Description
Book SynopsisThis is the first volume to consistently examine Soviet engagement with world literature from multiple institutional and disciplinary perspectives: intellectual history, literary history and theory, comparative literature, translation studies, diaspora studies. Its emphasis is on the lessons one could learn from the Soviet attention to world literature; as such, the present volume makes a significant contribution to current debates on world literature beyond the field of Slavic and East European Studies and foregrounds the need to think of world literature pluralistically, in a manner that is not restricted by the agendas of Anglophone academe.
Trade Review"World Literature in the Soviet Union demonstrates persuasively that World Literature can be productively conceptualised and analysed as a set of discrete grand projects, each with its own historically and culturally specific institutional and ideological underpinnings. The volume explores in both breadth and depth how Soviet projects of World Literature developed in tandem with the evolution of the Soviet Union’s more general politico-cultural positioning in the world. It at the same time provides important insights into the role that the idea of World Literature played in Soviet constructions of both internationalism and multiculturalism."
— Professor Andy Byford, Durham University
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements
Introduction
Galin Tihanov, Rossen Djagalov, Anne Lounsbery
1. World Literature in the Soviet Union: Infrastructure and Ideological Horizons
Galin Tihanov
2. On the Worldliness of Russian Literature
Anne Lounsbery
3. Armenian Literature as World Literature: Phases of Shaping it in the Pre-Soviet and Stalinist Contexts
Susanne Frank
4. The Roles of "Form" and "Content" in World Literature as Discussed by Viktor Shklovsky in His Writings of the Immediately Post-Revolutionary Years
Katerina Clark
5. “The Treasure Trove of World Literature”: Shaping the Concept of World Literature in Post-Revolutionary Russia
Maria Khotimsky
6. The Birth of New out of Old: Translation in Early Soviet History
Sergey Tyulenev
7. International Literature: A Multi-Language Soviet Journal as a Model of “World Literature” of the Mid-1930s USSR
Elena Ostrovskaya, Elena Zemskova, Evgeniia Belskaia, Georgii Korotkov
8. Translating China into International Literature: Stalin-Era World Literature Beyond the West
Edward Tyerman
9. World Literature and Ideology: The Case of Socialist Realism
Schamma Schahadat
10. Premature Postcolonialists: The Afro-Asian Writers’ Association (1958–1991) and Its Literary Field
Rossen Djagalov
11. Can “Worldliness” Be Inscribed into the Literary Text?: Russian Diasporic Writing in the Context of World Literature
Maria Rubins
Contributors
Index
