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The revival of the Olympic Games in 1896 was just one result of the unparalleled interest in physical culture that consumed Europe and America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Author Harold Segel shows that this obsession with physical culture resonated widely through the modernist movement, and he traces its profound influence on the arts in the early 20th century. Illustrated.
A vibrant Jewish community flourished in Poland from late in the tenth century until it was virtually annihilated in World War II. In this remarkable anthology, the first of its kind, Harold B. Segel offers translations of poems and prose works—mainly fiction—by non-Jewish Polish writers. Taken together, the selections represent the complex perceptions about Jews in the Polish community in the period 1530-1990.
While Carlo Collodi's internationally revered Pinocchio may not have been the single source of the modernist fascination with puppets and marionettes, the book's appearance on the threshold of the modernist movement heralded a new artistic interest in the making of human likenesses. And the puppets, marionettes, and other forms that figure so vividly and provocatively in modernist and avant-garde drama can, according to Harold Segel, be regarded as Pinocchio's progeny. Segel argues that the philosophical, social, and artistic proclivities of the modernist movement converged in the discovery of an exciting new relevance in the puppet and marionette. Previously viewed as entertainment for chil...
This is the first book-length account of Renaissance humanism in 15th- and 16th-century Poland. Harold B. Segel demonstrates that a lively community of intellectuals--Copernicus among them--helped to bring Poland into the mainstream of contemporary European culture and to lay the foundations for the Polish High Renaissance of the second half of the sixteenth century.
Segel's extensive introduction provides a wealth of information concerning the social, political, and cultural background of turn-of-the-century Vienna. The eight artists assembled here are concerned with their world, Austria and particularly Vienna. They exchange ideas, argue, gossip, tell stories, read each other's works and even write in the coffeehouse.
Sukhovo-Kobylin's "Trilogy - Krechinshy's Wedding, The Case"and "The Death of Tarelkin" represent the sole literary legacy of their aristocratic author whose involvement in a sensational murder case became one of the great scandals of mid-19th century Russian society. Out of the drama of his own life, Sukhovo-Kobylin fashioned a trilogy of plays remarkable for the acidity of their satire against the tsarist bureaucracy and police. It is not only for their pungent satire that the plays have continued to attract attention ever since. They are, above all, splendidly theatrical and encompass not one but several different traditions of theatre from the "well-made play" of Scribe to the absurd comedy of Gogol. "As for sheer stagecraft," writes Price D.S. Mirsky in his "A History of Russian Literature," "they have no rivals in Russian literary drama." Harold B. Segel is Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, New York. He is the author of ten books and numer
Because of their visibility in society and ability to shape public opinion, prominent literary figures were among the first targets of Communist repression, torture, and incarceration. Authors such as Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn famously documented the experience of internment in Soviet gulags. Little, however, has been published in the English language on the work of writers imprisoned by other countries of the Soviet bloc. For the first time, The Walls Behind the Curtain presents a collection of works from East European novelists, poets, playwrights, and essayists who wrote during or after their captivity under communism. Harold B. Segel paints a backdrop of the political culture and prison and...
The Iron Curtain concealed from western eyes a vital group of national and regional writers. Marked by not only geographical proximity but also by the shared experience of communism and its collapse, the countries of Eastern Europe--Poland, Hungary, Albania, Romania, Bulgaria, and the former states of Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany--share literatures that reveal many common themes when examined together. Compiled by a leading scholar, the guide includes an overview of literary trends in historical context; a listing of some 700 authors by country; and an A-to-Z section of articles on the most influential writers.
Containing translations of three major plays, in his highly informative introduction, Professor Segel discusses the plays against the background of the Romantic movement in Poland and points out their ideological and artistic importance.
Women are conspicuously absent from traditional cultural histories of south-east Europe. This book addresses that imbalance by describing the contribution of women to literary culture in the Orthodox/ Ottoman areas of Serbia and Bosnia. The first complete literary history in relation to women's writing in south-east Europe. The author provides a broad chronological account of this contribution, dividing the book into two main parts; the earlier period up until the eighteenth century concentrates on the projections of gender through the medium of oral tradition and the lives of a handful of educated women in medieval Serbia and the few works of literature they left. Hawkesworth also looks at ...