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The emergence of Maya writers bursts with original, novel, and transgressing proposals, within the contemporary political context of recognition of cultural rights and vindications from First Nations peoples. Such emergence has awakened a growing interest among diverse publics. Among them, literary critics stand at a special place, as many of them have tried to define such emergence and locate it as a particular category within the national or regional literary sphere. Contrary to that assimilationistic approach, this paper argues that through their literary works Maya writers are involved in a larger artistic indigenous movement that pursues not a place in the national literature, but that aims to question and redefine the hegemonic literary canon itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers of the specificity of the literary-critical path of I. F. Annensky have revealed the common features of his articles and critical essays, and have outlined his commitment to art criticism of O. Wilde. However, there is no comprehensive view of the poetics and semantics of the texts, of the “Book of Reflections” in particular, as the only and most complete collection of critical texts in order to identify the tradition that is consistent with modern literary criticism. The first and the second books are examples of how disconnected essays, written and published on the pages of newspapers and magazines at different times, thanks to the author’s will, gain a second life under one cover, getting the status of structural and semantic unity. A review of the key ideas in each of the two-volume collection of texts will give an idea of the unity of motives or semantic fields. They, in turn, provide integrity on the level of content. The article discusses the definitions of the genre and method of the book voiced in journalism and literary criticism of the early 20th century. The author makes an attempt to reveal the implicit and explicit components that have influenced structural-semantic integrity. A comparative description of literary-critical systems close to Annensky on the genre-methodological level is suggested. “Books of reflections” is such a genre form, the construction of a theoretical model of which needs highlighting the essential features of the components, both external (composition, heading complexes) and internal (image of the author, plot). Speaking about the structure of the “Books of Reflections” as a literary-critical text, in addition to literary, journalistic and scientific elements, the researcher must also take into account the figure of the author himself, because his worldview, taste and aesthetic attitudes explain the perception and interpretation of literature. Since already here the author appears in the role of a researcher, literary critic, philosopher, and writer, it can be said that this book determined the outlines of those paths within which his activities had previously developed. Reliance on comparative analysis of the literary-critical system of Annensky and his followers will open up the possibility for mutual conclusions regarding the stylistic and methodological laws of the chosen approaches.

The present publication acquaints the reader with the hitherto unknown correspondence in 1931 and 1951 between the Nobel Laureate Ivan Bunin and the Bulgarian literary critic Malcho Nikolov (1883–1962). The letters were found in the private collections of the literary figures in the Leeds (UK) and Sofia (Bulgaria) archives. Here they are published from the original texts in modernised orthography and with extensive annotations. In addition, the context of their creation has been restored. The work follows the Bulgarian national tradition of critical and scientific reception of Bunin’s works, which was initiated in 1920 by Professor Boyan Penev of Sofia University. This tradition was further developed by his disciple Malcho Nikolov, who was, in the words of P. Bicilli, ‘an excellent connoisseur of Russian literature’and ‘a great admirer’of Bunin’s talent. Nikolov considered Bunin his ‘most favourite author’. In 1926–1950s, he wrote three articles which likewise remained unknown until the present. These publications form an integrated text about Bunin, which preserves and transmits knowledge about the writer as a creator belonging to eternal art. The desire to come into contact with the author arose from a deep comprehension and emotional experience of Bunin’s creative work. Whereas Bunin was somewhat detached from this correspondence and it demonstrated a view of the correspondent through the Slavophile prism of tribal connectedness, Nikolov’s childlike admiration and excitement were the result of reasoning love and a developed conception of Bunin’s creative work. Bunin and Nikolov’s correspondence became not only an exchange of letters and gifts between two people ‘related by blood’ (in Bunin’s words) and by literary occupation, but also an exchange of symbols of Memory between individuals in solidarity. The publication of this text on the Nobel Laureate’s anniversary makes its indubitable contribution to Bunin studies.

Present research is an attempt to take a semantic look at the concept “love” in the writings of two great Persian poets; Sa’di and Hafez within the framework of conceptual literary critics. Authors have been trying to find answers for these questions: What is/are difference(s) of Sa’di and Hafez’s look at the concept “love”, and what is the justification for this(these) difference(s) in the framework of literary critics? To find answers for these questions, authors have examined conceptual metaphors and similes in the investigated lyrics of these two poets. Authors have also tried to find answers for these questions: which poet’s lyrics contain more fancy? And what is/are the difference(s) of mappings which each poet has used in his lyrics due to diversity of conceptual metaphors and similes and their emotional meaning? To find answers for these questions, one percent of Sa’di’s and one percent of Hafez’s lyrics have been gathered accidentally in order to investigate conceptual metaphors and similes used in them and in order for the authors to be able to investigate the lyrics from a structuralist point of view in the first step. Investigations have shown Sa’di’s lyrics contain more fancy and he has had a positive look at “love” compared with Hafez who has had a negative look at this concept. These findings have been justified in the article.

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Covid-19 pandemic remarkably changed the ways of working in almost every field and libraries were not an exception. However, librarians found the way to adapt quickly and successfully while trying to help their members and readers not to be influenced by new bad conditions. Librarians of Novi Sad City Library organized various and rich online programs. This paper is focused on the actions realized by the Department for cultural programs: „WRITERS AT YOUR PLACE“ – with online recordings of famous Serbian authors reading from their works. „MAYBE YOU DID (NOT) KNOW“ – publishing of little known data from biographies of remarkable writers. „BOOKS, AGAIN“ – platform for the critics to recommend the books along with the short review. In conclusion, I propose the idea that Covid-19 pandemic opened some new questions, along with the previously existing ones, about the place of libraries in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Muscovite chronicle material is very disparate about Ivan the Terrible's Raid of Novgorod in 1570. Novgorod and Pskov Chronicles show Ivan's brutal behavior in detail. In this article I argue that in the second half of the 17th century many chronicles were reworked in order to support an open discussion about dissatisfaction with the tsarist government in Novgorod and Pskov. Chronicle writing was used to disseminate the image of the terrible tsar Ivan. This image functioned as an allegory for the tsars of the end of the 17th century who were under pressure from a wider public that criticized autocracy. In this way, I am writing a nonlinear history of late Muscovy in which a historical figure like Ivan figured as a distorted allegorical image of a tyrannical tsar destroying the ancient régime. This history is non-linear in the sense that it puts some of the sources claiming to be from the reign of Ivan the Terrible (1530–1584) into the context in which they were used in later times. The history is linear in the sense that it begins with the oldest and ends with the youngest sources. In this way the story of history writing can be grasped in a historical-linear way, repeating a story and subtly modifying it according to the demands of the day of the writing of the later sources and so on. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the fall of 1966,Hiwar magazine published al-Tayyib Salih's novel Mawsim al-hijrah ila al-shamal [Season of Migration to the North]. Arabic literary critics both hailed the novel in the Arabic press and mourned that it had been published by the Paris-based Congress for Cultural Freedom's Hiwar. The CCF had been revealed just months before to be a global covert cultural front of the Cold War founded and funded by the United States Central Intelligence Agency, maintaining an extensive list of high profile literary magazines, including not only the Beirut-based Arabic magazines Hiwar and briefly Adab, but also the London-based Encounter, Bombay's Quest, and the African journals Black Orpheus in Ibadan and Transition in Kampala. In response to the 1955 Bandung conference for Afro-Asian solidarity, the CCF established a formidable network of its own, founding and funding African and Asian magazines, putting on conferences, art exhibits, and handsomely paying a significant cadre of intellectuals, writers, and artists worldwide. It would be more than a decade later that the CIA's domination of Afro-Asian literature would give way to the publication of the Afro-Asian Writers Association's trilingual (Arabic/English/French) journal Afro-Asian Writings (later to be called Lotus), a broadly imagined legacy of the 1955 Bandung Conference for Afro-Asian Solidarity and its celebration of decolonization, various forms of communism and socialism, and resistance literature in the third world. Drawing from Encounter, Hiwar, and other journals of the CCF, the Arabic press, letters exchanged by Salih and Hiwar's editor Tawfiq Sayigh, and the archives of the International Association for Cultural Freedom, this article argues that Season of Migration to the North, oft read as a postcolonial novel, is better understood as a product of American Cold War cultural imperialism. If its protagonist, Mustafa Sa'eed, might aspire, as though taking a page from Frantz Fanon, to liberate Africa with his penis as he beds a series of British women, seducing them with Orientalist fantasy, and if the novel's unnamed narrator might see that the newly independent Sudanese government was being corrupted by American cars, air conditioners, and opulent conferences and government ministries, the novel itself is doing something still more. As it reaches back intertextually to pre-Islamic poetry, the wine odes of Abbasid poet Abu Nuwas, and the tales of A Thousand and One Nights in British translation, Salih's novel exposes the long chain of empires subtending the dissemination of Arabic literature that left it vulnerable to becoming a terrain of cultural Cold War after Bandung's call for Afro-Asian solidarity., The young Sudanese author al-Tayyib Salih's 1966 Arabic novel Mawsim alhijrah ila al-shamal [Season of Migration to the North] was originally published in its entirety in Hiwar's September/December 1966 issue. [...]

If the dozens of titles in the noir series of Akashic Books is an indicator of popularity, then crime and noir fiction are having a renaissance. Once shunned as a lower form of literature, this genre now garners increased attention from literary scholars. Crime novels set in cities of the Global South, such as Mumbai and Dakar, have piqued literary critics' interest; postcolonial tensions add an extra layer to the mysteries at hand. In this article, I situate contemporary urban Haitian literature in the postcolonial noir space. I argue for the creation of a new term: the Haitian noir aesthetic. By analyzing three novels set in contemporary Port-au-Prince, I demonstrate how urban Haitian fiction can be read as a Haiti-specific noir genre., Shades of Port au Prince: Reading a Noir City The topography of Port-au-Prince reflects Haiti's political history; remnants of colonialism, imperialism, and fascism haunt the city's infrastructure. Haiti has been [...]

Despite their generic and formal differences, Samuel Beckett's 1953 novel The Unnamable and 1961 play Happy Days register complementary concerns toward the relationship between embodiment and communication. Both texts exhibit aspects of what media theorists and literary critics call the materiality of communication, going so far as to imagine communication itself as re-embodiment: a process in which Beckett's compromised and sometimes indecipherable bodies discover new forms. Considering themselves as observed objects (physical and discursive), Happy Days's Winnie and The Unnamable's narrator reflect upon the material systems that constitute and shape them. This reflexive strategy, both aesthetic and formal, illuminates both characters' estranging physicalities at the same time that it produces them, aligning communication itself with a sense of embodiment. Keywords: Samuel Beckett / communication / embodiment / materiality / media, Gaber was protected in numerous ways. He used a code incomprehensible to all but himself. Each messenger, before being appointed, had to submit his code to the directorate. Gaber understood [...]

The article briefly presents collections with donation inscriptions from the personal library of Prof. Stoyan Karolev, stored in "Zachary Knyazheski" Regional Library - Stara Zagora. Presented collections include copies of donation inscriptions by Radoi Ralin, Blaga Dimitrova, Andrey Germanov, Damyan Damyanov, Veselin Andreev, Stanislav Stratiev, Ivan Davidkov, Mihail Toshkov, D. Chavdarov-Chelkash, Pencho Danchev, Atanas Natev, Encho Mutafov, Alexander Milanov, Kamen Zidarov, Ivan Paunovski, Ivan Sarandev, Vihren Chernokozhev. In addition to revealing connections between the literary critic and a great number of important names in our literature and culture from the 1950s to the beginning of the 2000s, donation inscriptions are valuable in their authentic handwriting and in their content, which testifies the authors' attitude to cultural phenomena and polemics, the excitement in their first steps, the development of their creative self-consciousness; they also recall performances of forgotten authors today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Covid-19 pandemic remarkably changed the ways of working in almost every field and libraries were not an exception. However, librarians found the way to adapt quickly and successfully while trying to help their members and readers not to be influenced by new bad conditions. Librarians of Novi Sad City Library organized various and rich online programs. This paper is focused on the actions realized by the Department for cultural programs: „WRITERS AT YOUR PLACE“ – with online recordings of famous Serbian authors reading from their works. „MAYBE YOU DID (NOT) KNOW“ – publishing of little known data from biographies of remarkable writers. „BOOKS, AGAIN“ – platform for the critics to recommend the books along with the short review. In conclusion, I propose the idea that Covid-19 pandemic opened some new questions, along with the previously existing ones, about the place of libraries in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BRYAN KELSO CROW (Southern Illinois University Carbondale), 66, died Sept. 29. He was a retired professor of communication studies at SIU and hosted the Celtic Connections radio show. Crow was [...]

Mihail Sadoveanu, the greatest Romanian prose writer of all times, consecrated his work to a single hero: the Romanian people evoked at various times, from the beginnings of the nation to the present day. Mihail Sadoveanu writes in the era of the great realist novel and the modern novel. He is the creator of the Romanian historical novel, who sees history as a huge scene in which great voivodes move in an epic, legendary and mythical space. The originality of his work lies in the ability to merge with the evoked world, so that a single narrator, the author himself, tells the life of the past and today. Sadoveanu's heroes are exponents of some categories, types or archetypes, exemplary for humanity through their deeds. Sadoveanu follows the social and historical condition of the individual, describing the present realities and those belonging to history or a past that the documents cannot attest. What gives charm to the story of Mihail Sadovenu is the mystery that requires to be revealed and that can be reached by discovering his music, the state of balance and the significance of Sadoveanu's silence. Literary critics have appreciated that the originality of Sadoveanu’s writing lays precisely in its lyricism in the realistic evocation of a living world. Sadoveanu's writings produce that state of steady happiness from enjoying the beauty of nature.

This paper shows how much a change in political life can change the position of a writer in the eyes of literary criticism. As one example of such a phenomenon in literary life, this paper analyzes the collections of Milan Kašanin’s stories and the literary criticism written about them by Božidar Kovačević – before and after the Second World War and the Communist Revolution. The text suggests a potential political influence on the passing of value judgments on Milan Kašanin’s stories that the writer tried to publish shortly after the Second World War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The significance of the trope of the woman at the window in early modern culture and literature has been examined by literary critics, social and art historians, my indebtedness to [...]

This article analyzes the social and intellectual trajectory of the literary critic José Luis Martínez (1918-2007), in comparison with the Brazilian Antonio Candido (1918-2017) and the Argentine Adolfo Prieto (1928-2016), with the objective of evaluating the development and modalities of the institutionalization of university criticism in Mexico, Brazil and Argentina around the 1950s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay has two purposes. The first explores Antonio Candido's link to "Latin America"and the second explores the relevance of his critic for Latin American critics. For this we will review critical readings that have tried to locate the work of Candido in continental perspective and that offer us two different points of view, even opposed. One underlines the continental dialogue that the critic himself sought or intended. The other explores the power of his writing, that is, it is interested in what the reading of Candido's work unleashed outside of Brazil. Finally, we try to explore to what dynamics respond such divergences in the critic perspectives about the criticism of Candido. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyzes the book of literary critics texts Zadovoljština u tekstu (1989) by Goran Rem which is approached from the traditional typology of functional styles. It examines the existence of media codes and their interweaving in which literary critics texts as well as books in its entirety, imitate intermediate character. The paper provides an overview of the represented functional styles (scientific, essayistic, literary-artistic, conversational, journalistic and publicistic) and variants of the media subject which are results of experience of critic subject and codes of culture (especially media and rock culture) that the subject inscribes into the reading and interpretation of literary templates. The paper shows functional styles heterogeneity of literary critics texts in Zadovoljština u tekstu and the existence of four variants of the media subject. From this it is to conclude that the book is a hybrid text called postcritic whose hybridity suggests postmodern culture affiliation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Latvian writer Augusts Saulietis' oeuvre is a multifaceted literary phenomenon that reveals the specific character of literature of the late 19th century and the early decades of the 20th century. A. Saulietis' work has not received a comprehensive study by now. The limited and contradictory assessment of the writer's oeuvre at different stages of Latvian culture history may be accounted for by the coexistence of various literary trends - realism, early Modernism, classical Modernism, and Existentialism as well as the cultural and ideological tendencies of the respective epoch in literary criticism. A. Saulietis in this respect is a bright epitome for the successive change of various literary processes and systemic unity of various culture types in a single author's writing. His work does not find a clearly defined place in the system of literary trends. Study of literary trends is productive if executed in two segments - the context of national literature and that of European literary strivings. A. Saulietis' oeuvre encompasses approximately forty year long time period that epitomizes a gradual exchange of generations of writers, literary trends, and culture types. Literary criticism emphasizes the fact that the writer's work cannot be reduced to one culture type, neither is there replacement of one culture type by another as the author preserves both the modernist and realist tendencies throughout his creative life and periodically returns to one or another mode of depiction or represents both of them simultaneously. The prose narrative of A. Saulietis' early period of writing brings out the objective dominance of realist aesthetics that is supplemented by features of naturalism. In the beginning of the 20th century A. Saulietis, in line with the literary novelties of his contemporary epoch, uses modernist narrative highlighting the individual, psychological, associative world perception, introducing a new character type - individualist and outsider, depicts the concept of human soul, thus sketching out the aesthetics of early Modernism. A. Saulietis' works have been regarded in the aspect of early Modernism by R. Klaustiņš, K. Dziļleja, and A. Goba. As concerns the conceptual level and ideas of A. Saulietis' prose fiction, literary critics (T. Zeiferts, A. Goba, P. Ērmanis, E. Damburs, J. Veselis, Z. Mauriņa, B. Smilktina, etc.) discern parallels in the design of images and motifs with works by Apsīšu Jēkabs, J. Poruks, R. Blaumanis, A. Brigadere and other Latvian writers, yet emphasize the broad representation of the artistic world conception in Saulietis' works. According to literary critics, prose fiction represents the highest achievement of A. Saulietis' oeuvre, it has received the highest and unanimously positive evaluation, stressing its diversity and the dominance of psychological depiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Roland Bart, one of the most important French thinkers of the twentieth century, commenced his critical activity in the period of the rule of structuralism. Structural method, originally appeared in linguistics, acted as flexible and scientific tool which had been borrowed and used by numerous humanistic sciences such as antropology, psychology, and history during their own studies. Bart intended in his early oeuvres to adapt and implement this method during the literature study. Nevertheless, such way of literature comprehension seemed to be a rigid and violent one regarding the study subject itself. Very soon, faced with numerous aporias woven into the fundaments of structuralism themselves, and inability to give an appropriate response to some important questions such as the ones of the importance and value of the oeuvre from the position of structuralism, Bart leaves structural method by turning increasingly to the one known in the science of literature as post-structuralism. The inability to settle numerous problems this author faced with during the attempt at comprehension of literature as autonomous system conditioned only by mutual relationships of elements led to the urgent redefinition of initial positions. By throwing out the scientific method Bart will endeavour to affirm one more liberal approach to literature in his latter oeuvres whose main principle is the pleasure appearing in the relation toward to Text. The moving from structuralism toward post-structuralism present in the thinking system of Bart is almost given the value of paradigm. A wider moving which will lead to the dominance of post-structuralism in social sciences is being reflected in it.

The tremendous development of stylistics over the last four decades has brought about the growth of different approaches. As the essence of stylistics is integrating linguistics with literature, it has become a controversial subject particularly among literary critics and linguists. The dissension among scholars is a product of their own research in and therefore grounded in solid empirical study. Thus, the article discusses various approaches as reported in the stylistics literature along with their respective strengths and weaknesses. Thus, the paper attempts to shed some light on the controversies of stylistics in general as well as the various approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is focused on the role of a librarian and a literary critic as mediators in developing a reading culture. The literary critic is presented through the theory of radical (cognitive) constructivism (empirical literary studies), where his views acquire the status of merely limited and distinctly personal judgements. The author suggests that when librarians recommend literary works to users, they consider not only the contemporary critics, but also their own reading experiences and the experiences of other readers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The "copla" is born in Spain at the beginning of 20th Century, in coincidence with technological revolution, social democracy, triumph of capital and mass consumption in arts. This historical crossroads, which is shared by others patterns of dramatic music such as jazz, canzone napolitana, cuple or tango, provides popular and urban features for the copla. Throughout the textual analysis of the songs written by Rafael de Leon, before 1953, this work focuses on the role of women as protagonist of the copla. In 1952 was composed Carmen de España, a song which is a counterpoint to the image of women shaped in the copla, rarely "Christian and decent". In the copla dominates the urban environment, taverns, brothels, convents or houses with gates and bars, where women were torn between the chaste wife and marginalization, though the latter is the preferred choice by Rafael de León to build his protagonists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The review discusses the volume Unthinkable coincidence. On Poetry by Wisława Szymborska edited by Joanna Grądziel-Wójcik and Krzysztof Skibski. In six parts of the book the authors of Unthinkable coincidence... point out nad investigate the most important issues present in the poetic work of the Nobel Prize laureate: the anthropological perspective, the unanthropocentric model of humanity and human condition, existential and metaphysical problems, philosophical contexts, irony, figures of memory, silence, uncertainty and helplessness, models of poetics and metrics of Szymborska's poems. The last two parts of the volume focus on translations of Szymborska's poems into English, Bulgarian, Czech and Slovak, on Szymborska's translations of French baroque poets and on her images in Polish media form 1995 to 2012 and her posthumous traces in German newspapers. In the conclusion the reviewer describes the volume as the first really significant Polish collection of essays on Szymborska's poetry since her death in 2012. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a previous paper (Philip et al. 2013) we presented the analysis of the main characters' identities, as they emerge from the dialogues in Chapter 10 of the seventh book of the Harry Potter series, in relation to their Knowing, Unknowing, and Believing epistemic stances. The aim of the present study is to expand this analysis to all seven books of the same saga, in particular focusing on how Harry and Lord Voldemort negotiate, construct, and develop their identities and how they evolve in what they know, believe, and do not know through the dialogues in the seven books. This study also aims to compare this linguistic analysis to a literary one. The results show that the epistemic roles in the dialogues support the characters' identities in the narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]