This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

From the contents: From Pantheon to Pandemonium (Richard Peace). - Karamzin's Gothic tale: The Island of Bornholm (Derek Offord). - Alessandra TOSI: At the origins of the Russian Gothic novel: Nikolai Gnedich's Don Corrado de Gerrera (1803) (Alessandra Tosi). - Does Russian Gothic verse exist? The Case of Vasilii Zhukovskii (Michael Pursglove). - The fantastic in Russian Romantic prose: Pushkin's The Queen of Spades (Claire Whitehead).

Russian Literary Criticism is a survey of the various ways in which representative Russian critics from the eighteenth century to the twentieth century, have viewed not only the literary works of other Russian and non-Russian writers but also the problems of literature in general. Primarily intended for readers who do not know Russian, this book discusses the major Russian critics and critical movements. The author provides sufficient historical and political background to enable the reader to understand both the literary situation and the problems facing Russian critics at any given time – whether the influx of various ideologies, official Soviet views, or dissident opinion form the Decembrists to Solzhenitsyn.

To celebrate the 270th anniversary of the De Gruyter publishing house, the company is providing permanent open access to 270 selected treasures from the De Gruyter Book Archive. Titles will be made available to anyone, anywhere at any time that might be interested. The DGBA project seeks to digitize the entire backlist of titles published since 1749 to ensure that future generations have digital access to the high-quality primary sources that De Gruyter has published over the centuries.

How Russian Literature Became Great explores the cultural and political role of a modern national literature, orchestrated in a Slavonic key but resonating far beyond Russia's borders. Rolf Hellebust investigates a range of literary tendencies, philosophies, and theories from antiquity to the present: Roman jurisprudence to German Romanticism, French Enlightenment to Czech Structuralism, Herder to Hobsbawm, Samuel Johnson to Sainte-Beuve, and so on. Besides the usual Russian suspects from Pushkin to Chekhov, Hellebust includes European writers: Byron and Shelley, Goethe and Schiller, Chateaubriand and Baudelaire, Dante, Mickiewicz, and more. As elsewhere, writing in Russia advertises itself via a canon of literary monuments constituting an atemporal "ideal order among themselves" (T.S. Eliot). And yet this is a tradition that could only have been born at a specific moment in the golden nineteenth-century age of historiography and nation-building. The Russian example reveals the contradictions between immutability and innovation, universality and specificity at the heart of modern conceptions of tradition from Sainte-Beuve through Eliot and down to the present day. The conditions of its era of formation—the prominence of the crucial literary-historical question of the writer's social function, and the equation of literature with national identity—make the Russian classical tradition the epitome of a unified cultural text, with a complex narrative in which competing stories of progress and decline unfold through the symbolic biographical encounters of the authors who constitute its members. How Russian Literature Became Great thus offers a new paradigm for understanding the paradoxes of modern tradition.

Since the early eighteenth century, following Peter the Great’s policy of forced westernization, translation in Russia has been a very visible and much-discussed practice. Generally perceived as an important service to the state and the nation, translation was also viewed as a high art, leading many Russian poets and writers to engage in literary translation in a serious and sustained manner. As a result, translations were generally regarded as an integral part of an author’s oeuvre and of Russian literature as a whole. This volume brings together Russian writings on translation from the mid-18th century until today and presents them in chronological order, providing valuable insights into the theory and practice of translation in Russia. Authored by some of Russia’s leading writers, such as Aleksandr Pushkin, Fedor Dostoevskii, Lev Tolstoi, Maksim Gorkii, and Anna Akhmatova, many of these texts are translated into English for the first time. They are accompanied by extensive annotation and biographical sketches of the authors, and reveal Russian translation discourse to be a sophisticated and often politicized exploration of Russian national identity, as well as the nature of the modern subject. Russian Writers on Translation fills a persistent gap in the literature on alternative translation traditions, highlighting the vibrant and intense culture of translation on Europe’s ‘periphery’. Viewed in a broad cultural context, the selected texts reflect a nuanced understanding of the Russian response to world literature and highlight the attempts of Russian writers to promote Russia as an all-inclusive cultural model.

This book examines the figure of Joan of Arc as depicted in stage works of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially those based on or related to Schiller’s 1801 romantic tragedy, Die Jungfrau von Orleans (The Maid of Orleans). The author elucidates Schiller’s appropriation of themes from Euripides’s Iphigenia plays, chiefly the quality of “sublime sanctity,” which transforms Joan’s image from a victim of fate to a warrior-prophet who changes history through sheer force of will. Finding the best-known works of his time about her – Voltaire’s La pucelle d’Orléans and Shakespeare’s Henry VI, part I – utterly dissatisfying, Schiller set out to replace them. Die Jungfrau von Orleans was a smashing success and inspired various subsequent treatments, including Verdi’s opera Giovanna d’Arco and a translation by the father of Russian Romanticism, Vasily Zhukovsky, on which Tchaikovsky based his opera Orleanskaya deva (The Maid of Orleans). In turn, the book’s final chapter examines Shaw’s Saint Joan and finds that the Irish playwright’s vociferous complaints about Schiller’s “romantic flapdoodle” belie a surprising affinity for Schiller’s approach.

The University of Pennsylvania Press is pleased to reissue in two volumes von Gronicka's study. The first volume discusses the early Russian reaction to Goethe and his work and his effect on Zhukovski (Goethe's translator and interpreter), Pushkin, Lermontov, the Pushkin Pleiade and the Decembrists, the Russian Romanticists, and the Westerners (Stankevich, Belinksi, and Herzen).

Brian Hamnett examines key historical novels by Scott, Balzac, Manzoni, Dickens, Eliot, Flaubert, Fontane, Galdós, and Tolstoy, revealing the contradictions inherent in this form of fiction and exploring the challenges writers encountered in attempting to represent a reality that linked past and present.

In this study the author singles out the ideas of K. S. Aksakov (1817-1860), philologist, poet, historian, and sometime dramatist, and places them in the broader current of nineteenth century Slavophilism. Originally published in 1982. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.