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This book explores how Russian writers from the mid-1920s on have read and responded to Joyce's work. The book uncovers the many roles Joyce has occupied in Russia over the last century, demonstrating how the writers Yury Olesha, Vladimir Nabokov, Andrei Bitov, Sasha Sokolov, and Mikhail Shishkin draw from Joyce's texts, particularly Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, to address the volatile questions of lineages in their respective Soviet, émigré, and post-Soviet contexts. Interviews with contemporary Russian writers, critics, and readers of Joyce extend the conversation to the present day, showing how the debates regarding the Irish writer's place in the Russian pantheon are no less settled one hundred years after Ulysses. The creative reworkings, or “translations,” of Joycean themes, ideas, characters, plots, and styles made by the five writers that the book examines speak to shifting cultural norms, understandings of intertextuality, and the polarity between Russia and the West. The book illuminates how Russian writers have used Joyce's ideas as a critical lens to shape, prod, and constantly redefine their own place in literary history. The book offers one overarching approach to the general narrative of Joyce's reception in Russian literature. While each of the writers examined responded to Joyce in an individual manner, the sum of their methods reveals common concerns. This subject raises the issue of cultural values and, more importantly, how they changed throughout the twentieth century in the Soviet Union, Russian emigration, and the post-Soviet Russian environment.

This book examines the effects of antisedition law on the overlapping public spheres of India and Britain under empire. After 1857, the British government began censoring the press in India, culminating in 1870 with the passage of Section 124a, a law that used the term “disaffection” to target the emotional tenor of writing deemed threatening to imperial rule. As a result, the book shows, Indian journalists adopted modes of writing that appeared to mimic properly British styles of prose even as they wrote against empire. The book argues that Section 124a, which is still used to quell political dissent in present-day India, both irrevocably shaped conversations and critiques in the colonial public sphere and continues to influence anticolonialism and postcolonial relationships between the state and the public. The book draws out the coercive and emotional subtexts of law, literature, and cultural relationships, demonstrating how the criminalization of political alienation and dissent has shaped literary form and the political imagination.

Nansō Satomi hakkenden is one of the monuments of Japanese literature. This multi-generational samurai saga was one of the most popular and influential books of the nineteenth century and has been adapted many times into film, television, fiction, and comics. An Ill-Considered Jest, the first part of Hakkenden, tells the story of the Satomi clan patriarch Yoshizane and his daughter Princess Fuse. An ill-advised comment forces Yoshizane to betroth his daughter to the family dog, creating a supernatural union that ultimately produces the Eight Dog Warriors. Princess Fuse's heroic and tragic sacrifice, and her strength, intelligence, and self-determination throughout, render her an immortal character within Japanese fiction. This book is the culmination of centuries of premodern Japanese tale-telling, combining aspects of historical romance, fantasy, Tokugawa-era popular fiction, and Chinese vernacular stories. The lively translation conveys the witty and colorful prose of the original, producing a faithful and entertaining edition of this important literary classic.

This book analyzes the complex response of Meiji-era Japanese poets and readers to the challenge introduced by European verse and the resulting crisis in Japanese poetry. Amidst fierce competition for literary prestige on the national and international stage, poets and critics at the time recognized that the character of Japanese poetic culture was undergoing a fundamental transformation, and the stakes were high: the future of modern Japanese verse. The book documents the creation of new Japanese poetic forms, tracing the first invention of Japanese free verse and its subsequent disappearance. The book examines the impact of the acclaimed and reviled shintaishi, a new poetic form invented for translating European-language verse and eventually supplanted by the reintroduction of free verse as a Western import. The book draws on materials written in German, Spanish, English, and French, recreating the global poetry culture within which the most ambitious Meiji-era Japanese poets vied for position.

Over the past fifty years, debates about human rights have assumed an increasingly prominent place in postcolonial literature and theory. Writers from Salman Rushdie to Nawal El Saadawi have used the novel to explore both the possibilities and challenges of enacting and protecting human rights, particularly in the Global South. This book shows how human dignity and bodily integrity contribute to an anxiety about the body that helps to explain many of the contemporary and historical failures of human rights, revealing why and how lives are excluded from human rights protections along the lines of race, gender, class, disability, and species membership. The book suggests how an embodied politics of reading might restore a vital fleshiness to the overly abstract, decorporealized subject of liberal rights. Each novel examined approaches human rights in terms of limits and paradoxes. Rushdie's Midnight's Children addresses the obstacles to incorporating rights into a formerly colonized nation's legal culture. El Saadawi's Woman at Point Zero takes up controversies over women's freedoms in Islamic society. In Disgrace, J. M. Coetzee considers the disappointments of post-apartheid reconciliation in South Africa. And in The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy confronts an array of human rights abuses widespread in contemporary India. Each of these literary case studies further demonstrates the relevance of embodiment to both comprehending and redressing the failures of human rights, even while those narratives refuse simplistic ideals or solutions.

The world's oldest work of literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh recounts the adventures of the semi-mythical Sumerian king of Uruk and his ultimately futile quest for immortality after the death of his friend and companion, Enkidu, a wildman sent by the gods. Gilgamesh was deified by the Sumerians around 2500 bce, and his tale as we know it today was codified in cuneiform tablets around 1750 bce and continued to influence ancient cultures into Roman times. The epic was, however, largely forgotten, until the cuneiform tablets were rediscovered in 1872 in the British Museum's collection of recently unearthed Mesopotamian artifacts. In the decades that followed its translation into modern languages, the Epic of Gilgamesh has become a point of reference throughout Western culture. This book explores the surprising legacy of the poem and its hero, as well as the epic's continuing influence in modern letters and arts. The book sees fascination with Gilgamesh as a reflection of eternal spiritual values—love, friendship, courage, and the fear and acceptance of death. Noted writers, musicians, and artists from Sweden to Spain, from the United States to Australia, have adapted the story in ways that meet the social and artistic trends of the times. The spirit of this capacious hero has absorbed the losses felt in the immediate postwar period and been infused with the excitement and optimism of movements for gay rights, feminism, and environmental consciousness. Gilgamesh is at once a seismograph of shifts in Western history and culture and a testament to the verities and values of the ancient epic.

Vladimir Nabokov complained about the number of Dostoevsky's characters “sinning their way to Jesus.” In truth, Christ is an elusive figure not only in Dostoevsky's novels, but in Russian literature as a whole. The rise of the historical critical method of biblical criticism in the nineteenth century and the growth of secularism it stimulated made an earnest affirmation of Jesus in literature highly problematic. The writers at the heart of this book understood that to reimage Christ for their age, they had to make him known through indirect, even negative ways, lest what they say about him be mistaken for cliché, doctrine, or naïve apologetics. The Christology of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Boris Pasternak is thus apophatic because they deploy negative formulations (saying what God is not) in their writings about Jesus. Professions of atheism in Dostoevsky and Tolstoy's non-divine Jesus are but separate negative paths toward truer discernment of Christ. This first study in English of the image of Christ in Russian literature highlights the importance of apophaticism as a theological practice and a literary method in understanding the Russian Christ. It also emphasizes the importance of skepticism in Russian literary attitudes toward Jesus on the part of writers whose private crucibles of doubt produced some of the most provocative and enduring images of Christ in world literature. This important study will appeal to scholars and students of Orthodox Christianity and Russian literature, as well as educated general readers interested in religion and nineteenth-century Russian novels.

This book is the first study to examine the ubiquity of commercial sex in Russian literary and artistic production from the nineteenth century through the fin de siècle. The book offers a compelling account of how the figure of the sex worker captivated the public's imagination through depictions in fiction and fine art, bringing to light how imperial Russians grappled with the issue of sexual commerce. Studying a wide range of media — from little-known engravings that circulated in newspapers to works of canonical fiction — the book shows how writers and artists used the topic of prostitution both to comment on women's shifting social roles at the end of tsarist rule and to express anxieties about the incursion of capitalist transactions in relations of the heart. Each chapter focuses on a type of commercial sex, looking at how the street walker, brothel worker, demimondaine, kept woman, impoverished bride, and madam traded in sex as a means to acquire capital. The book argues that prostitution became a focal point for imperial Russians because it signaled both the promises of modernity and the anxieties associated with Westernization. The book integrates historical analysis, literary criticism, and feminist theory and conveys how nineteenth-century beliefs about the “fallen woman” drew from medical, judicial, and religious discourse on female sexuality. The book invites readers to draw a connection between rhetoric of the nineteenth century and today's debate on sex workers' rights, highlighting recent controversies concerning Russian sex workers to show how imperial discourse is recycled in the twenty-first century.

Blending close readings of literature, films, and other artworks with analysis of texts of political philosophy, science, and social theory, this book offers an interdisciplinary perspective on attitudes to soil in Russia and the Soviet Union from the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. As the book shows, the earth has inspired utopian dreams, reactionary ideologies, social theories, and durable myths about the relationship between nation and nature. In this period of modernization, soil was understood as the collective body of the nation, sitting at the crux of all economic and social problems. The “soil question” was debated by nationalists and radical materialists, Slavophiles and Westernizers, poets and scientists. The book highlights a selection of key myths at the intersection of cultural and material history that show how soil served as a natural, national, and symbolic resource from Fedor Dostoevsky's native soil movement to Nikita Khrushchev's Virgin Lands campaign at the Soviet periphery in the 1960s. Providing an original contribution to ecocriticism and environmental humanities, the book expands our understanding of how cultural processes write nature and how nature inspires culture. The book brings Slavic studies into new conversations in the environmental humanities, generating fresh interpretations of literary and cultural movements and innovative readings of major writers.

On the Threshold of Eurasia: Revolutionary Poetics in the Caucasus explores the idea of the Russian and Soviet “East” as a political, aesthetic and scientific system of ideas that contributed to the construction of Soviet discourses of ethnicity, empire, and literary modernity during the tumultuous first two decades of the twentieth century, from 1905 to 1929. It exposes connections between literary works, political essays, and orientalist history, geography, and ethnology written by Russian and Azeri Turkic Muslim writers and thinkers, many of whom have been unknown to Anglophone readers until now. Tracing translations and intertextual engagements across Russia, the Caucasus and western Europe, this book offers an alternative vision of empire, modernity and anti-imperialism from the vantage point of cosmopolitan centers in the Russian empire and Soviet Union. In this way, On the Threshold of Eurasia illustrates the pivotal impact of the literature of the Caucasus and the former Soviet periphery more broadly on the monumental aesthetic and political shifts of the early twentieth century.

This book considers how photography has shaped Russian poetry from the early twentieth century to the present day. Drawing on theories of the lyric and the elegy, the social history of technology, and little-known archival materials, the book offers close readings of poems by Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva, Joseph Brodsky, and Bella Akhmadulina, as well as by the late and post-Soviet poets Andrei Sen-Sen'kov, Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, and Kirill Medvedev, to understand their fascination with the visual language, representational power, and metaphorical possibilities offered by the camera and the photographic image. Within the context of long-standing anxieties about the threat that visual media pose to literary culture, the book finds that these poets were attracted to the affinities and tensions that exist between the lyric or elegy and the snapshot. The book reveals that at the core of each poet's approach to “writing the photograph” is the urge to demonstrate the superior ability of poetic language to capture and convey human experience.

This book is the first complete English translation of Wu Yue Chunqiu, a chronicle of two neighboring states during China's Spring and Autumn period. This collection of political history, philosophy, and fictional accounts depicts the rise and fall of Wu and Yue and the rivalry between them, the inspiration for centuries of poetry, vernacular fiction, and drama. Wu Yue Chunqiu makes use of rich sources from the past, carefully adapting and developing them into complex stories. Historical figures are transformed into distinctive characters; simple records of events are fleshed out and made tangible. The result is a nuanced record that is both a compelling narrative and a valuable historical text. As one of the earliest examples of a regional history, Wu Yue Chunqiu is also an important source for the history of what is now Zhejiang and Jiangsu. This engaging translation and the extensive annotations make this significant historical and literary work accessible to an English-speaking audience for the first time.

Friendship encompasses a wide range of social bonds, from playground companionship and wartime camaraderie to modern marriages and Facebook links. For many, friendship is more meaningful than familial ties. And yet it is our least codified relationship, with no legal standing or bureaucratic definition. This book explores the complex, sometimes contradictory nature of friendship, reclaiming its importance in both society and the humanities today. The book looks at the art of friendship and friendship in art, finding a compelling link between our need for friends and our engagement with fiction. Both necessitate the possibility of entering invented worlds, of reading the minds of others, and of learning to live with people. Investigating the ethics, aesthetics, and politics of friendship, the book draws from the earliest writings to the present, from the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Iliad to Charlotte's Web and Brokeback Mountain, as well as from philosophy, sociology, evolutionary biology, psychology, and political theory. The book asks: What makes friends stay together? Why do we associate friendship with mourning? Does friendship contribute to the formation of political communities? Can friends desire each other? The history of friendship demonstrates that human beings are a mutually supportive species with an innate aptitude to envision and create ties with others. At a time when we are confronted by war, economic inequality, and climate change, the book suggests that we reclaim friendship to harness our capacity for cooperation and empathy.

This book examines nine authorship controversies, providing an introduction to particular disputes and teaching students how to assess historical documents, archival materials, and apocryphal stories, as well as internet sources and news. The book does not argue in favor of one side over another but focuses on the principles of attribution used to make each case. While furthering the field of authorship studies, the book provides an essential resource for instructors at all levels in various subjects. It is ultimately about historical detective work. Using Moses, Analects, the Secret Gospel of Mark, Abelard and Heloise, the Compendium of Chronicles, Rashid al-Din, Shakespeare, Prince Andrei Kurbskii, James MacPherson, and Mikhail Sholokov, the book builds concrete examples that instructors can use to help students uncover the legitimacy of authorship and to spark the desire to turn over the hidden layers of history so necessary to the craft.