The Literary Field Under Communist Rule

This volume widens the field of Soviet literature studies by interpreting it as a multinational project, with national literatures acting not as copies of the Russian model, but as creators of a multidimensional literary space. The book proposes a reconsideration of Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of literary field and analyzes the interactions of literature, power, and economics under the communist rule. The articles selected include theoretical discussions and case studies from different national literatures presenting different structural elements of the Soviet literary field, as well as different phenomena created by the complexity of the field itself, such as the Aesopian language, state of emergency literature, or compromise as the essential element of the writers’ identity.

Au?ra Jurgutiene is Senior Researcher at the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore. She has published more than seventy articles and is author of New Romanticism from Longing (1998) and The Art of Literary Interpretation: The Hermeneutical Tradition (2013). She is also the chief editor and co-author of academic textbooks and readers in literary theory.

Dalia Satkauskyte is Senior Researcher at the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore. She is the author of Language Consciousness in Lithuanian Poetry (1996), Profiles of Subjectivity in Lithuanian Literature (2008), and more than forty articles in Lithuanian, English, Russian, French, Polish, and German on contemporary literature, literary theory, and sociocriticism.