2706 books match the query 'European' and 20 start with k

cover of Kafka Goes to the Movies

Kafka Goes to the Movies

Hanns Zischler

University of Chicago Press, 2002

"Went to the movies. Wept. Matchless entertainment." So wrote Franz Kafka in one of his diaries, giving us but one hint of his little-known passion for the cinema. Until now, Kafka aficionados have been left to speculate about which films moved Kafka so powerfully and how those films might have influenced his writing. With Kafka Goes to the Movies, German actor and film director Hanns Zischler draws on years of detective work to provide the first account of Kafka's moviegoing life.

Since many of Kafka's visits to the cinema occurred during bachelor trips with Max Brod, Zischler's research took him not only to Kafka's native Prague but to film archives in Munich, Milan, and Paris. Matching Kafka's cinematic references to reviews and stills from daily papers, Zischler hunted down rare films in collections all across Europe. A labor of love, then, by a true man of the cinema, Kafka Goes to the Movies brims with discoveries about the pioneering years of European film. With a wealth of illustrations, including reproductions of movie posters and other rare materials, Zischler opens a fascinating window onto movies that have been long forgotten or assumed lost.

But the real highlights of the book are those about Kafka himself. Long considered one of the most enigmatic figures in literature, the Kafka that emerges in this work is strikingly human. Kafka Goes to the Movies offers an absorbing look at a witty, passionate, and indulgently curious writer, one who discovered and used the cinema as a place of enjoyment and escape, as a medium for the ambivalent encounter with modern life, and as a filter for the changing world around him.
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Kafka and Cultural Zionism

Dates in Palestine

Iris Bruce

University of Wisconsin Press, 2007

Kafka and Cultural Zionism is an illumination of the individual Jewish identity of this major modernist German author. Through a thorough examination of Kafka's life, his influences, and his writings, Iris Bruce makes a case for Kafka's interest in Zionism and demonstrates the presence of Jewish themes and motifs in Kafka's literary works. In recognizing this essential part of Kafka's individual voice, Bruce hopes to provide a new perspective on Kafka and his writings that allows the reader to find the humor, playfulness, rebelliousness, and challenge that can be overlooked if the reader expects to find a Kafka who is disengaged from his ethnic and cultural identity, as well as the politics of his age.
 
Outstanding Academic Title, Choice Magazine
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Kafka and Noise

The Discovery of Cinematic Sound in Literary Modernism

Kata Gellen

Northwestern University Press, 2019

A series of disruptive, unnerving sounds haunts the fictional writings of Franz Kafka. These include the painful squeak in Gregor Samsa's voice, the indeterminate whistling of Josefine the singer, the relentless noise in "The Burrow," and telephonic disturbances in The Castle. In Kafka and Noise, Kata Gellen applies concepts and vocabulary from film theory to Kafka's works in order to account for these unsettling sounds. Rather than try to decode these noises, Gellen explores the complex role they play in Kafka's larger project.
 
Kafka and Noise offers a method for pursuing intermedial research in the humanities—namely, via the productive "misapplication" of theoretical tools, which exposes the contours, conditions, and expressive possibilities of the media in question. This book will be of interest to scholars of modernism, literature, cinema, and sound, as well as to anyone wishing to explore how artistic and technological media shape our experience of the world and the possibilities for representing it.
 
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Kafka and Wittgenstein

The Case for an Analytic Modernism

Rebecca Schuman

Northwestern University Press, 2015

In Kafka and Wittgenstein, Rebecca Schuman undertakes the first ever book-length scholarly examination of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language alongside Franz Kafka’s prose fiction. In groundbreaking readings, she argues that although many readers of Kafka are searching for what his texts mean, in this search we are sorely mistaken. Instead, the problems and illusions we portend to uncover, the im-portant questions we attempt to answer—Is Josef K. guilty? If so, of what? What does Gregor Samsa’s transformed body mean? Is Land-Surveyor K. a real land surveyor?— themselves presuppose a bigger delusion: that such questions can be asked in the first place. Drawing deeply on the entire range of Wittgenstein’s writings, Schuman can-nily sheds new light on the enigmatic Kafka.

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cover of Kafka's Ethics of Interpretation: Between Tyranny and Despair

Kafka's Ethics of Interpretation

Between Tyranny and Despair

Jennifer L. Geddes

Northwestern University Press, 2016

Kafka's Ethics of Interpretation refutes the oft-repeated claim, made by Kafka's greatest interpreters, including Walter Benjamin and Harold Bloom, that Kafka sought to evade interpretation of his writings. Jennifer L. Geddes shows that this claim about Kafka's deliberate uninterpretability is not only wrong, it also misconstrues a central concern of his work. Kafka was not trying to avoid or prevent interpretation; rather, his works are centrally concerned with it.

Geddes explores the interpretation that takes place within, and in response to, Kafka's writings, and pairs Kafka's works with readings of Sigmund Freud, Pierre Bourdieu, Tzvetan Todorov, Emmanuel Levinas, and others. She argues that Kafka explores interpretation as a mode of power and violence, but also as a mode of engagement with the world and others. Kafka, she argues, challenges us to rethink the ways we read texts, engage others, and navigate the world through our interpretations of them.
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cover of Kafka's Law: "The Trial" and American Criminal Justice

Kafka's Law

"The Trial" and American Criminal Justice

Robert P. Burns

University of Chicago Press, 2014

The Trial is actually closer to reality than fantasy as far as the client’s perception of the system. It’s supposed to be a fantastic allegory, but it’s reality. It’s very important that lawyers read it and understand this.” Justice Anthony Kennedy famously offered this assessment of the Kafkaesque character of the American criminal justice system in 1993. While Kafka’s vision of the “Law” in The Trial appears at first glance to be the antithesis of modern American legal practice, might the characteristics of this strange and arbitrary system allow us to identify features of our own system that show signs of becoming similarly nightmarish?
           
With Kafka’s Law, Robert P. Burns shows how The Trial provides an uncanny lens through which to consider flaws in the American criminal justice system today. Burns begins with the story, at once funny and grim, of Josef K., caught in the Law’s grip and then crushed by it. Laying out the features of the Law that eventually destroy K., Burns argues that the American criminal justice system has taken on many of these same features. In the overwhelming majority of contemporary cases, police interrogation is followed by a plea bargain, in which the court’s only function is to set a largely predetermined sentence for an individual already presumed guilty. Like Kafka’s nightmarish vision, much of American criminal law and procedure has become unknowable, ubiquitous, and bureaucratic. It, too, has come to rely on deception in dealing with suspects and jurors, to limit the role of defense, and to increasingly dispense justice without the protection of formal procedures. But, while Kennedy may be correct in his grim assessment, a remedy is available in the tradition of trial by jury, and Burns concludes by convincingly arguing for its return to a more central place in American criminal justice.
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Kafka's Zoopoetics

Beyond the Human-Animal Barrier

Naama Harel

University of Michigan Press, 2020

Nonhuman figures are ubiquitous in the work of Franz Kafka, from his early stories down to his very last one. Despite their prominence throughout his oeuvre, Kafka’s animal representations have been considered first and foremost as mere allegories of intrahuman matters. In recent years, the allegorization of Kafka’s animals has been poetically dismissed by Kafka’s commentators and politically rejected by posthumanist scholars. Such critique, however, has yet to inspire either an overarching or an interdiscursive account. This book aims to fill this lacuna. Positing animal stories as a distinct and significant corpus within Kafka’s entire poetics, and closely examining them in dialogue with both literary and posthumanist analysis, Kafka’s Zoopoetics critically revisits animality, interspecies relations, and the very human-animal contradistinction in the writings of Franz Kafka.

Kafka’s animals typically stand at the threshold between humanity and animality, fusing together human and nonhuman features. Among his liminal creatures we find a human transformed into vermin (in “The Metamorphosis”), an ape turned into a human being (in “A Report to an Academy”), talking jackals (in “Jackals and Arabs”), a philosophical dog (in “Researches of a Dog”), a contemplative mole-like creature (in “The Burrow”), and indiscernible beings (in “Josefine, the Singer or the Mouse People”). Depicting species boundaries as mutable and obscure, Kafka creates a fluid human-animal space, which can be described as “humanimal.” The constitution of a humanimal space radically undermines the stark barrier between human and other animals, dictated by the anthropocentric paradigm. Through denying animalistic elements in humans, and disavowing the agency of nonhuman animals, excluding them from social life, and neutralizing compassion for them, this barrier has been designed to regularize both humanity and animality. The contextualization of Kafka's animals within posthumanist theory engenders a post-anthropocentric arena, which is simultaneously both imagined and very real.
 

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cover of Kafka’s Blues: Figurations of Racial Blackness in the Construction of an Aesthetic

Kafka’s Blues

Figurations of Racial Blackness in the Construction of an Aesthetic

Mark Christian Thompson

Northwestern University Press, 2016

Kafka's Blues proves the startling thesis that many of Kafka's major works engage in a coherent, sustained meditation on racial transformation from white European into what Kafka refers to as the "Negro" (a term he used in English). Indeed, this book demonstrates that cultural assimilation and bodily transformation in Kafka's work are impossible without passage through a state of being "Negro." Kafka represents this passage in various ways—from reflections on New World slavery and black music to evolutionary theory, biblical allusion, and aesthetic primitivism—each grounded in a concept of writing that is linked to the perceived congenital musicality of the "Negro," and which is bound to his wider conception of aesthetic production. Mark Christian Thompson offers new close readings of canonical texts and undervalued letters and diary entries set in the context of the afterlife of New World slavery and in Czech and German popular culture.
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cover of Kafka’s Other Prague: Writings from the Czechoslovak Republic

Kafka’s Other Prague

Writings from the Czechoslovak Republic

Anne Jamison

Northwestern University Press, 2018

Kafka’s Other Prague: Writings from the Czechoslovak Republic examines Kafka’s late writings from the perspective of the author’s changing relationship with Czech language, culture, and literature—the least understood facet of his meticulously researched life and work.
 
Franz Kafka was born in Prague, a bilingual city in the Habsburg Empire. He died a citizen of Czechoslovakia. Yet Kafka was not Czech in any way he himself would have understood. He could speak Czech, but, like many Prague Jews, he was raised and educated and wrote in German. Kafka critics to date have had little to say about the majority language of his native city or its “minor literature,” as he referred to it in a 1913 journal entry. Kafka’s Other Prague explains why Kafka’s later experience of Czech language and culture matters.
 
Bringing to light newly available archival material, Anne Jamison’s innovative study demonstrates how Czechoslovakia’s founding and Kafka’s own dramatic political, professional, and personal upheavals altered his relationship to this “other Prague.” It destabilized Kafka’s understanding of nationality, language, gender, and sex—and how all these issues related to his own writing.
 
Kafka’s Other Prague juxtaposes Kafka’s German-language work with Czechoslovak Prague’s language politics, intellectual currents, and print culture—including the influence of his lover and translator, the journalist Milena Jesenská—and shows how this changed cultural and linguistic landscape transformed one of the great literary minds of the last century.
 
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cover of Karl Kraus and the Discourse of Modernity

Karl Kraus and the Discourse of Modernity

Ari Linden

Northwestern University Press, 2020

Ari Linden’s Karl Kraus and the Discourse of Modernity reconsiders the literary works of the Viennese satirist, journalist, and playwright Karl Kraus (1874–1936). Combining close readings with intellectual history, Linden shows how Kraus’s two major literary achievements (The Last Days of Mankind and The Third Walpurgis Night) and his adaptation of The Birds by Aristophanes (Cloudcuckooland) address the political catastrophes of the first third of Europe’s twentieth century—from World War I to the rise of fascism.

Kraus’s central insight, Linden argues, is that the medial representations of such events have produced less an informed audience than one increasingly unmoved by mass violence. In the second part of the book, Linden explores this insight as he sees it inflected in the writings of Søren Kierkegaard, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno. This hidden dialogue, Linden claims, offers us a richer understanding of the often-neglected relationship between satire and critical theory writ large.
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cover of Katherine Parr: Complete Works and Correspondence

Katherine Parr

Complete Works and Correspondence

Katherine Parr

University of Chicago Press, 2011

To the extent that she is popularly known, Katherine Parr (1512–48) is the woman who survived King Henry VIII as his sixth and last wife. She merits far greater recognition, however, on several other fronts. Fluent in French, Italian, and Latin, Parr also began, out of necessity, to learn Spanish when she ascended to the throne in 1543. As Henry’s wife and queen of England, she was a noted patron of the arts and music and took a personal interest in the education of her stepchildren, Princesses Mary and Elizabeth and Prince Edward. Above all, Parr commands interest for her literary labors: she was the first woman to publish under her own name in English in England.

           

For this new edition, Janel Mueller has assembled the four publications attributed to Parr—Psalms or Prayers, Prayers or Meditations, The Lamentation of a Sinner, and a compilation of prayers and Biblical excerpts written in her hand—as well as her extensive correspondence, which is collected here for the first time. Mueller brings to this volume a wealth of knowledge of sixteenth-century English culture. She marshals the impeccable skills of a textual scholar in rendering Parr’s sixteenth-century English for modern readers and provides useful background on the circumstances of and references in Parr’s letters and compositions. Given its scope and ambition, Katherine Parr: Complete Works and Correspondence will be an event for the English publishing world and will make an immediate contribution to the fields of sixteenth-century literature, reformation studies, women’s writing, and Tudor politics.

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cover of Keats's Odes: A Lover's Discourse

Keats's Odes

A Lover's Discourse

Anahid Nersessian

University of Chicago Press, 2021

“When I say this book is a love story, I mean it is about things that cannot be gotten over—like this world, and some of the people in it.”
 
In 1819, the poet John Keats wrote six poems that would become known as the Great Odes. Some of them—“Ode to a Nightingale,” “To Autumn”—are among the most celebrated poems in the English language. Anahid Nersessian here collects and elucidates each of the odes and offers a meditative, personal essay in response to each, revealing why these poems still have so much to say to us, especially in a time of ongoing political crisis. Her Keats is an unflinching antagonist of modern life—of capitalism, of the British Empire, of the destruction of the planet—as well as a passionate idealist for whom every poem is a love poem.

The book emerges from Nersessian’s lifelong attachment to Keats’s poetry; but more, it “is a love story: between me and Keats, and not just Keats.”  Drawing on experiences from her own life, Nersessian celebrates Keats even as she grieves him and counts her own losses—and Nersessian, like Keats, has a passionate awareness of the reality of human suffering, but also a willingness to explore the possibility that the world, at least, could still be saved. Intimate and speculative, this brilliant mix of the poetic and the personal will find its home among the numerous fans of Keats’s enduring work.
 
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Keats's Reading of the Romantic Poets

Beth Lau

University of Michigan Press, 1991

Keats's Reading of the Romantic Poets offers the first comprehensive analysis of Keats’s familiarity with the works of his most famous contemporaries: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, and Shelley. Beth Lau considers a variety of questions: which volumes and individual poems Keats read, what editions he used, when he read them, where he might have acquired copies, and why he read and responded as he did to certain works at particular periods of his life. The book presents a complex, detailed portrait of Keats's intellectual relationships with the major poets of his age.This study situates Keats in the literary climate of his time and provides Keats scholars with a reliable record that may assist future intertextual, influence, biographical, or critical studies. While previous work has concentrated on Keats's debt to Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, and other great Renaissance and Medieval writers, the most significant influences on a poet's style and outlook are generally contemporary sources. In fact, Keats's very interest in Renaissance and Medieval poetry and drama was a taste he shared with his age. Keats's Reading of the Romantic Poets, in laying the groundwork for a new examination of the poet in relation to the literature of his time, helps us to see the Romantic poets as a genuine literary group that read and responded to one another's works.Each chapter contains an essay and checklists that conveniently organize information on Keats's familiarity with each of the other poets’ publications. The checklists also distinguish reliable evidence — direct references and quotations, items in Keats's library, and statements by people who knew Keats — from more conjectural echoes and allusions. The essays draw conclusions from the information presented in the checklists and consider other types of evidence that do not lend themselves to a checklist format. One source of such evidence is the libraries and literary tastes of Keats's friends: people like Charles Cowden Clarke, Leigh Hunt, Benjamin Robert Haydon, John Hamilton Reynolds, Benjamin Bailey, and William Hazlitt, who were influential in shaping Keats's opinions about literature. In fact, the book may be considered a study of two levels in Keats's relationship to his contemporaries: his literary relationships with the major poets of his day, and his personal interactions with an immediate circle that helped stimulate and focus his reading and thinking about poetry.Keats's Reading of the Romantic Poets is an important reference work for scholars and critics interested in Keats, in the connections among the major poets of the early nineteenth century, and in biography and social history. The book’s clear, jargon-free prose makes it accessible to a variety of students and scholars.
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cover of Kindred Hands: Letters on Writing by British and American Women Authors, 1865-1935

Kindred Hands

Letters on Writing by British and American Women Authors, 1865-1935

Jennifer Cognard-Black

University of Iowa Press, 2006

Kindred Hands, a collection of previously unpublished letters by women writers, explores the act and art of writing from diverse perspectives and experiences. The letters illuminate such issues as authorship, aesthetics, collaboration, inspiration, and authorial intent. By focusing on letters that deal with authorship, the editors reveal a multiplicity of perspectives on female authorship that would otherwise require visits to archives and special collections.

Representing some of the most important female writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including transatlantic correspondents, women of color, canonical writers, regional writers, and women living in the British empire, Kindred Hands will enliven scholarship on a host of topics, including reception theory, feminist studies, social history, composition theory, modernism, and nineteenth-century studies. Moreover, because it represents previously unpublished primary sources, the collection will initiate new discussions on race, class, sexuality, ethnicity, and gender with an eye to writing at the turn of the twentieth century.
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King John

William Shakespeare

Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2023

A rousing contemporary translation of Shakespeare’s classic exploration of early English monarchy.
 
In this modern take on Shakespeare’s King John, Brighde Mullins navigates the political twists and turns of early English monarchy. Mullins’s translation parses Shakespeare’s language carefully, with a focus on its sonic qualities. Her version focuses on the listener, developing the play for the immense pleasure of it—the fortuitous juxtapositions of the fates of these characters.
 
This translation of King John was written as part of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Play On! project, which commissioned new translations of thirty-nine Shakespeare plays. These translations present the work of “The Bard” in language accessible to modern audiences while never losing the beauty of Shakespeare’s verse. Enlisting the talents of a diverse group of contemporary playwrights, screenwriters, and dramaturges from diverse backgrounds, this project reenvisions Shakespeare for the twenty-first century. These volumes make these works available for the first time in print—a new First Folio for a new era.
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cover of King Lear

King Lear

William Shakespeare

Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2022

A new translation of Shakespeare’s great tragedy that renews it for today’s audiences.
 
Marcus Gardley’s translation of King Lear renews the language of one of Shakespeare’s most frequently staged tragedies for a modern audience. Gardley’s update allows audiences to hear the play anew while still finding themselves in the tragic midst of Shakespeare’s play.
 
This translation of King Lear was written as part of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Play On! project, which commissioned new translations of thirty-nine Shakespeare plays. These translations present the work of “The Bard” in language accessible to modern audiences while never losing the beauty of Shakespeare’s verse. Enlisting the talents of a diverse group of contemporary playwrights, screenwriters, and dramaturges from diverse backgrounds, this project reenvisions Shakespeare for the twenty-first century. These volumes make these works available for the first time in print—a new First Folio for a new era.
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cover of Kiosk Literature of Silver Age Spain: Modernity and Mass Culture

Kiosk Literature of Silver Age Spain

Modernity and Mass Culture

Edited by Jeffrey Zamostny and Susan Larson

Intellect Books, 2017

The so-called “Silver Age” of Spain ran from 1898 to the rise of Franco in 1939 and was characterized by intense urbanization, widespread class struggle and mobility, and a boom in mass culture. This book offers a close look at one manifestation of that mass culture: weekly collections of short, often pocket-sized books sold in urban kiosks at low prices. These series published a wide range of literature in a variety of genres and formats, but their role as disseminators of erotic and anarchist fiction led them to be censored by the Franco dictatorship. This book offers the most detailed scholarly analysis of kiosk literature to date, examining the kiosk phenomenon through the lens of contemporary interdisciplinary theories of urban space, visuality, celebrity, gender and sexuality, and the digital humanities.
 
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cover of Knots, or the Violence of Desire in Renaissance Florence

Knots, or the Violence of Desire in Renaissance Florence

Emanuele Lugli

University of Chicago Press, 2023

An interdisciplinary study of hair through the art, philosophy, and science of fifteenth-century Florence.

In this innovative cultural history, hair is the portal through which Emanuele Lugli accesses the cultural production of Lorenzo il Magnifico’s Florence. Lugli reflects on the ways writers, doctors, and artists expressed religious prejudices, health beliefs, and gender and class subjugation through alluring works of art, in medical and political writings, and in poetry. He considers what may have compelled Sandro Botticelli, the young Leonardo da Vinci, and dozens of their contemporaries to obsess over braids, knots, and hairdos by examining their engagement with scientific, philosophical, and theological practices.
 
By studying hundreds of fifteenth-century documents that engage with hair, Lugli foregrounds hair’s association to death and gathers insights about human life at a time when Renaissance thinkers redefined what it meant to be human and to be alive. Lugli uncovers overlooked perceptions of hair when it came to be identified as a potential vector for liberating culture, and he corrects a centuries-old prejudice that sees hair as a trivial subject, relegated to passing fashion or the decorative. He shows hair, instead, to be at the heart of Florentine culture, whose inherent violence Lugli reveals by prompting questions about the entanglement of politics and desire.
 
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Knut Hamsun Remembers America

Essays and Stories, 1885-1949

Knut Hamsun, Edited & Translated by Richard Nelson Current

University of Missouri Press, 2003

When Americans remember him at all, they no doubt think of Knut Hamsun (1859–1952) as the author of Hunger or as the Norwegian who, along with Vidkun Quisling, betrayed his country by supporting the Nazis during World War II. Yet Hamsun, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1920 for his novel The Growth of the Soil, was and remains one of the most important and influential novelists of his time. Knut Hamsun Remembers America is a collection of thirteen essays and stories based largely on Hamsun’s experiences during the four years he spent in the United States when he was a young man. Most of these pieces have never been published before in an English translation, and none are readily available.
Hamsun’s feelings about America and American ways were complex. For the most part, they were more negative than positive, and they found expression in many of his writings—directly in his reminiscences and indirectly in his fiction. In On the Cultural Life of Modern America, his first major book, he portrayed the United States as a land of gross and greedy materialism, populated by illiterates who were utterly lacking in artistic originality or refinement. Although the pieces in this collection are not all anti-American, most of them emphasize the strangeness and unpleasantness, as the author saw it, of life in what he called Yankeeland.
Arranged chronologically, the pieces fall into three categories: Critical Reporting, Memory and Fantasy, and Mellow Reminiscence. The Critical Reporting section includes articles that appeared in Norwegian or Danish newspapers soon after each of Hamsun’s two visits to America and that give his views on a variety of American subjects, and includes an essay devoted to Mark Twain. Memory and Fantasy comprises narratives of life in America, most of which are presented as personal experiences but which actually are blends of fact and fiction. Mellow Reminiscence includes later and fonder recollections and impressions of the United States.
The pieces in this collection provide variations on a theme that runs through much of American history—European criticism of American ways. They give vivid, at times distorted, pictures of life as it was in the United States. They tell us something about the development of the worldview of a man who became a great writer, only to jeopardize his reputation by defending the Nazi oppressors of his own people. Knut Hamsun Remembers America will appeal to anyone interested in the history of American civilization or, more specifically, in the history of anti-Americanism.
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cover of Krúdy's Chronicles: Turn-of-the-Century Hungary in Gyula Krudy's Journalism

Krúdy's Chronicles

Turn-of-the-Century Hungary in Gyula Krudy's Journalism

John Batki

Central European University Press, 2000

Written during the 1910s '20s and '30s, these articles offer a wistful and nostalgic image of the waning years of the Austro-Hungarian empire, with portraits of the Habsburgs, culminating in first-hand reports in 1916, from Vienna on the funeral of Emperor Francis Joseph I, and from Budapest on the coronation of Charles IV, the last king of Hungary. Krúdy's reports follow the bloodless democratic revolution of 1918, the Károlyi government and the short-lived Soviet Republic, and present cameos of the leading political figures of the day such as Ferenc Kossuth, Mihály Károlyi and Béla Kun.


In his lively, casual pieces Krúdy displays his intimate knowledge of Hungarian society with a special emphasis on literature and publishing.

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