General

The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Poetry presents the major themes, forms, genres and styles of Russian poetry. Using examples from Russia's greatest poets, Michael Wachtel draws on three centuries of verse, from the beginnings of secular literature...

This book casts new light on the life and work of Francois Villon, one of the most famous but least understood poets of the later Middle Ages. Traditionally Villon has been viewed by scholars as an alienated outsider in his own time, whose work was in...

Dostoevsky is one of Russia's greatest novelists and a major influence in modern debates about religion, both in Russia and the West. This collection brings together Western and Russian perspectives on the issues raised by the religious element in his...

The Cambridge Introduction to French Poetry is a comprehensive survey of French poetry. The poets discussed - all quoted in the original, followed by an English translation - belong to every period from the eleventh century to the present, and include...

If the rise of modernism is the story of a struggle between the burden of tradition and a desire to break free of it, then Rilke's poetic development is a key example of this tension at work. Taking a sceptical view of Rilke's own myth of himself as a...

Writing Marginality in Modern French Literature, first published in 2001, explores how cultural centres require the peripheral, the outlawed and the deviant in order to define and bolster themselves. It analyses the hierarchies of cultural value which...

In the Russian modernist era, literature threw itself open to influences from other art forms, most particularly the visual arts. Collaborations between writers, artists, designers, and theatre and cinema directors took place more intensively and...

This book addresses the issues of collecting, consuming, classifying and describing the curiosities, antiques and objets d'art that proliferated in French literary texts during the last decades of the nineteenth century. After Balzac made such issues...

Published in 1999 to mark the centenary of Vladimir Nabokov's birth, this volume brings together the work of eleven of the world's foremost Nabokov scholars offering perspectives on the writer and his fiction. Their essays cover a broad range of topics...

The Development of Russian Verse explores the Russian verse tradition from Pushkin to Brodsky, showing how certain formal features are associated with certain genres and, at times, specific themes. Michael Wachtel's basic thesis is that form is never...

Paul Valery's work is a unique odyssey in the universe of ideas and mental forms. The most recently acknowledged - and the most private - of the masters of modernity, Valery is perhaps the most radical and wide-ranging. He navigates freely within the...

Given the restrictions on political action and even political discussion in Russia, Russian literary journals have served as the principal means by which Russia discovered, defined and shaped itself. Every issue of importance for literate Russians -...

The Literature of Misogyny in Medieval Spain examines the medical underpinnings of two major misogynist works from fifteenth-century Iberia: Alonso de Martinez's Arcipreste de Talavera and Jacme Roig's Spill. Michael Solomon argues that these works gain...

The Family in Crisis in Late Nineteenth-Century French Fiction, first published in 1999, focuses on a key moment in the construction of the modern view of the family in France. Nicholas White's analysis of novels by Zola, Maupassant, Hennique, Bourget...

Originally published in 1996, this collection of fascinating essays by leading western and Russian specialists gives an overview of key issues in Russian women's writing and of important representations of women by men, between 1600 and the present. This...

This book was originally published in 1997. The Bildungsroman - the story of the development or formation of a young man - is the most famous German contribution to the European novel. Most studies of the Bildungsroman have concentrated on its underlying...

This volume offers a unique and valuable insight into the novel in French over the past two centuries. In a series of essays, acknowledged experts discuss a variety of topics including nineteenth-century realism, women and fiction, popular fiction,...

This is the first full-length study in English of Michel Leiris's work. Frequently cited as a central figure in contemporary French culture, Leiris was an outstanding writer whose double career as ethnographer and creative writer places him at important...

This is a comprehensive study of a group of avant-garde Soviet writers active in Leningrad in the 1920s and 1930s who styled themselves OBERIU, 'The Association for Real Art'. Graham Roberts re-examines commonly held assumptions about OBERIU, its...

This pioneering 1994 study documents the extent and diversity of the impact of Nietzschean ideas on Soviet literature and culture. It shows how these ideas, unacknowledged and reworked, entered and shaped that culture and stimulated the imagination of...

Wagner is often held to have exerted a greater impact on modern culture than any other artist, yet the history of the reception of his works in Russia has remained largely unexplored. This book, which draws extensively on unpublished archival materials...

This comparative 1997 study examines a medieval love story, Floire and Blancheflor, and shows how writers from Spain, France, Italy, England and Scandinavia reworked the story from the twelfth to the sixteenth century to develop and emphasize social,...

In this discerning study of sentimental discourse of the late eighteenth century, David J. Denby sheds new light on Enlightenment thought and sensibility. He reveals how sentimental sub-literature reflects the social attitudes of the emerging...

Iurii Trifonov (1925-81) has become well known in the West as a writer of Soviet urban life. This study, first published in 1993, concentrates on his exploration of major events in Russian history (such as the assassination of Tsar Alexander II and the...

Nikolai Zabolotsky (1903-1958) was one of the great poets of twentieth-century Russia. As the last link in the Russian Futurist tradition and the first significant poet to come of age in the Soviet period, Zabolotsky wrote poetry both highly experimental...

This study explores the problems faced by writers of the Enlightenment, who attempted to demystify all previous forms of knowledge by applying rationalist critiques that can in turn be applied to examine their own critical work. It focuses on the works...

This new study of the nineteenth-century French realist novel focuses on the difference, and fundamental incompatibility, between the narrative and the descriptive modes of discourse. James Reid shows how the major novelists, Balzac, Flaubert and Zola,...

This study of Baudelaire's writings applies the principles of schizoanalysis to literary history and cultural studies. By resituating psychoanalysis in its socio-economic and cultural context, this framework provides an illuminating approach to the...

In Literature, Art and the Pursuit of Decay, Timothy Mathews examines work by a range of writers and painters working in France in the twentieth century. The well-illustrated book engages with canonical figures - Guillaume Apollinaire, Marguerite Duras...

This wide-ranging study explores the ideological framework of genre in Old French and Occitan literature by charting the relationship between ideology and gender in five key genres: the chansons de geste, courtly romance, the Occitan canso, hagiography,...

It was through Stael's best-seller De l'Allemagne that the term 'Romanticism', coined in Germany, reached Europe and America. Around this term, Stael built a new and universal agenda: her manifesto offered Napoleon's Europe an alternative to everything...

This study provides a fresh assessment of Spanish Romanticism through a sympathetic appraisal of its literary theory and criticism. It identifies the origins of Spanish Romantic thought in the theories of German Romantic thinkers, in particular Herder's...

In this book, Peter Dronke illustrates how medieval Latin traditions can help us to understand Dante's great poem 'The Divine Comedy'. He first discusses medieval conceptions of allegory and vision, image and metaphor, symbol and myth, as well as some of...

This is the first major study of naturalist fiction as a distinct literary genre. It focuses mainly on French naturalist literature, analysing a number of key works in detail, but also draws examples from other national traditions, particularly from the...

The Frenchman Juan de Grimaldi was instrumental in the development of the Spanish theatre in the 1820s and 30s, at a time when censorship, repression, and economic chaos had left it in a state of stagnation. As impresario and stage director, he trained...

The first edition of this book appeared in German in 1985, and set an agenda for the study of medieval literary theory. Rather than seeing vernacular writers' reflections on their art, as found in prologues, epilogues and interpolations in literary...

In this major study Rhiannon Goldthorpe takes up the challenge of Sartre's diversity in an original and provocative way. Her detailed and comprehensive exploration of the relationship between the theoretical and literary works pays due attention to their...

Khlebnikov is becoming recognized as one of the major Russian poets of the twentieth century, having for years been dismissed as a purveyor of unintelligible verbal trickery. This book provides a broad survey of his work. Dr Cooke's aim is to be both...

Dr Scott argues that only by attending to the precise locations of words in line or stanza, and to the specific value of syllables, or by understanding the often conflicting demands of rhythm and metre, can the reader of poetry acquire a real grasp of...

Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu is an imaginative achievement without parallel in the twentieth century. Any critic who sets out to discuss the book in the full variety of its concerns will find that his own powers of insight and judgement are...