the essays in this volume are concerned with early printed narrative texts in western europe. the aim of this book is to consider to what extent the shift from hand-written to printed books left its mark on narrative literature in a number of vernacular languages. did the advent of printing bring about changes in the corpus of narrative texts when compared with the corpus extant in manuscript copies? did narrative texts that already existed in manuscript form undergo significant modifications when they began to be printed? how did this crucial media development affect the nature of these narratives? which strategies did early printers develop to make their texts commercially attractive? which social classes were the target audiences for their editions? around half of the articles focus on developments in the history of early printed narrative texts, others discuss publication strategies. this book provides an impetus for cross-linguistic research. it invites scholars from various disciplines to get involved in an international conversation about fifteenth- and sixteenth-century narrative literature.

the collapse of the soviet union forced russia to engage in a process of nation building. this involved a reassessment of the past, both historical and cultural, and how it should be remembered. the publication of previously barely known underground and émigré literary works presented an opportunity to reappraise «official» soviet literature and re-evaluate twentieth-century russian literature as a whole.

this book explores changes to the poetry canon - an instrument for maintaining individual and collective memory - to show how cultural memory has informed the evolution of post-soviet russian identity. it examines how concerns over identity are shaping the canon, and in which directions, and analyses the interrelationship between national identity (whether ethnic, imperial, or civic) and attempts to revise the canon. this study situates the discussion of national identity within the cultural field and in the context of canon formation as a complex expression of aesthetic, political, and institutional factors. it encompasses a period of far-reaching upheaval in russia and reveals the tension between a desire for change and a longing for stability that was expressed by attempts to reshape the literary canon and, by doing so, to create a new twentieth-century past and the foundations of a new identity for the nation.