Transnational Tolstoy: Between the West and the World

Introduction: Transnational Tolstoy and the New Comparatism Part One: Facing West 1. "Occidentalism" in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky: Culture Shock on European Visits 2. Vengeance is Mine: Anna Karenina and Stendhal's Italy 3. Napoleonic Anniversaries: War and Peace and Flaubert's Sentimental Education 4. From Worldliness to World Literature: Tolstoy between Goethe and Proust Part Two: Outside the Soviet Canon 5. Realism as Imagism: Tolstoy, Nabokov, and Modernist Fiction 6. Toxic Nationalism: From Tolstoy and Stendhal to Malraux and Lampedusa 7. Felt History: From Anna Karenina to Magical Realism Part Three: Into the World 8. What is Art?, Hadji Murad, and World Literature 9. Dialogues with Tolstoy: Premchand and Mahfouz 10. "Show Me the Zulu Tolstoy": Who Owns War and Peace? 11. Postcoloniality and Islamic Identity in Hadji Murad Conclusion: Between the West and the World Bibliography Index

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 litt raire / Literary Research, the journal of the International Comparative Literature Association.

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 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 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, Tolstoy's works now receive a thorough consideration from a fresh perspective, defining Tolstoy's art through the concepts of 'transnational' writing and 'global' literature. Foster uses these concepts effectively to open up intriguing sides of Tolstoy's art and to encourage readers to think differently about Tolstoy. Foster probes the middle-aged and aged Tolstoy's views of himself as non-Western. Finally, he investigates the ways in which twentieth-century non-Western writers of various stylistic bents - modernist, postmodernist, and postcolonial; imagist and