Italian Lizards and Literary Politics II:

A review of the editorial archive of the Literary Heritage [Literaturnoe nasledstvo] book series at the Manuscripts Department of the Russian Academy’s Gorky Institute of World Literature. The emergence of the new archaeographical publication, Literary Heritage, was at odds with the political context of the early 1930s. I. Zilbershtein’s personality and extensive connections in the publishing world, as well as the favourable disposition of the RAPP (Russian Association of Proletarian Writers) and Stalin himself, helped to launch the series and made sure that it endured despite the RAPP’s downfall and to meet the program’s goals to ‘explore the archived riches’ and ‘bring out the hitherto unpublished’. It was thanks to the utmost erudition of LH’s authors and reviewers that their editorial office remained a platform that accumulated both archival discoveries and contemporary challenges and ideas. LH’s survival amid constant scrutiny from the party and official censorship was the result of often obscure forces and political schemes put to work. It was driven by personal interests and scholarly collaborations and rivalries, something that broadly defined the trends in literary studies of the 21st century.

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Rolling back Modernity: Selective Tradition and Contemporary Literary Politics in the South Pacific

The Journal of New Zealand Studies ◽

10.26686/jnzs.v0ins26.4838 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Jennifer Lawn

Keyword(s):

New Zealand ◽

Literary Criticism ◽

Cultural Politics ◽

21St Century ◽

Literary History ◽

Cultural Participation ◽

Future Directions ◽

Selective Tradition ◽

Literary Politics ◽

Aotearoa New Zealand

This article relates Raymond Williams’s concept of “selective tradition” to the shaping of literary history in Aotearoa New Zealand. It makes the case for the ongoing salience of Williams’s narrative of modernity as a “long revolution,” and his sense of the threats to democratic and cultural participation around the turn of the 21st century, as a framework for situating recent cultural politics. The article closes with some suggestions for possible future directions for the development of locally-based materialist literary criticism.

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