National Identity in Russian Culture: An Introduction
The question of national identity has long been a vexing one in Russia, and is particularly pertinent in the post-Soviet period. Designed for students of Russian literature, culture and history, this collection of essays explores aspects of national identity in Russian culture from medieval times to the present.
Anna Silver examines the ways nineteenth-century British writers used physical states of the female body--hunger, appetite, fat and slenderness--in the creation of female characters. She argues that anorexia nervosa, serves as a paradigm for the cultural ideal of middle-class womanhood in Victorian Britain. Silver uses the works of a wide range of writers (including Charlotte Bronte, Christina Rossetti, Charles Dickens, Bram Stoker and Lewis Carroll) to demonstrate that mainstream models of middle-class Victorian womanhood share important qualities with the beliefs or behaviors of the anorexic female.
Wilkie Collins was one of the most popular writers of the nineteenth century. He is best known for The Woman in White, which inaugurated the sensation novel in the 1860s, and The Moonstone, one of the first detective novels; but he wrote over 20 novels, plays and short stories during a career that spanned four decades. This Companion offers a fascinating overview of Collins's writing.
Asian Literary Voices: From Marginal to Mainstream
The essays in this collection give voice to a wide range of artists and writers from China, Japan, Korea, and India who to this day remain largely unknown or poorly understood in literary circles around the world. Contributors from Asia, Europe, and the United States cover a wide range of topics from a vast expanse of time, from Sanskrit poetry dating back over a thousand years to Chinese fiction of the twenty-first century.
Each volume of Poetry for Students provides analysis of approximately 20 poems that teachers and librarians have identified as the most frequently studied in literature courses. Some of the poems covered in this volume include:
"Business" by Victor Hernandez Cruz "Colibri" by Martin Espada "Reunions with a Ghost" by Ali "Southbound on the Freeway" by May Swenson "Ways to Live" by William Stafford And more
