Literary Pairs in Comparative Readings across National and Cultural Divides
This collection of essays focuses on works by prominent poets and writers of the 19th and 20th centuries, with a particular focus on (post)Romantics and modernists. These authors belong to essentially different socio-historical, linguistic, cultural and geopolitical contexts, and the studies examine some of their emblematic texts from a comparative critical perspective. Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire, William Butler Yeats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Emily Dickinson and Marina Tsvetaeva are some of the paired authors, who, due to the originality of their thought and work, have come to be considered amongst the most significant literary figures of their contemporary world. The volume offers an original and insightful reading of the literary text as a powerful means of both representing and shaping the inherent dialogism of different cultures. As such, it transcends, in an imaginative way, the national, racial and cultural boundaries of human existence.
Yarmila Nikolova Daskalova is Assistant Professor at St Cyril and St Methodius University of Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria, where she teaches British Romanticism, post-Romanticism and Modernism. Her publications include “W. B. Yeats and P. K. Yavorov: Concepts of National Mythopoetics” in Ireland and Europe: Cultural and Literary Encounters (2017); “The Apocalyptic Mind: Nature, Ritualistic Gongs and Imperial Afflictions in the Works of Emily Dickinson and Marina Tsvetaeva” in PHILOLOGY (2017); and “Receptacles of the Foreign: Aspects of Intertextuality and Ontological Self-Reflexivity in Two Contemporary Bulgarian Novels” in Comparative Critical Studies (2012). Her research interests are in the fields of English, Irish, and Bulgarian literature, as well as comparative critical studies. She has translated English and Russian poetry into Bulgarian and is a Laureate in the poetry translation competition organized by the Bulgarian Translators’ Union.
“In the field of contemporary comparative literary studies, with its self-proclaimed interest in crossing cultural and linguistic borders and its adherence to a multi-faceted interdisciplinary approach to the literary text, seldom does a critical study appear that attempts to distort the balance of a comparative-contrastive dichotomy (in its analysis of texts and authors) in favour of the former rather than the latter. One such book is Yarmila Daskalova’s Literary Pairs in Comparative Readings across National and Cultural Divides. The book is a kaleidoscopic collection of essays, covering a time period of two centuries, encompassing literary samples from Romanticism to postmodernism, dealing with the works of ten authors, writing in four different languages, coupled in eight “pairs.” […] Insightful, illuminating and poetic itself, this book is a valuable contribution to the field of comparative literary studies. A pleasure to read, it will appeal to scholars and the general public alike.”
Vakrilen Kilyovski
University of Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria; VTU Review: Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences, 3:1, 2019
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