Transnational Tolstoy: Between the West and the World

(Paperback)

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Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2014 Transnational Tolstoy renews and enhances our understanding of Tolstoy's fiction in the context of "World Literature," a term that he himself used in What is Art (1897). It offers a fresh perspective on Tolstoy's fiction as it connects with writers and works from outside his Russian context, including Stendhal, Flaubert, Goethe, Proust, Lampedusa and Mahfouz. Foster provides an interlocking series of cross-cultural readings ranging from nineteenth-century Germany, France, and Italy through the rise of modernist fiction and the crisis of World War II, to the growth of a worldwide literary outlook from 1960 onward. He emphasizes Tolstoy's writings with the most consistent international resonance: War and Peace and Anna Karenina, two of the world's most compelling novels. Transnational Tolstoy also discusses a shorter work, Hadji Murad. It shares the earlier novels' historical sweep, social breadth, and subtle interplay among a large cast of characters. Along with bringing Tolstoy's gifts to bear on a Muslim protagonist, it also represents his most sustained attempt at world literature.

Reviews

Transnational Tolstoy is a welcome and groundbreaking addition to Tolstoy studies, and to the transnational reading of Russian literature generally In this rewarding volume, John Burt Foster has updated and extended the exhausted genres of Tolstoy and the West and Tolstoy and World Literature. Transnational Tolstoy provokes consideration and plays an exemplary role in opening Tolstoys complex position between the west and the world to new and productive approaches. -- William Nickell, University of Chicago * Slavic and East European Journal *
Transnational Tolstoy is unlike any other current work on Tolstoi today. It provides a refreshing and thought-provoking look at one of the major figures of Russian literature and the dialogues he inspired and initiated around the globe. -- Justin Weir, Harvard University * Slavic Review *
Foster ... clearly has a gift for condensing his arguments into self-contained, well-expressed units. He also writes with a stylistic finesse and an apparent aversion to generating critical antipathy; his focus is always on saying things as well and persuasively as possible. Judging by his wide cultural knowledge, refined style, and pleasing attitude, he could have been a diplomat. * Cambridge Quarterly Review *
Foster's engaging study makes a crucial point: that, far from being a monologist or solipsist or hegemonic universalist, Tolstoi developed an ever more nuanced recognition of the incredibly complex interplay of different influences on which any cultural product must depend . . . To have returned this magnificently plural Tolstoi to us, as Foster has in lucid and mercifully jargon-free prose, is a substantial achievement. -- Jeff Love, Clemson University, US * Slavonic and East European Review *
Foster's book is a laudable venture into a new critical method of reading great fiction transnationally ... [He] works with splendid erudition and ingenuity ... [to provide] a refreshing and welcome method of reading and understanding Tolstoi. * Modern Language Review *
I immensely enjoyed reading John Burt Foster's Transnational Tolstoy, a monumental work that puts Tolstoy at the very heart of world literature, relating his work, and especially War and Peace, Anna Karenina and Hadji Murad, to that of immediate predecessors such as Stendhal, contemporaries like Flaubert, and successors including Malraux and Lampedusa, Premchand and Mahfouz. Fully informed by the most recent thinking on comparative and world literature, yet always wearing its learning lightly, Transnational Tolstoy stands as a guide and an inspiration for literary scholars worldwide. -- Theo D'haen, Professor of English & Comparative Literature, University of Leuven, Belgium, and author of The Routledge Concise History of World Literature
In Transnational Tolstoy: Between the West and the World John Burt Foster, Jr., offers a new framework for reading the works of Lev Tolstoy. Often viewed as one of the pillars of 'western' literature, Tolstoys works now receive a thorough consideration from a fresh perspective, defining Tolstoys art through the concepts of 'transnational' writing and 'global' literature. Foster uses these concepts effectively to open up intriguing sides of Tolstoys art and to encourage readers to think differently about Tolstoy. Foster probes the middle-aged and aged Tolstoys views of himself as non-Western. Finally, he investigates the ways in which twentieth-century non-Western writers of various stylistic bentsmodernist, postmodernist, and postcolonial; imagist and magical realisthave engaged with Tolstoys art. The result is a stimulating read for literary scholars and the educated public alike. -- Edith W. Clowes, Brown-Forman Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Virginia, USA, and author of Russia on the Edge: Imagined Geographies and Post-Soviet Identity
Transnational Tolstoy is a consistently illuminating and lucidly written examination of Tolstoy as a central figure in the fluid movement of culture around the world. More broadly, this wonderful book is also a methodologically innovative, provocative, and inspiring example of how to conduct literary study in the twenty-first century. -- Vladimir Alexandrov, B. E. Bensinger Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Director of Graduate Studies, Yale University, USA

Author Bio

John Burt Foster, Jr., is University Professor of English and Cultural Studies at George Mason University, USA. He is the author of Heirs to Dionysus: A Nietzschean Current in Literary Modernism (Princeton University Press, 1981) and Nabokov's Art Memory and European Modernism (Princeton University Press, 1993) and the editor, with Wayne J. Froman, of Dramas of Culture: Theory, History, Performance (Lexington Books, 2008). He is the past editor of The Comparatist and of Recherche littraire / Literary Research, the journal of the International Comparative Literature Association.