EccentriCities: Writing in the margins of Modernism

St. Petersburg to Rio de Janeiro

Sharon Lubkemann Allen

Published by Manchester University Press

Durham Modern Languages Series MUP

Accessible, engaging storytelling with interdisciplinary approach to the modernist text
Broad cultural range, connecting Luso-Brazilian and Slavic literatures through a study of direct and mutual influences and by charting structural and cultural correspondences; reframing the correlation between European modernist citytexts and concentric, eccentric, and ex-centric contexts
Extensive historical scope
Innovative, incisive readings of important Russian and Brazilian writers, including Gogol, Dostoevsky, Bely, Almeida, Machado de Assis, Lima
Interpolation of visual and literary texts (reading maps, lithographs, paintings, photographs alongside literary texts, not only in order to look at what is represented within the frame but to elucidate common frameworks)

EccentriCities: Writing in the margins of Modernism

St. Petersburg to Rio de Janeiro

Sharon Lubkemann Allen

Published by Manchester University Press

Durham Modern Languages Series MUP

Description

An innovative, interdisciplinary, incisive scholarly study remapping and redefining domains and dynamics of modernism, EccentriCities: Writing in the margins of modernism critically considers how geo-historically distant and disparate urban sites, concentrating Russian and Luso-Brazilian cultural dialogue and definition, give rise to peculiarly parallel anachronistic and alternative fictional forms. While comparatively reframing these literary traditions through an extensive survey of Russian and Brazilian literature, cartography, urban design and development, foregrounding innovative close readings of works by Gogol, Dostoevsky, Bely, Almeida, Machado de Assis, Lima Barreto, Mário de Andrade, the book also redefines new constellations (eccentric, concentric, ex-centric) for understanding geo-cultural and generic dimensions of modernist and post-modern literature and theory.

EccentriCities: Writing in the margins of Modernism

St. Petersburg to Rio de Janeiro

Sharon Lubkemann Allen

Published by Manchester University Press

Durham Modern Languages Series MUP

Introduction
1. Eccentricity and modernity
2. Eccentric cities and citytexts: transposition, translation, and transformations of authority and authorship
3. Gogol's open prospects: digressive copy clerks
4. Dostoevsky's and Machado de Assis's undergrounds: dead men writing
5. Hallucinated cities
Postscript: Theory of the novel and the eccentric novel's early play with theory