The author’s contention is that Chekhov’s plays have often been misinterpreted by scholars and directors, particularly through their failure to adequately balance the comic and tragic elements inherent in these works. Through a close examination of the form and content of Chekhov’s dramas, the author shows how deeply pessimistic or overly optimistic interpretations fail to sufficiently ac…
What makes some characters seem so real? Mimetic Lives explores this unprecedented question on the rich ground of Tolstoy’s and Dostoevsky’s fiction. Each author discovered techniques for intensifying the aesthetic illusion Kitzinger calls mimetic life: the reader’s sense of a character’s embodied existence. Both authors tested the limits of that illusion by pushing it toward the novelâ…
This is the first English-language study of the Chinese writer’s work and influence, featuring essays from scholars in a range of disciplines, from both China and the United States. Its introduction, twelve articles, and epilogue aim to deepen and widen critical discussions of both a specific literary author and the globalization of Chinese literature more generally.The book takes the â…
Late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century French writer Romain Rolland remains best known for his epic coming-of-age tale, Jean Christoph. In A Critical Bibliography of the Published Writings of Romain Rolland William Thomas Starr Starr painstakingly collects the information on all writings by and about this prolific author through 1949. Organized into two parts, the bibliography lists the wr…
The study examines cultural effects of various colonial systems of government in the Spanish- and French-speaking Caribbean in a little investigated period of transition: from the French Revolution to the abolition of slavery in Cuba (1789–1886). The comparison of cultural transfer processes by means of literary production from and about the Caribbean, embedded in a broader context of the cir…
Critical Prefaces of the French Renaissance contains nearly 30 prefaces from the works of French poets and dramatists published from 1525 to 1611. Bernard Weinberg’s helpful book collects prefaces from the works of satirical poets, as well as dramatists, and provides a short introduction to each preface setting it in its literary and historical context. Lyrical and satirical poets represented…
Before Albert Einstein proposed the concept of four-dimensional spacetime, late Victorian scientists, radical philosophers and writers were discussing the possibility of a different kind of fourth dimension. Before Einstein offers the first book-length examination of the impact of pre-Relativity four-dimensional theory on literature and culture at the turn of the twentieth century.
Dostoevsky and Tolstoy are the titans of Russian literature. As mature artists, they led very different lives and wrote vastly different works, but their early lives and writings display provocative kinships, while also indicating the divergent paths the two authors would take en route to literary greatness. The ten new critical essays here, written by leading specialists in nineteenth-century …
The study centers on the presentation of the North American borderlands in the works of Canadian Native writer Thomas King’s Truth & Bright Water (1999), American writer Howard Frank Mosher’s On Kingdom Mountain (2007), and American writer Jim Lynch’s Border Songs (2009). The three authors describe the peoples and places in the northeastern, middle and northwestern border regions of the U…
This study of the novels of Nathanael West begins with the important threads of West’s life and their relationship to his works. James F. Light gives a detailed analysis of each of West’s novels, investigating in particular the works’ treatment of social criticism and manipulation of dream and symbol.