Writing before the institution of copyright, Renaissance authors were not recognized as owning their works. Yet, in an environment in which the written word could be variously marketed by printers or by acting companies, and in which authors could be...

Our finest essayists discuss six centuries of literary genius."Genius is one of those words upon which the world has agreed to form no clear consensus," Joseph Epstein tells us in his introduction. How then shall we define "literary genius"? In this...

Yankees in Petrograd, Bolsheviks in New York examines the myth of America as the Other World at the moment of transition from the Russian to the Soviet version. The material on which Milla Fedorova bases her study comprises a curious phenomenon of the...

Delicate Markers is the first book-length study of Vladimir Nabokov's novel Invitation to a Beheading (1935-36), a masterpiece that has received a great deal of scholarly attention, second only to Lolita, among Nabokov's works. Contrary to the prevailing...

Nabokov's translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (1964) and its accompanying Commentary, along with Ada, or Ardor (1969), his densely allusive late English language novel, have appeared nearly inscrutable to many interpreters of his work. If not outright...

Peter Dronke illuminates a unique literary tradition: the narrative that mixes prose with verse. Highlighting a wide range of text, he defines and explores the creative ways in which mixed forms were used in Europe from antiquity through to the 13th...

Featuring essays and commentaries on American themes and American writers, this volume identifies and explores the central dynamic of American literature; the imperatives of a powerful national past vs. the subversions of an endlessly anarchic spirit

This is the first full-length study of the huge popularity and cultural impact of fortune telling in Russia from the eighteenth century to the present. It examines the ways in which popular fortune telling books found acceptance among urban and literate...

Americans long have been fascinated by Russians and have wished to know their real appraisals of American culture and their judgments of literature free from the tint of party politics. In the past such information about Soviet criticism of American...

A culmination of years of literary scholarship explores facets of the literature of the South in chronologically arranged sections and discusses the major authors, movements, and social consequences of the American South

At a time in Russia's history when poets could be (and sometimes were) killed for a poem, the autobiographies of three prominent poets, Osip Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Boris Pasternak, became a courageous defense of poetry. The Most Dangerous Art...

Presents eighteen biographical and literary essays on Wallace Stevens, W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, Washington Irving, Oscar Wilde and other notable authors

This is the first book-length study of Andrei Bitov, one of contemporary Russia's most original writers. It plots his evolution from the post-Stalin years to his mature masterpieces of the glasnost era and assesses his place in the Russian and...

After the Wake provides the reader with a critical guide to the development of experimental literature, music, and paining since the Second World War. A large number of artists central to this new tradition—among them Boulez, Stockhausen, Pollock,...

Trilling's classic portrait of the nineteenth-century English poet and critic views Arnold within the cultural and political milieu of his century as well as from a twentieth-century perspective

An entire generation of Russian writers have been living in exile from their homeland. Although today's glasnost has special meaning for many of these banished writers, it does not dissolve their experience of forced separation from their country of...

Russian Drama from Its Beginnings to the Age of Pushkin...