Includes bibliographical references and index.

Machine generated contents note: -- Contents -- Foreword by Eric Hayot -- 1. Introducing Historical Poetics: History, Experience, Form -- Ilya Kliger and Boris Maslov -- Part I: Questioning the Historical, Envisioning a Poetics -- 2. From the Introduction to Historical Poetics: Questions and Answers (1894) -- Alexander Veselovsky -- 3. Alexander Veselovsky's Historical Poetics vs. Cultural Poetics: Remembering the Future -- Victoria Somoff -- 4. Historicist Hermeneutics and Contestatory Ritual Poetics: An Encounter between Pindaric Epinikion and Attic Tragedy -- Leslie Kurke -- 5. Three Extensions of Veselovsky's Historical Poetics: Metapragmatics, Toposforschung, Marxist Stylistics -- Boris Maslov -- Part II: The Life of Forms: Tradition, Memory, Regeneration -- 6. The Oresteia in the Odyssey (1946) -- Olga Freidenberg -- 7. Innovation Disguised as Tradition: Commentary and the Genesis of Art Forms -- Nina V. Braginskaya -- 8. A Remnant Poetics: Excavating the Chronotope of the Kurgan -- Michael Kunichika -- 9. On "Genre Memory" in Bakhtin -- Ilya Kliger -- Part III: Comparative Poetics and the Historicity of Experience -- 10. The Age of Sensibility (1904) -- Alexander Veselovsky -- 11. Against Ornament: O. M. Freidenberg's Concept of Metaphor in Ancient and Modern Contexts -- Richard Martin -- 12. Breakfast at Dawn: Alexander Veselovsky and the Poetics of Psychological Biography -- Ilya Vinitsky -- 13. From the Prehistory of Russian Novel Theory: Alexander Veselovsky and Fyodor Dostoevsky on the Modern Novel's Roots in Folklore and Legend -- Kate Holland -- Part IV: Literary Genres in the Longue Duree -- 14. Satire (1940) -- Mikhail Bakhtin -- 15. Columbus's Egg, or the Structure of the Novella (1973) -- Mikhail Gasparov -- 16. On the Eve of Epic: Did the Chryses Episode in Iliad 1 Begin its Life as a Separate Homeric Hymn? -- Christopher Faraone -- 17. Schematics and Models of Genre: Bakhtin and Soviet Satire -- Robert Bird -- Notes -- Further Readings in Historical Poetics -- List of Contributors -- Index.

"Drawing inspiration from the Russian and Soviet tradition of historical poetics, the contributors to the volume seek to challenge and complement the historicism that stresses proximate socio-political contexts as well as the more recent and salutary concern with understanding literary production and reception on a global scale with the perspective of the longue duree of literary forms and institutions"-- Provided by publisher.

"Since the mid-1980s, attempts to think history and literature together have produced much exciting work in the humanities. Indeed, some form of historicism can be said to inform most of the current scholarship in literary studies, including work in poetics, yet much of this scholarship remains undertheorized. Envisioning a revitalized and more expansive historicism, this volume builds on the tradition of Historical Poetics, pioneered by Alexander Veselovsky (1838-1906) and developed in various fruitful directions by the Russian Formalists, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Olga Freidenberg. The volume includes previously untranslated texts of some of the major scholars in this critical tradition, as well as original contributions which place that tradition in dialogue with other thinkers who have approached literature in a globally comparatist and evolutionary-historical spirit. The contributors seek to challenge and complement a historicism that stresses proximate sociopolitical contexts through an engagement with the longue duree of literary forms and institutions. In particular, Historical Poetics aims to uncover deep-historical stratifications and asynchronicities, in which formal solutions may display elective affinities with other, chronologically distant solutions to analogous social and political problems. By recovering the traditional nexus of philology and history, Persistent Forms seeks to reinvigorate poetics as a theoretical discipline that would respond to such critical and intellectual developments as Marxism, New Historicism, the study of world literature, practices of distant reading, and a renewed attention to ritual, oral poetics, and genre"-- Provided by publisher.

Description based on print version record.