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In this article I demonstrate how in the post-Thaw period—the period of “soft” socialist realism—the northern indigenous minorities began to (re)invent literary writing and manifest their own version of the canon. Due to the lack of a pre-Soviet written literary tradition, “young” literatures were born as a symbiosis of folklore, beliefs, indigenous-Christian customs and the surrogate literary tradition of the Russian-European center: the Soviet “master plot.” Having graduated from universities in Moscow or Leningrad, the first generations of writers “(re)invented” a view of themselves as simultaneously native and Other. A consequence of the fact that the authors internalized the role of the youngest “brother” was, among others, the amalgamation of children's and adults' narrative and pedagogical zeal, which combined folklore ethics with socialist realist moralism. The study is of a transitional time: before the local authors had experienced a cardinal reevaluation of their values during perestroika and afterwards.

The natural elements of inhabited areas often shape people’s lifestyles, psychology and worldviews, influencing their moods, decisions and actions. Rivers in particular are often associated with the historical development of human relationships and the emergence of settlements and urban life. This paper explores the representations of the Danube in four contemporary novels by Hungarian authors or set in Hungary: The White King (2008) by György Dragomán, Train to Budapest (2008) by Dacia Maraini, Under Budapest (2013) by Ailsa Kay and Los Amantes Bajo el Danubio (2016) by Federico Andahazi. The aim of this analysis is to show how the river operates as a framework of “liquid modernity” (Bauman, 2000) in each of these works, it has a representative power of its own and determines people’s destinies and human relationships in heterogeneous cultural contexts. It functions both as a natural backdrop for historical events and as a means of expressing and conveying emotions, creating a transnational political identity that is both socio-cultural and deeply intimate.

How Russian Literature Became Great explores the cultural and political role of a modern national literature, orchestrated in a Slavonic key but resonating far beyond Russia's borders. Rolf Hellebust investigates a range of literary tendencies, philosophies, and theories from antiquity to the present: Roman jurisprudence to German Romanticism, French Enlightenment to Czech Structuralism, Herder to Hobsbawm, Samuel Johnson to Sainte-Beuve, and so on. Besides the usual Russian suspects from Pushkin to Chekhov, Hellebust includes European writers: Byron and Shelley, Goethe and Schiller, Chateaubriand and Baudelaire, Dante, Mickiewicz, and more. As elsewhere, writing in Russia advertises itself via a canon of literary monuments constituting an atemporal \"ideal order among themselves\" (T.S. Eliot). And yet this is a tradition that could only have been born at a specific moment in the golden nineteenth-century age of historiography and nation-building. The Russian example reveals the contradictions between immutability and innovation, universality and specificity at the heart of modern conceptions of tradition from Sainte-Beuve through Eliot and down to the present day. The conditions of its era of formation-the prominence of the crucial literary-historical question of the writer's social function, and the equation of literature with national identity-make the Russian classical tradition the epitome of a unified cultural text, with a complex narrative in which competing stories of progress and decline unfold through the symbolic biographical encounters of the authors who constitute its members. How Russian Literature Became Great thus offers a new paradigm for understanding the paradoxes of modern tradition.

This article focuses on Bulgarian women writers’ activities, their reception, and their problematic existence in the context of the modernizing and emancipatory trends in Bulgarian society after the Liberation (1878–1944). The analysis is based on the concept of the (intellectual) hierarchy of genders and mechanisms of gender tutelage, traced in the specifics of women’s literary texts, their critical and public resonance, and the authors’ complicated relation with the Bulgarian literary canon. The question is topical, given the noticeable absence of women writers in the corpus of Bulgarian authors/ literary texts, thought and among those considered representative in terms of national identity and culture. The study is based on primary source materials such as works by Bulgarian women writers, the periodical press from the period, various archival materials, and scholarly publications relevant to the topic.

This essay, co-written by adult and child researchers, marks an important shift in the field of children’s literature studies because it promotes an academic practice in which children are actively involved in decision-making. In our polyphonic account of the collaboration, we draw on the ideas of productive remembering, re-memorying, and child-led research to advance a new pedagogical approach to the current, adult-centered literary school canon in Poland, which was compiled in 2017 by a panel of politically appointed experts. We exemplify our proposal by discussing “Staś and Nel in the 21st Century”: Do Long-established School Readings Connect Generations?”, a participatory research project conducted at a primary school in Wrocław, Poland, in spring 2018. As we argue, selected texts from the canon may catalyze memories of childhood from older readers that can be shared with younger readers to develop their own connections with these texts. Such an exchange may open new individual and collective remembering spaces linking intragenerational perspectives with intergenerational meanings and resulting in a school canon that promotes both national cohesion and openness to other cultures. Seen thus, our approach can be adopted in school and other settings to engage children and adults as co-creators of particular memory-work methods. In broader terms, it can promote a critical and action-oriented understanding of the heritage of childhood in Poland and elsewhere.

One aim of this special issue, then, is to bring together work that explores the ramifications of the new modesty and a certain subset of queer methods in and for modernist studies in particular. Another is to advance debates about post-critique by moving past some of the brittler binarisms—paranoid versus reparative, depth versus surface, close versus distant, critique versus description—on which those debates run aground. We do so by shifting the focus of the debate to weak theory, a loose parcel of concepts and heuristics that mostly antedate post-critique, and only some of which have since become associated with it.

[...]while holding the specificity of anti-Blackness very much before us, we suggest that Sharpe's insights are necessary to the broader thinking of race and racialization we wish to perform here. Together with our contributors, we want to illuminate how race and racial difference subtend our most cherished objects of study, our most familiar historical and theoretical frameworks, our most engrained scholarly protocols, and the very demographics of our field.1 We seek to challenge the multiple rigidities, cultural and conceptual, that have kept Victorian studies isolated from other fields. In particular, we want to ask why contemporary scholarship on a period and a geographical center that consolidated a modern idea of race-the nineteenth century in and beyond Britain-lacks a robust account of race and racialization. More broadly, we have to do more than lift a frame from critical race theory in an effort to save Victorian studies: we must both elucidate what Victorian studies has to offer to other fields and to a larger anti-racist project, and confront directly those aspects of the field that cannot, in keeping with this project, be saved.

This response to David Fishelov suggests that the establishment of canonicity could/should be described as the result not only of textual and aesthetic qualities but as a semiotic process that extends the borders of genre