The chapter analyzed the debates on parliamentarism in the late Russian Empire and revolutionary Russia and explored how the idea of parliament helped intellectuals locate Russia globally. The establishment of the legislative State Duma and the adoption of the Fundamental Laws of the Russian Empire during the Revolution of 1905–1907 seemed to m…[Read more]

Addressing the entangled histories of deliberative decision making, political representation, and constitutionalism in several geographic and temporal contexts, this Special Issue offers nuanced political and intellectual histories and anthropologies of parliamentarism in Eurasia. It explores parliaments and quasi-parliamentary formations and the…[Read more]

The influential Tamil writer Pudumaippittan turned to the short story to theorize the relationship between literature and society in the late-colonial era. He used the genre’s brevity to compress his portrayals of well-known female types—such as widows, prostitutes, and goodwives—into singular emotional events. This enabled Pudumaippittan to evoke…[Read more]

At the heart of Gérard Gavarry’s writing are the questions of what power language holds, and what remains beyond the reach of expression. The two translations included here, excerpts from Allada (P.O.L, 1993) and Expérience d’Edward Lee, Versailles (P.O.L, 2009), share little with each other in terms of setting or structure, but explore simil…[Read more]

This article suggests that comparative literature scholars may benefit from the awareness that different communities around the world subscribe to different models of mind and that works of fiction can thus be fruitfully analyzed in relation to those local ideologies of mind. Taking as her starting point the “opacity of mind” doctrine, the aut…[Read more]

In early 1918, the Bolshevik-dominated Third Congress of Soviets declared the formation of a new composite polity—the Soviet Russian Republic. The congress’s resolutions, however, simultaneously proclaimed a federation of national republics and a federation of soviets. The latter seemed to recognize regionalism and localism as organizing pri…[Read more]

This article traces the breadfruit tree’s strange career as an eighteenth-century superfood, its journey from the Pacific world to the Caribbean islands, and the rhetorical practices, epistemological slippages, and linguistic permutations that undergirded these developments. Comparing indigenous, Spanish, English, Dutch, French, and US-American d…[Read more]

This special issue of the Journal of Creative Writing Studies centers on how creative writing changes when writers actively engage computers as nonhuman collaborators in “creative making.” Using examples from McGurl’s The Program Era, Emily Dickinson, and the crowdsourced “translation” of Melville’s classic into Emoji Dick, Berens suggests th…[Read more]

The article argues that the spread of scientific information is not always enough to ensure the success of the production of any particular country in a global market. In particular, there were significant barriers to the introduction of improved livestock raising in nineteenth century Russia. Although agricultural societies, which were voluntary…[Read more]

This article is an introduction to the New York Public Library’s pre-revolutionary Russian and Eastern European photographic albums. It also provides a checklist of these albums. The checklist is an especially rich source for Russian architecture, art, and science and provides documentation for a variety of places in the center and provinces of t…[Read more]

This article traces the attempts by the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries to devolve economic powers to the regions and the ultimate failure of this project, which was a contributing factor to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

This essay examines the Hindi Nayī Kahānī, or New Story, Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, which was influential for the short stories, criticism, and literary history that its writers produced. Incorporating a view toward the larger “metaliterary” corpus in relation to which properly “literary” nayī kahānī texts were written, the essay shows h…[Read more]

This multilingual undergraduate translation workshop was co-taught in the Spring of 2014 with Prof. Norman Holland in the division of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies at Hampshire College. During the course, students were introduced to translation theory and explored key concepts through intralingual translation exercises before embarking on…[Read more]