• En

Literary perspectives: An introduction

The re-transnationalization of literary criticism

Editorial Eurozine's new series of essays aims to provide an overview of diverse literary landscapes in Europe. [ more ]

• En

Literary perspectives: Croatia

Post-traumatic stress disorder

Essay A new generation of post-feminist writers in Croatia has emerged in the crossover between literature and journalism. Common to much new Croatian writing is the postwar experience, with authors using marginal characters to explore tensions between individual and society. [ more ]

• De
• En
• Lt
• Sv

Literary perspectives: Sweden

Beyond crime fiction, handbags and designer suits

Essay Recent literary debates in Sweden have dwelled, among things, on authors' love lives and penchant for designer handbags. Yet there is more out there if one looks: Hans Koppel's hatchet job on suburban manners, for example, or Magnus Hedlund's explorations of human perception. [Lithuanian version added] [ more ]

• En
• Sv

We're like a boat with water up to the gunwales and there are waves breaking over the sides the whole time!

Prose Pär Thörn, one of Sweden's most acclaimed young writers, studied the discussions between the executive managers on the web forum www.ledarna.se ("the executives"). Read the results of his copy-pasting. [ more ]

• Cs
• De
• En
• Hu
• Lt

Literary perspectives: Austria

Anything but a "German appendix"

Essay Austrian novelists are still referred to as Germans despite recent critical and commercial success. From the new narrative "miracle" to the darkly humorous "writer's novel", Daniela Strigl finds a contemporary Austrian scene at the top of its game. [Czech version added] [ more ]

• Cs
• De
• En
• Et
• Lt
• Lv
• Sv

Literary perspectives: Estonia

Waiting for the Great Estonian Novel

Essay While the Great Estonian Novel has yet to be written, the range of fiction in Estonia is wide enough to serve as an indicator of the post-communist country's hopes and fears, anxieties and obsessions. writes the editor of "Vikerkaar". [Czech version added] [ more ]

• Cs
• De
• En
• Lt

Literary perspectives: Ukraine

Longing for the novel

Essay In Ukraine, the demand for engagement with the recent past has produced a series of novels that are better described as autobiographies. But, asks Timofiy Havryliv, is autobiography equal to the task? [Czech version added] [ more ]

• De
• En
• Lt
• Tr

Literary perspectives: Northern Ireland

Shaking the hand of history

Essay While the Northern Irish literary tradition is closely bound up with the experience of sectarian violence, contemporary Northern Irish writing defies the assumption that "the Troubles" are all there is to the country's literature. [Lithuanian version added] [ more ]

• En
• Sl
• Lt

Literary perspectives: Slovenia

A hollowed-out generation

Essay Slovenian novelists are developing original responses to the experience of post-communist society, writes Ales Steger. While male novelists take a hyper-realist, social-critical approach, their female counterparts are creating fictions only loosely connected to contemporary time and space. [Lithuanian version added] [ more ]

• En
• Lt
• Nl

Literary perspectives: The Netherlands

"Profound Holland" and the new Dutch

Essay The new need for security in the Netherlands is reflected in the work of two novelists in particular: Jan Siebelink, whose fiction evokes the "profound Holland" overturned in the 1960s; and Arnon Grunberg, whose portrayals of male disintegration withhold any such reassurances. But a parallel strand of contemporary Dutch literature sidesteps such concerns: novelists and poets with migrant backgrounds introducing new styles into the Dutch literary repertoire. [Lithuanian version added] [ more ]

• En
• Hu
• Lt

Literary perspectives: Hungary

Mastering history through narrative?

Essay In the first essay in the Eurozine "Literary perspectives" series, Gábor Csordás reads the newest Hungarian novels. All share a concern with narrative, holding out to the reader the hope of mastering history. [Lithuanian version added] [ more ]

• En
• Hu

The body of the text

Corporeal writing in Péter Nádas's "Parallel Stories"

Essay Parallel Stories, the new novel by Péter Nádas, interweaves four sets of narratives driven by the twin motors of politics and eroticism. But Parallel Stories is more than the sum of its plot lines. [ more ]

• En

Resting

An excerpt

Literature Attila Bartis's Resting (2001) portrays a consciousness for which "rest" is unattainable. Both private psychodrama and portrait of the end of the Communist era, the novel is one of the darkest to have emerged from contemporary Hungarian literature. [ more ]

• En
• Hu

Zehuze

Literature A Hungarian-Israeli mother addresses her daughter in Europe in a letter she never sends. In a fictional monologue, András Forgách explores the private suffering and political ambivalence of a life in postwar Israel. One of Hungary's most interesting authors for the first time in English translation. [ more ]

Advertising

• En
• Et

Why study literature?

Essay Literary studies in Estonia has taken a crash course in twentieth-century theory. With mixed results, says the editor of cultural journal Vikerkaar. Now literary critics should stop baffling one another with jargon and aim at a wider readership. [ more ]

• Cs
• En

"Water is more dangerous than the rise of Islam..."

Interview with Dutch writer Margriet de Moor

In conversation Although often using female heroines in her novels, Margriet de Moor finds pigeonholing literature into male and female categories is a pointless exercise. "The social issue of women suffering under a male dominance – no, I don't find it terribly interesting." [ more ]

• En
• Hu
• Da
• Sv

My heart belongs to Europe. Therefore it is broken

Essay Does literature help maintain individual and collective identity, or does it inspire us to discredit it? [ more ]

• En
• Sv
• Hu

The scream of geometry

(modified excerpts)

Literature "How can these cities, villages, and their people exist? How can they stand there selling tomatoes and speaking their language and drying their laundry without considering the infinite number of other places where someone else is standing, selling tomatoes or potatoes and speaking their language and drying laundry?" [Hungarian version added] [ more ]

• En
• Sv

European waistlines

Literature Swedish poet Ida Börjel confronts us with our favourite and most insulting national prejudices about ourselves and our European neighbours. But does she confirm them? In a series of insidious linguistic displacements and only seemingly naive phrases, the preconceived notions start to move. Measuring the European waistlines is not a standardizing measure. [ more ]

• En

Anthology of contemporary Hebrew poetry VII

Poetry Helicon editor Amir Or's latest addition to the Hebrew poetry anthology presented in Eurozine. [ more ]

• Da
• En
• Cs

A heavy prelude to chaos

Aspects of literary anti-Americanism in the interwar years

Essay Interwar European literature represented the US as the quintessence of unbridled modernity that prefigured the destruction of Europe. Jesper Gulddal surveys the uncharted territory of literary anti-Americanism. [Czech version added] [ more ]

• En
• Lv

A lesson in Dylan appreciation

Interview When Christopher Ricks, author of critical works on Milton, Keats, and Eliot, turned his attention to Bob Dylan, critics grumbled that he could talk one into believing that even a phone book is poetry. Now that Dylan has won the Pulitzer Prize, they may have to reconsider. [ more ]

• En
• Lv

Breakfast with brontosaurus

An interview with Harold Bloom

In conversation "Partly from encountering wisdom, I have to say I have no wisdom." American literary critic Harold Bloom talks to Latvian journal Rigas Laiks about his twenty-ninth book, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? [ more ]

• Cs
• En

Twenty-two years later

A second reading of Milan Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being"

Literary criticism Twenty-two years after it was first published in Czech, Jiri Travnicek discovers a new appreciation for the narration, characterization, and above all wisdom of Milan Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being". [ more ]

• De

On the privileges of the literary critic

Literary criticism Literary lunches aside, what are the critic's privileges? According to Jörg Magenau, it's all about accumulating others' experiences, about "being in the world", about avoiding the media's barrage of facts. And about having lots of books... [ more ]

• En
• It
• Sk
• Sl

Gained in translation

On translation What is the translator's job? To bring the text to the reader or the reader to the text? And either way, do translators receive the credit they deserve? [Slovak version added] [ more ]

• De
• En
• Sv

Against love

Seeking the literary traces of the Natascha Kampusch affair

Radical critique "The birth of love out of the spirit of totalitarianism expressed itself in exemplary manner in the Kampusch abduction story. A person is shut in, all the others shut out – that is the ideological core of romantic love." [ more ]