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.

a landmark work of literary criticism northrop frye's anatomy of criticism is the magnum opus of one of the most important and influential literary theorists of the twentieth century. breaking with the practice of close reading of individual texts, frye seeks to describe a common basis for understanding the full range of literary forms by examining archetypes, genres, poetic language, and the relations among the text, the reader, and society. using a dazzling array of examples, he argues that understanding "the structure of literature as a total form" also allows us to see the profoundly liberating effect literature can have.

how leading american artists reflected on the fate of humanity in the nuclear era through monumental sculpture in the wake of the atomic bombings of japan in 1945, artists in the united states began to question what it meant to create a work of art in a world where humanity could be rendered extinct by its own hand. the new monuments and the end of man examines how some of the most important artists of postwar america revived the neglected tradition of the sculptural monument as a way to grapple with the cultural and existential anxieties surrounding the threat of nuclear annihilation. robert slifkin looks at such iconic works as the industrially evocative welded steel sculptures of david smith, the austere structures of donald judd, and the desolate yet picturesque earthworks of robert smithson. transforming how we understand this crucial moment in american art, he traces the intersections of postwar sculptural practice with cybernetic theory, science-fiction cinema and literature, and the political debates surrounding nuclear warfare. slifkin identifies previously unrecognized affinities of the sculpture of the 1940s and 1950s with the minimalism and land art of the 1960s and 1970s, and acknowledges the important contributions of postwar artists who have been marginalized until now, such as raoul hague, peter grippe, and robert mallary. strikingly illustrated throughout, the new monuments and the end of man spans the decades from hiroshima to the fall of saigon, when the atomic bomb cast its shadow over american art.