Synopses & Reviews
Pushkin and Romantic Fashion is about the interpenetration of culture and personality, specifically Alexander I's Russian Empire, a latecomer in post-Napoleonic European history, and Alexsandr Pushkin, virtuoso improvisor yet prisoner of the Golden Age discourses that now bear his name. It focuses on Pushkin's use of the Romantic fragment, especially the link between the fragment and Romantic irony's fundamental and modern questioning of the sources and intentionality of language. In the view of such irony's most eloquent formulator, Friedrich Schlegel, "identity" does not precede speech, but is forged in each improvisational interaction with interlocutor or reader. One finds out who one is by speaking, and all utterances and texts stand in a fragmentary, contingent relation to an accumulating life-text.
Review
"Greenleaf's notes demonstrate her impressive research in an unusually broad range of sources. . . . If all interpretations are contingently valid, few are more powerfully and sensitively argued than Greenleaf's."Choice
Synopsis
This book is about the interpenetration of culture and personality, specifically Alexander I's Russian Empire. It focuses on Pushkin's use of the Romantic fragment, especially the link between the fragment and Romantic irony's fundamental and modern questioning of the sources and intentionality of language.
Synopsis
This book is about the interpenetration of culture and personality, specifically Alexander I's Russian Empire, a latecomer in post-Napoleonic European history, and Aleksandr Pushkin, virtuoso improvisor yet prisoner of the Golden Age discourses that now bear his name.
Synopsis
A reassessment of Romanticism in the work of Pushkin.
Synopsis
This book focuses on the interpenetration of culture and personality in the work of Alexander Pushkin, during Russia's Golden Age under Alexander I. The author argues that the fashionable genres of Romanticism offered Pushkin fresh opportunities for self-articulation where no native tradition of individualism existed. She reveals Pushkin's use of the link between the Romantic fragment and Romantic irony's questioning of the sources and intentionality of language. Pushkin may come closest of all major European poets to realising what Schlegel prescribed as the poetics of modernity, because, as common latecomers on the European scene, Russian and German writers shared a fascination with European fashions and a talent for conflating or stepping outside them.
Synopsis
“This is one of those rare books that both present new material (the result of extensive research) and new understanding (the result of intensive and luminous thought). . . . It is a major contribution.”—William Mills Todd III, Harvard University
“Greenleafs notes demonstrate her impressive research in an unusually broad range of sources. . . . If all interpretations are contingently valid, few are more powerfully and sensitively argued than Greenleafs.”—Choice
Table of Contents
A note to the reader; Pushkin and the fragment: an introduction; 1. The romantic fragment: a genealogy; 2. From epitaph to elegy: Russia's entry into European culture; 3. The foreign fountain: self as other in the oriental poem; 4. 'What's in a name?' the rhetoric of imposture in Boris Godunov; 5. The sense of not ending: romantic irony in Eugene Onegin; 6. How to read an epitaph: the 'Kleopatra' tales; Autoportraiture: an afterword; Notes; Index.