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Nadya Aisenberg discusses the potentialities of the crime novel, its implications, principles, and scope, and its analogy ot myth and the fairy tale. She proposes that the detective story and the thriller have made an unacknowledged contribution to "serious" literature. Her discussion of Dickens, Conrad, and Green indicate that each borrowed many important ingredients from the formulaic novel.

From Outlaw to Classic presents a sweeping history of the forces that have shaped, and continue to shape, the American poetry canon. Students, scholars, critics, and poets will welcome this enlightening and impressively documented book.
    Recent writings by critics and theorists on literary canons have dealt almost exclusively with prose; Alan Golding shows that, like all canons, those of American poetry are characterized by conflict. Choosing a series of varied but representative instances, he analyzes battles and contentions among poets, anthologists, poetry magazine editors, and schools of thought in university English departments.  The chapters:
• present a history of American poetry anthologies
• compare competing models of canon-formation, the aesthetic (poet-centered) and the institutional (critic-centered)
• discuss the influence of the New Critics, emphasizing their status as practicing poets, their anti-nationalist reading of American poetry, and the landmark textbook, Understanding Poetry by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren
• examine the canonizing effects of an experimental “little magazine,” Origin
• trace how the Language poets address, in both their theory and their method, the canonizing institutions and canonical assumptions of the age.

Gogol's claim to the title of national literary classic is incontestable. An exemplar of popular audiences no less than for the intelligentsia, Gogol was pressed into service under the tsarist and Soviet regimes for causes both aesthetic and political, official and unofficial. In Gogol's Afterlife, Stephen Moeller-Sally explores how he achieved this peculiar brand of cultural authority and later maintained it, despite dramatic shifts in the organization of Russian literature and society.

Part I charts the historical and cultural currents that shaped Gogol's reputation, devoting particular attention to the models of authorship Gogol himself devised in response to his changing audience and developing authorial mission. Part II takes a panoramic view of the social milieu in which Gogol's status evolved. Finally, Part III examines the place of the classics in Soviet culture, with a focus on Gogol's role in the cultural revolution and his peculiar relationship with state power under Stalinism.

In The Chekhovian Intertext Lyudmila Parts explores contemporary Russian writers’ intertextual engagement with Chekhov and his myth. She offers a new interpretative framework to explain the role Chekhov and other classics play in constructing and maintaining Russian national identity and the reasons for the surge in the number of intertextual engagements with the classical authors during the cultural crisis in post-perestroika Russia.   

The book highlights the intersection of three distinct concepts: cultural memory, cultural myth, and intertextuality. It is precisely their interrelation that explains how intertextuality came to function as a defense mechanism of culture, a reaction of cultural memory to the threat of its disintegration.

In addition to offering close readings of some of the most significant short stories by contemporary Russian authors and by Chekhov, as a theoretical case study the book sheds light on important processes in contemporary literature: it explores the function of intertextuality in the development of Russian literature, especially post-Soviet literature; it singles out the main themes in contemporary literature, and explains their ties to national cultural myths and to cultural memory. The Chekhovian Intertext may serve as a theoretical model and impetus for examinations of other national literatures from the point of view of the relationship between intertextuality and cultural memory.