Cross-Cultural Reckonings: A Triptych of Russian, American and Canadian Texts

These far-reaching essays offer a serious and thought-provoking account of the complexities of cross-cultural interpretation. Bringing together such eminent voices as Bellow, Solzhenitsyn and Cather with others less well known to American readers - Russian and Canadian writers Natalya Baranskaya, Lydia Chukoskaya and Ethel Wilson, and Americans Arlene Heyman and Meridel Le Sueur - Blanche Gelfant deals with matters of weighing and judging - of 'essaying' in its primary meaning. The consequence is a gathering of new essayistic forms for criticism which invite, indeed demand, cross-cultural conversation; which engage matters of wide current interest; and which challenge conventional critical approaches. Cross-Cultural Reckonings holds broader implications for a range of issues in literary criticism, but perhaps most explosively for the visions and revisions invoked by shifting notions of nationality, and the unpredictable attitudes towards gender and sexual difference entertained by the field of literary criticism at large.