic backdrop of the Spanish Civil War’s fallout and Hollywood’s Golden Age, by “one of the most powerful female voices Spanish literature has produced” (La Razón). After a childhood in exile, two odd sisters, known mysteriously as “The Winterlings,” return to their murdered grandfather’s cottage in the Galician countryside and settle into the unchanged routines of rural living. When the sisters learn of nearby filming for Pandora and the Flying Dutchman and the call for Ava Gardner lookalikes, the chance to stand in for the most beautiful woman in the world divides their once-unified passion for Hollywood cinema and acting, threatening to sunder their close relationship. Meanwhile, the insular villagers gradually reveal themselves as grotesque (albeit charming) characters: a widow in perpetual mourning, a woman who never dies and the priest who climbs a steep hill daily to give her last rites, and a dentist who plants the teeth of the deceased in his patients’ mouths. But most unsettling of all is the revelation of the perverse business arrangement the townspeople have made with the girls’ departed grandfather. Enchanting as a spell, award-winning Galician author Cristina Sánchez-Andrade’s novel draws equally from Spanish oral tradition and the American gothic fiction of Flannery O’Connor and Shirley Jackson, puncturing the idyllic surface of provincial life and historical codes of silence to expose the darkness lurking underneath.

Download or read book Skunk written by Petr Aleshkovskiĭ and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Novel set in Russian North. Story of young man "Skunk", whose childish experiences of life in the Russia North are degraded and criminal, and yet who has instinct for moral and religious values which makes his life into a quest.

Download or read book The Grotesque in the Fiction of Charles Dickens and Other 19th century European Novelists written by Isabelle Hervouet-Farrar and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2015-01-12 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an overview of the literary grotesque in 19th-century Europe, with special emphasis on Charles Dickens, whose use of this complex aesthetic category is thus addressed in relation with other 19th-century European writers. The crossing of geographical boundaries allows an in-depth study of the different modes of the grotesque found in 19th-century fiction. It provides a comprehensive analysis of the reasons behind the extensive use of such a favoured mode of expression. Intertextuality and comparative or cultural analysis are thus used here to shed new light on Dickens’s influences (both given and received), as well as to compare and contrast his use of the grotesque with that of key 19th-century writers like Hugo, Gogol, Thackeray, Hardy and a few others. The essays of this volume examine the various forms taken by the grotesque in 19th-century European fiction, such as, for example, the fusion of the familiar and the uncanny, or of the terrifying and the comic; as well as the figures and narrative techniques best suited for the expression of a novelist’s grotesque vision of the world. These essays contribute to an assessment of the links between the grotesque, the gothic and the fantastic, and, more generally, the genres and aesthetic categories which the 19th-century grotesque fed on, like caricature, the macabre and tragicomedy. They also examine the novelists’ grotesque as contributing to the questioning of society in Victorian Britain and 19th-century Europe, echoing its raging conflicts and the shocks of scientific progress. This study naturally adopts as its theoretical basis the works of key theorists and critics of the grotesque: namely, Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire and John Ruskin in the 19th century, and Mikhail Bakhtin, Wolfgang Kayser, Geoffrey Harpham and Elisheva Rosen in the 20th century.