Russian Classical Literature Today The Challengestrials Of Messianism And Mass Culture 1st Edition Yordan Ljutskanov Hristo Manolakev Radostin Rusev by Yordan Ljutskanov; Hristo Manolakev; Radostin Rusev 9781443861823, 1443861820 instant download after payment.

This book explores a range of (mis)uses of the Russian classical literature canon and its symbolic capital by contemporary Russian literature, cinema, literary scholarship, and mass culture. It outlines processes of current canon-formation in a situation of the expiration of a literature-centric culture that has been imbued with specific messianism and its doubles. The book implements Pierre Bourdieu's theory of the cultural field, focussing on a field's constitutive pursuit of autonomy and on its flexible resistance to the double pressure of the political field and the economic field. It provides material for elaborating this theory through postulating the principal presence of a third factor of heteronomy: the 'strong neighbour' within the cultural field. Furthermore, this volume demonstrates the heuristic of comparing the current Russian (mis)uses of classical literature to prior Russian and current foreign ones. As such, it also discusses such issues as the historical relativity of a literary field's (notion of) autonomy and the geo-cultural variability of the Russian literary canon.