How Russian Literature Became Great - Couverture rigide

Hellebust, Rolf

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 1501773410 ISBN 13 : 9781501773419

Editeur : Northern Illinois University Press, 2024

Synopsis

How Russian Literature Became Great explores the cultural and political role of a modern national literature, orchestrated in a Slavonic key but resonating far beyond Russia's borders.

Rolf Hellebust investigates a range of literary tendencies, philosophies, and theories from antiquity to the present: Roman jurisprudence to German Romanticism, French Enlightenment to Czech Structuralism, Herder to Hobsbawm, Samuel Johnson to Sainte-Beuve, and so on. Besides the usual Russian suspects from Pushkin to Chekhov, Hellebust includes European writers: Byron and Shelley, Goethe and Schiller, Chateaubriand and Baudelaire, Dante, Mickiewicz, and more.

As elsewhere, writing in Russia advertises itself via a canon of literary monuments constituting an atemporal "ideal order among themselves" (T.S. Eliot). And yet this is a tradition that could only have been born at a specific moment in the golden nineteenth-century age of historiography and nation-building. The Russian example reveals the contradictions between immutability and innovation, universality and specificity at the heart of modern conceptions of tradition from Sainte-Beuve through Eliot and down to the present day.

The conditions of its era of formation--the prominence of the crucial literary-historical question of the writer's social function, and the equation of literature with national identity--make the Russian classical tradition the epitome of a unified cultural text, with a complex narrative in which competing stories of progress and decline unfold through the symbolic biographical encounters of the authors who constitute its members. How Russian Literature Became Great thus offers a new paradigm for understanding the paradoxes of modern tradition.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Rolf Hellebust teaches comparative literature with the Brilliant Club university access charity in London. He is the author of Flesh to Metal.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Northern Illinois University Press
• Date d'édition: 2024
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1501773410
• ISBN 13: 9781501773419
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 252
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible