Results by title

We are, once again, a world at war. Geopolitical elites are deploying the implacable forces of ethnocentric hatred and religious nationalism; ordinary people are paying a fearful price. Not for the first time: this has been the characteristic pattern of war for more than a century. Every selection in this anthology (except for the timeless Aeneid) casts light on modern war, observed or directly experienced. Most are grounded in particular places—Stalingrad, Halberstadt, Budapest, Baghdad, Algiers, the Tamil ghost towns of Sri Lanka, the six-by-twelve-foot cell in Belmarsh maximum security prison where Julian Assange is held without bail for the act of revealing U.S. war crimes. Some recapture the actual look and feel of war—the sight of a seven-year-old girl clutching her mother's hand, dodging explosions in the Halberstadt public square; the sound of a Mozart concerto in D Minor, heard by a family hiding in a cave, played on their own piano by a Serbian sniper. Others take aim at the vast and vapid abstractions used to justify armed conflict, down to and including the use of nuclear weapons.

Raritan on War collects some of the finest writing on that troubling subject published in Raritan Quarterly between 2003 and 2022. The editors, Jackson Lears and Karen Parker Lears, have selected work that typifies Raritan's wide-ranging sensibility, focusing on a topic that is aesthetically rich, intellectually challenging, and morally disturbing. Ultimately, Raritan on War reveals the power of art and reflection to sustain humane ways of being in the world, even amid constant global violence.

Contributors: C. Felix Amerasinghe; Andrew J. Bacevich; Victoria De Grazia; Tamas Dobozy; David Ferry; M. Fortuna; Cai Guo-Qiang; Emma Dodge Hanson; Jochen Hellbeck; Karl Kirchwey; Ray Klimek; Peter LaBier; Patrick Lawrence; d. mark levitt; Michael Miller; Lyle Jeremy Rubin; Elizabeth D. Samet; Sherod Santos; Robert Westbrook

Although younger than most European theatrical traditions, the Russian professional theater has generated an exciting body of criticism and theory which until recently has remained unknown or nearly inaccessible in the West. This anthology presents a selection of important Russian writing on the aesthetics of drama and the theater from 1828 to 1914.

The focus of these essays, most published here for the first time in English, is on the so-called Crisis in the Theater of 1904 to 1914, a lively debate between the symbolists and the naturalists that evoked brilliant polemic writing from Meyerhold, Bely, Bryusov, and others. Along with Chekhov's amusing critique of Sarah Bernhardt ("monstrously facile!") and Ivanov's abstruse analysis of the essence of tragedy, the essays form a running commentary on the development of the Russian theater: Pushkin on his predecessors, Gogol on his own work, Belinsky on Gogol, Sleptsov on Ostrovsky and Leskov, Bely on Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard ("enervated people, trying to forget the terror of life"), the symbolists on one another.

Each selection is printed in its entirety, with extensive notes, and a lengthy introduction places all the pieces within their historical and cultural contexts to comprise a brief history of Russian dramatic theory before the revolution. This volume is essential reading for all who wish to extend their knowledge of the Russian contribution to theatrical history, theory, and criticism.