{"product_id":"how-russian-literature-became-great-9781501773419","title":"How Russian Literature Became Great","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eHow Russian Literature Became Great\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003e explores the cultural and political role of a modern national literature, orchestrated in a Slavonic key but resonating far beyond Russia's borders. \u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eRolf 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. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAs 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. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe 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.\u003ci\u003e How Russian Literature Became Great\u003c\/i\u003e thus offers a new paradigm for understanding the paradoxes of modern tradition.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eRolf Hellebust teaches comparative literature with the Brilliant Club university access charity in London. He is the author of \u003ci\u003eFlesh to Metal\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Northern Illinois University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50651771994386,"sku":"9781501773419","price":58.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_f62f66d3-922f-4e7f-a94c-2a86433afa33.jpg?v=1733309314","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/how-russian-literature-became-great-9781501773419","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}