Major statements by the celebrated Russian poet Boris Pasternak (1890-1960) about poetry, inspiration, the creative process, and the significance of artistic/literary creativity in his own life as well as in human life altogether are presented here in direct translation of his own words, and are discussed in the extensive commentaries and introduction. The texts range from 1910 to 1946 and are …
In this volume, Professor Ljunggren introduces the Symbolists and their feverish expectations in detail. Theirs was a time when for a brief moment everything seemed possible. Then came the rude awakening, best described in Bely’s powerful prose masterpiece Petersburg, which serves as the connective thread and recurrent point of reference throughout this collection. Written in the early 1910s,…
The Complete Poetry of Du Fu presents a complete scholarly translation of Chinese literature alongside the original text in a critical edition. The English translation is more scholarly than vernacular Chinese translations, and it is compelled to address problems that even the best traditional commentaries overlook.The main body of the text is a facing page translation and critical edition of t…
Due to their popularity with the American counterculture, the poems attributed to Hanshan, Shide and Fenggan have been translated several times in recent decades. However, previous translations have either been broadly popular in nature or have failed to understand fully the colloquial qualities of the originals. This new version provides a complete Chinese/English edition of the poems, aimed a…
The power of stories to raise our concern for animals has been postulated throughout history by countless scholars, activists, and writers, including such greats as Thomas Hardy and Leo Tolstoy. This is the first book to investigate that power and explain the psychological and cultural mechanisms behind it. It does so by presenting the results of an experimental project that involved thousands …
"Hunger is a contentious theme in modernist literature, and this study addresses its relevance in the works of four major American and European writers. Taking an in-depth look at works by Melville, Kafka,Hamsun, and Wright, it argues that hunger is deeply involved with concepts of modernity and modern literature. Exploring how it is bound up with the writer’s role in modern society this stud…
The Arjunawiw?ha is one of the best known of the Old Javanese classics. This volume presents a new text, based on Balinese manuscripts, with a complete translation, building on the work done by earlier writers. An introduction provides ample background information, as well as an original interpretation of the significance of the text, within its historical and cultural setting. This poem was wr…
In international research, metafictionality and other metaliterary features have typically been regarded as phenomena related to postmodernist fiction, in particular – Metaliterary Layers in Finnish Literature, however, discusses the metalayers of Finnish literature from the early 20th century to the present. By analyzing different genres of Finnish literature in varying historical contexts M…
Vladimir Nabokov described the literature course he taught at Cornell as "a kind of detective investigation of the mystery of literary structures." Leona Toker here pursues a similar investigation of the enigmatic structures of Nabokov's own fiction. According to Toker, most previous critics stressed either Nabokov’s concern with form or the humanistic side of his works, but rarely if ever th…
The renowned Russian writer Leo Tolstoy created a realistic masterpiece in Anna Karenina (1878). In the same work, moreover, he utilized allegory and symbol to an extent and at a level of sophistication unknown in his other works. In Browning’s study, the author identifies and analyzes previously unnoticed or only briefly mentioned “linkages and keystones” found in two highly developed cl…