‘The province…But, indeed, that is Russia!’

“The Imagined Province” investigates the shifts in what the “idea of the province” in the period of world war and the Russian revolution and civil war. I argue that the mental and emotional valence of Russia’s map changed markedly over these nine years as regionalist and provincial pride came into literary culture, urging a fresh view of central Russia outside the capital cities. This change of perspective emerges in essays, stories, and poetry throughout Central Russia, though this article focuses mainly on the Volga Region. Authors of many different political stripes contributed to this shift—among them, regionalists like Evgenii Chirikov and Nikolai Kliuev, pro-revolutionary socialists such as Maksim Gor’kii and Matvei Dudorov, and Bolsheviks like Aleksei Dorogoichenko and Fedor Bogorodskii. As the Bolsheviks regathered Russia, these provincial voices were overpowered by more prominent voices from the center. Nonetheless, they established a “usable history” that remains a substrate of Russian culture even today, challenging the simplistic binary juxtaposing “capital” and “province.”

The Author and the Authors of the 'Vita Ædwardi Regis:' Women's Literary Culture and Digital Humanities

Commissioned by Queen Edith in the 1060s, the Vita Ædwardi Regis (hereafter VER) has recently received substantial scholarly attention, including focus on identification of the author of this putatively anonymous text; the quest for authorial identification has until now proceeded with the assumption of sole authorship of the text. Lexomics, an open-access vocabulary analysis tool, adds digital strategies to more traditional literary and historical analyses; the Lexomic evidence indicates that the VER is a composite text built by multiple contributors under the direction of the queen. Not only did Edith's patronage cause the VER to be written, but her knowledge, and her personal and political interests, shaped the Life's content. Hers was the active, guiding intellect behind the entire text, and in two passages the VER appears not only to communicate the queen's intentions but also to preserve her voice. If any one person is to be identified as the 'author' of the VER, therefore, it is Edith, guiding a team of writers and scribes to tell her story.

THE ROLE OF LITERARY CULTURE AND FICTIONAL DISCOURSE IN THE GENESIS OF THE MODERN PUBLIC SPHERE

The paper is devoted to the study of the role of fictional discourse and literary culture in the formation process of the Modern public sphere. It is proved that this sphere was rooted in the genesis structures, which were represented by the following oppositions of the literary field: author’s production – mass consumption, closed and open fields of artistic production, self-reference and other-reference, signified and signifier. The dynamic structure of fictional discourse allowed to maintain the unity of the human, who was not determined by birth, but constructed himself. The permanent identification and the interpretations conflict became the content of the communication of the public circles of the Modern society (table conversations, clubs, salons and magazines). The institutionalization apogee of the literary field was the formation of literary culture – the content of education of the English model of the university, which balanced between the Scylla of the canon and Charybdis unification of industrial society.

French Literature in Mono- and Multilingual Social Contexts

This article analyses the production and consumption of francophone manuscripts in thirteenth-century Flanders from a multilingual perspective. The polyglot linguistic reality of the County of Flanders, home to both Dutch- and French-speaking communities, is evident in documentary sources and manuscripts from around 1200. Using a database compiled for The Multilingual Dynamics of the Literary Culture of Medieval Flanders (ca 1200–ca 1500) project, the quantitative evidence for the apparent popularity of French literature will be scrutinized in the extant manuscripts produced and used in Flemish urban, monastic, and court environments during the thirteenth century. Furthermore, manuscript case studies related to the Flemish court illustrate how thirteenth-century francophone literary culture is shaped by social milieus and user contexts, including examples of the interregional francophone networks of noblewomen, cultural exchange between the court and urban elites, and a renewed interest in crusader history.

"Nowy komeniusz" Jana Chrzciciela Mieroszewskiego. Jego związki z pansofią Komeńskiego

The article analyses The New Comenius, a work by a little-known 19th-century Polish writer, Jan Mieroszewski. The title itself indicates a connection with the works by John Amos Comenius due to the appellativization of the scientist’s name. The author lists multiple affinities in the content, composition and form of the Polish "Comenius" with Orbis Pictus and other works by the outstanding Czech educator, and above all, with his idea of pansophism. He mentions the illustrative method of transferring knowledge and the encyclopaedic tendency to collect and systematize it. At the same time, he proves that Comenius' concepts influenced the development of the Polish prose of the seventeenth century, which assumed the silvic formula of a collection of varieties useful in the lives of educated people. Mieroszewski's book is a continuation of this trend of writing, which combined genealogically contradictory patterns of silva rerum and the encyclopaedia. Despite its literary nature, it retains the value of a textbook or lexicon, which was intended to convey wisdom in a universal dimension, relating to the spheres of self-knowledge, the world of universal and transcendent things, as Comenius had assumed. Undoubtedly, the analysed text confirms the viability of the scholar's concept in the Polish intellectual and literary culture of the nineteenth century.

3. Convention and idiosyncrasy

“Convention and idiosyncrasy” shows how the successful use of recognizable artistic conventions can help a poet to enter a literature and a culture that seeks to exclude them. It can moderate skepticism, even hostility, and sanction an outsider’s admittance into a community. At the same time, respect for poetic convention hardly reigns uncontested in American literary culture. With several notable exceptions, American poetry and, even more so, its scholarly discussions value a different quality. American poets and readers alike often appreciate idiosyncrasy and the associated values of disruption, originality, innovation, strangeness, and surprise. Poets as different Phillis Wheatley, Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich, Charles Bernstein, and Maggie Smith consider the competing imperatives of convention and idiosyncrasy.

How and Why to Do Things with Eighteenth-Century Manuscripts

This Element examines eighteenth-century manuscript forms, their functions in the literary landscape of their time, and the challenges and practices of manuscript study today. Drawing on both literary studies and book history, Levy and Schellenberg offer a guide to the principal forms of literary activity carried out in handwritten manuscripts produced in the first era of print dominance, 1730-1820. After an opening survey of sociable literary culture and its manuscript forms, numerous case studies explore what can be learned from three manuscript types: the verse miscellany, the familiar correspondence, and manuscripts of literary works that were printed. A final section considers issues of manuscript remediation up to the present, focusing particularly on digital remediation. The Element concludes with a brief case study of the movement of Phillis Wheatley's poems between manuscript and print. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.