Julia Titus – författare

Through the poetry of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian authors, including Pushkin and Akhmatova, Poetry Reader for Russian Learners helps upper-beginner, intermediate, and advanced Russian students refine their language skills. Poems are coded by level of difficulty. The text facilitates students’ interaction with authentic texts by means of a complete set of learning tools, including biographical sketches of each poet, stress marks, annotations, exercises, questions for discussion, and a glossary. An ancillary Web site containing audio files for all poems can be found below.

The focus of this study in comparative criticism is close analysis of Dostoevsky’s first literary publication—his 1844 translation of the first edition of Balzac’s Eugе́nie Grandet (1834)—and the stylistic choices that he made as a young writer while working on Balzac’s novel. Through the prism of close reading, the author analyzes Dostoevsky’s literary debut in the context of his future mature aesthetic style and poetics. Comparing the original and the translation side by side, this book focuses on the omissions, additions and substitutions that Dostoevsky brought into the text. It demonstrates how young Dostoevsky’s free translation of Eugénie Grandet predicts the creation of his own literary characters, themes, and other aspects of his literary output that are now recognized as Dostoevsky’s signature style. It investigates the changes that Dostoevsky made while working on Balzac’s text and analyzes the complex transplantation of Balzac’s imagery, motifs, and character portraiture from Eugénie Grandet into Dostoevsky’s own writing later on.

Music in World Literature: From Tolstoy to Manga examines the relationship between music and literary works within various national literatures, from the 19th century to the present day, by presenting an amalgam of contemporary critical approaches to this topic across literatures and genres, from music in Leo Tolstoy and Marcel Proust to its role in Japanese manga. In doing so, the collection investigates each author’s technique of representing music in literature, or how an author’s work has been adapted musically, and includes a broad range of chapters devoted to the analysis of the complex interplay of the two art forms. Essays explore the aesthetic and cultural interactions between music and literature or between audience and performers; the nature of creativity and the role of music in specific texts, as well as the broader topics of integrating a musical performance within a narrative form.