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Lindsey Hughes (1949-2007) made her reputation as one of the foremost historians of the age of Peter the Great by revealing the more freakish aspects of the tsar's complex mind and reconstructing the various physical environments in which he lived. Contributors to Personality and Place in Russian Culture were encouraged to develop any of the approaches featured in Hughes's work: pointillist and panoramic, playful and morbid, quotidian and bizarre. The result is a rich and original collection, ranging from the sixteenth century to the present day, in which a group of leading international scholars explore the role of the individual in Russian culture, the myriad variety of individual lives, and the changing meanings invested in particular places. The editor, Simon Dixon, is Sir Bernard Pares Professor of Russian History at UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies.
During the most recent conference of the Renaissance Society of America, two sessions were devoted entirely to the Renaissance in Poland. In fifty-nine editions of what is considered the most prestigious international appointment for experts of Renaissance culture, this is the first time that characteristic features of sixteenth-century Poland were the subject of analysis and debate. The interest generated at the conference and the academic value of the contributions convinced the organisers of the panels to ask the speakers to develop and revise their contributions to conform with the conventions of the academic article. The result is a selection of essays that pursue specific pathways in exploring the cultural factors that affected the Renaissance in Poland: influences and originality in Polish literary and artistic production, orthodoxy and dissidence, the circulation of thought and reflection on the Res Publica in the spheres of both politics and philosophy. Adopting a distinctly interdisciplinary approach, the aim of this publication is to focus certain aspects of the Polish Renaissance and the cultural identity of sixteenth-century Poland in relation to the European context.
This book examines the feeling that we often refer to as 'nostalgia' from the perspective of writers and artists located on the (imperial, Soviet, and Post-Soviet) periphery of Russian culture who regard the center of the culture from which they have been excluded with varying degrees of longing and ambivalence. The literary and artistic texts analyzed here have been shaped by these author's ruminations on social and psychological marginalization, a process that S. Boym has called 'reflective nostalgia' and that the authors of this volume also refer to as 'toska'
This book contains a synchronic grammar and grammatical dictionaries of Old Church Slavic. The framework is based on a substantially revised version of the classical descriptive methodology. The intent is to improve on the classical monographs by Vaillant, Diels, Lunt in the direction of utmost completeness, explicitness, and deliberate consistency between the grammatical structure, the corpus of texts (limited to the seven oldest OCS manuscripts), and the dictionaries. The grammar is intended as a set of rules that provide a complete characterization of any OCS wordform. Peculiarities in the language of each source are described as systematic departures from canonical OCS, a conventional constructed variety primarily described by the grammar. The book is addressed to linguists working in Slavic studies, as well as to specialists in the general theory of grammar, especially phonologists and morphologists.
Nearly as global in its ambition and sweep as its subject, Franco Moretti's The Novel is a watershed event in the understanding of the first truly planetary literary form. A translated selection from the epic five-volume Italian Il Romanzo (2001-2003), The Novel's two volumes are a unified multiauthored reference work, containing more than one hundred specially commissioned essays by leading contemporary critics from around the world. Providing the first international comparative reassessment of the novel, these essential volumes reveal the form in unprecedented depth and breadth--as a great cultural, social, and human phenomenon that stretches from the ancient Greeks to today, where moderni...
The Castrato is a nuanced exploration of why innumerable boys were castrated for singing between the mid-sixteenth and late-nineteenth centuries. It shows that the entire foundation of Western classical singing, culminating in bel canto, was birthed from an unlikely and historically unique set of desires, public and private, aesthetic, economic, and political. In Italy, castration for singing was understood through the lens of Catholic blood sacrifice as expressed in idioms of offering and renunciation and, paradoxically, in satire, verbal abuse, and even the symbolism of the castrato’s comic cousin Pulcinella. Sacrifice in turn was inseparable from the system of patriarchy—involving teachers, patrons, colleagues, and relatives—whereby castrated males were produced not as nonmen, as often thought nowadays, but as idealized males. Yet what captivated audiences and composers—from Cavalli and Pergolesi to Handel, Mozart, and Rossini—were the extraordinary capacities of castrato voices, a phenomenon ultimately unsettled by Enlightenment morality. Although the castrati failed to survive, their musicality and vocality have persisted long past their literal demise.
The essays gathered in this volume are devoted to different aspects of the reception of Humanism and the Renaissance in Slavic countries. They mark the beginning of a dialogue among scholars of different Slavic languages and literatures, in search of the ways in which the entire Slavic world – albeit to varying degrees – has participated from the very beginning in European cultural transformations, and not simply by sharing some characteristics of the new currents, but by building a new identity in harmony with the changes of the time. By overcoming the dominant paradigm, which sees all cultural manifestations as part of a separate ‘national’ linguistic, literary and artistic canon, this volume is intended to be the first step in outlining some ideas and suggestions in view of the creation, in the future, of an atlas that maps the relevance of Humanism and the Renaissance in the Slavic world.
This volume explores the dense networks created by diplomatic relationships between European courts and aristocratic households in the early modern age, with the emphasis on celebratory events and the circulation of theatrical plots and practitioners promoted by political and diplomatic connections. The offices of plenipotentiary ministers were often outposts providing useful information about cultural life in foreign countries. Sometimes the artistic strategies defined through the exchanges of couriers were destined to leave a legacy in the history of arts, especially of music and theatre. Ministers favored or promoted careers, described or made pieces of repertoire available to new audiences, and even supported practitioners in their difficult travels by planning profitable tours. They stood behind extraordinary artists and protected many stage performers with their authority, while carefully observing and transmitting precious information about the cultural and musical life of the countries where they resided.
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