You may have to register before you can download all our books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Since the late 1980s, there has been an explosion of women’s writing in Russia, Central and Eastern Europe greater than in any other cultural period. This book, which contains contributions by scholars and writers from many different countries, aims to address the gap in literature and debate that exists in relation to this subject. We investigate why women’s writing has become so prominent in post-socialist countries, and enquire whether writers regard their gender as a burden, or, on the contrary, as empowering. We explore the relationship in contemporary women’s writing between gender, class, and nationality, as well as issues of ethnicity and post-colonialism.
"Alta, Zaya, Nara, Oyuna and Dolgorna - a mother, three sisters, and the teenage daughter of one of the sisters - each tell their pieces of the family story, an epic fraught with secrets and betrayals, in All This Belongs to Me, the debut novel of Petra Hulova." "All This Belongs to Me transports the reader from Mongolia's harsh, dusty steppe to the clamor and grime of the capital, Ulaanbantar; from nomanic herding and felt tents to brothels and prefab apartment blocks. With a filmic eye and a dead-on ear, Hulova vividly conveys the landscapes and lives of three generations of women. Two of the sisters, born illegitimately of their mother's clandestine affairs with foreigners - one Chinese, one Russian - struggle with the stigma of being half-breeds, while the strict division of male and female labor and social roles plays out in the city and country alike, with devastating consequences." --Book Jacket.
Originally published in 1975, The Apology and the Last Days is the final volume in a trilogy of novels—also including The Rise and Fall of Icarus Gubelkian and How to Quiet a Vampire—about the aftermath of World War II, by Borislav Pekić, one of the former !--?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" /--Yugoslavia’s most important postwar writers. The narrator tells his story from prison, where he is serving time for the murder of a former Nazi official. As the novel unfolds, we learn that the victim was the same person whom the narrator, while a lifeguard during the war, saved from drowning, thus making him vulnerable to charges of collaboration. In this tragicomic tale, Pekić explores eternal questions of fate and individual responsibility.
Comprehensive view of Andreas-Salomé's fictional works, focusing on her depictions of women and questions of narrative and identity. The writer and intellectual Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861-1937) fascinates scholars of German literature because of her associations with Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud and because she was active in the cultural and intellectual vanguardof late 19th- and early 20th-century Germany and Austria. Recent editions of her fictional works have garnered wider attention from scholars of literature and theory, particularly those interested in women's studies, identity politics, and narrative theory. This study analyzes how Andreas-Salomé depicted women in her fictional works ...
A marriage of mystery fiction and queer concerns, queer crime literature celebrates the pairing of the political and the sexual. Queer crime fiction is a subgenre in which sex, gender and sexuality are among the mysteries to be solved. Its writers use boundary-crossing identities and desires to express social critique, inviting readers to interpret queer narratives as literary incursions into cultural traditions. From androgynous investigators and serial killer housewives to closeted lesbians and transgendered lovers, the characters in queer mysteries are metaphors for changing social and political relations. This book reads German-language crime stories as allegories about 20th- and 21st-ce...
In a remote Albanian village, a place of banishment, a stranger appears, claiming to be Viktor Dragoti and looking for his long-lost love. That Viktor Dragoti has been dead for nine years, killed by the Albanian coast guard while trying to swim to freedom, only adds to the stranger's mystery--and to the suspense of this curiously real and yet otherworldly work by one of Albania's most distinguished writers. With echoes of The Return of Martin Guerre and Kafka's The Trial, with allusions to The Odyssey and the Albanian folktale of Ago Ymeri, a legendary hero released from the underworld for one day, Shehu's novel blends the autobiographical and the historical, the personal and the political into a powerful tale--a story that conveys the terrors, small and large, of a totalitarian state while capturing all that is surreal and even lyrical in life in such a deeply distorted world.
These newly collected short stories reveal a master at the top of his game. Drago Jancar possesses an acute understanding of the human psyche, enabling his stories to resonate beyond their particular milieu. This collection features seven pieces, drawn from four different collections, that together present the struggle of individuals against powerful forces. The characters try to make sense of a world of shifting borders and changing names that make the idea of a "homeland"—either literal or figurative—a dream rather than a reality.
Every time a so-called “woman’s voice” appears in the media in connection with any sphere of creative activity, it finds itself confronted by the almost formulaic expression “feminism today,” instantaneously suggesting that feminism is, in fact, a matter of the past, and that if we want to return to this phenomenon, then we need to explain ourselves. Women’s Voices and Feminism in Polish Cultural Memory seeks to elaborate the problem of generalization, expressed by such formulas as “feminism today,” while analysing how feminist sympathies have shaped Polish literature, film and language. This volume does not want to impose any hegemonic understanding of “feminism,” or imp...
Jaan Kross's historical novel Sailing Against the Wind fictionalizes the life of Bernhard Schmidt (1879–1935), an Estonian-born inventor. Schmidt lost an arm in his youth while experimenting with a homemade rocket, resulting in psychological trauma that would plague him for the rest of his life. Largely self-taught, Schmidt was driven to seek recognition of his talents. He moved to Germany in the 1930s, where, after perfecting techniques for polishing lenses, he began developing ideas for improving astronomical telescopes. He was arrested for selling one to the Russians, and although he got off with only a warning, he later suffered a breakdown and was sent to a mental hospital, where he soon died. Sailing Against the Wind becomes a meditation on national identity, the relationship between history and the individual life, and the mechanisms of the historical novel as a genre.