Now Available: Creating the Empress: Politics and Poetry in the Age of Catherine II

[Academic Studies Press]

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Academic Studies Press is pleased to announce that Creating the Empress:
Politics and Poetry in the Age of Catherine II by Vera Proskurina is now
available. Please visit our website at
<http://www.academicstudiespress.com/> www.academicstudiespress.com for more
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Creating the Empress:

Politics and Poetry in the Age of Catherine II

By Vera Proskurina

 

ISBN 978-1-936235-50-6 (cloth) $55.00 / £45.99

310 pp, December 2010

 

 

Series: Ars Rossika

 

Topic Areas: Russian Literature, Literary Criticism:Poetry

 

Level: Academic: upper undergraduate and graduate 

 

Summary: In Creating the Empress, Vera Proskurina examines the interaction
between power and poetry in creating the imperial image of Catherine the
Great, providing a detailed analysis of a wide range of Russian literary
works from this period, particularly the main Classical myths associated
with Catherine (Amazon, Astraea, Pallas Athena, Felicitas, Fortune, etc.),
as well as how these Classical subjects affirmed imperial ideology and the
monarch’s power. The book allows for the viewing of these themes and motifs
not only in the immediate historical context of Catherine II's reign, but
also in the context of the broader European symbolic traditions. Each
chapter of the book revolves around the major events of Catherine’s reign
(as well as some major literary works) that give a broad framework to
discuss the evolution of important recurring motifs and images.

 

Author: Vera J. Proskurina (PhD, Moscow State University) is a lecturer in
Russian and East Asian Languages and Cultures department at Emory
University. She is the author of two books and sixty articles on Russian
literature and the intellectual history of Russia. Her first book, Mikhail
Gershenzon: his Life and Myth (1998) was devoted to the Jewish Russian
writer and thinker of the first decades of the 20th century. Her second
book, Myths of Empire: Politics and Literature in the Time of Catherine II,
first appeared in Moscow in 2006.

 

  

Creating the Empress:

Politics and Poetry in the Age of Catherine II

 

Reviews:

 

“The strength of Proskurina's work lies in its detailed analysis of a wide
range of Russian literary works from this period, particularly in
highlighting the frequent use of Classical subjects or genres by authors to
discuss the symbolic or analogous content of their writings. Similarly, she
draws on an impressive range of English- and Russian-language scholarship to
emphasize the need to view these Classical themes and motifs in the context
of wider European symbolic traditions, as well as the immediate historical
context of Catherine II's reign.”

 

 —Paul Keenan, Department of International History, London School of
Economics and Political Science, in Kritika: Explorations in Russian and
Eurasian History, Volume 10, Number 1, 2009, 179-182

 

Best Wishes!

 

-Academic Studies Press

 


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