Author: Robert Elsie
Publisher: CreateSpace
ISBN: 9781515132769
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 250
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Book Description
This reader presents the best of classical Albanian literature, from the end of the nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth century. It includes the best-known works of the age, poetry in particular. After a sluggish start, Albanian literature flourished in the 1920s and 1930s. By the mid-1930s, it reached a zenith, when intellectual life in the country was finally on a sound footing. A modern literature had been created in Albania and the nation had come of age. Alas, it was a brief blossoming in the shadow of the apocalypse which loomed in the form of the Stalinist regime that seized power in 1944 and would snuff out all genuine literary production for decades to come.
Author: Robert Elsie
Publisher: I.B. Tauris
ISBN: 9781845110314
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 372
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Book Description
The tender plant of Albanian literature grew in a rocky soil. It was late to evolve and its development, indeed its very existence, was threatened in many periods. "Albanian Literature: A Short History" tells the story of the survival and growth of Albanian creative writing beginning with the earliest thirteenth century texts of Theodor of Shkodra, tracing the development of the modern literature of Buzuku, Budi and Bogdani, the incorporation of the Muslim influences of Frakulla and Kycyku and continuing with the works of Cajupi and Kadare during the reign of King Zog and the Hoxha administration. A unique book that illuminates an under-researched subject, "Albanian Literature" is an essential reference guide for all those interested in Balkan cultures, in comparative literature and in European cultural history in general.
Author: Robert Elsie
Publisher: Writings from an Unbound Europ
ISBN:
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 332
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Book Description
If a people Have no poets And no poetry of their own For a National Anthology Then treachery and barking Will do the trick With these words, a challenge is laid down in this new volume of Albanian poetry. Albania, however, has a dynamic tradition of literature. Lightning from the Depths is the first English collection to present the full range of Albanian verse. Albanian literature has had many lives. The early Christian traditions disappeared as Islam and the Ottoman Empire took over. Muslim literature, too, withered when the nation strove to become an independent European country. The beginnings of a modern tradition were quashed by the Stalinists. All along this rocky path, poets have turned the political strife, poverty, and isolation their nation has often experienced into culture, both celebrating and questioning the society in which they live. Lightning from the Depths opens readers’ eyes to a new political and cultural world populated artists who can spin despair into poetry.
Author: Fred Abrahams
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479896683
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 378
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Book Description
In the early 1990s, Albania, arguably Europe’s most closed and repressive state, began a startling transition out of forty years of self-imposed Communist isolation. Albanians who were not allowed to practice religion, travel abroad, wear jeans, or read “decadent” Western literature began to devour the outside world. They opened cafés, companies, and newspapers. Previously banned rock music blared in the streets. Modern Albania offers a vivid history of the Albanian Communist regime’s fall and the trials and tribulations that led the country to become the state it is today. The book provides an in-depth look at the Communists' last Politburo meetings and the first student revolts, the fall of the Stalinist regime, the outflows of refugees, the crash of the massive pyramid-loan schemes, the war in neighboring Kosovo, and Albania’s relationship with the United States. Fred Abrahams weaves together personal experience from more than twenty years of work in Albania, interviews with key Albanians and foreigners who played a role in the country’s politics since 1990—including former Politburo members, opposition leaders, intelligence agents, diplomats, and founders of the Kosovo Liberation Army—and a close examination of hundreds of previously secret government records from Albania and the United States. A rich, narratively-driven account, Modern Albania gives readers a front-row seat to the dramatic events of the last battle of Cold War Europe.
Author: Ismail Kadare
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
ISBN: 9781559707732
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 228
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Book Description
"This, Ismail Kadare's most recent novel, is a fictional inquiry into the still-unexplained death of Mehmet Shehu, the man who for decades was the designated Number Two political figure in Communist dictator Enver Hoxha's ironfisted and increasingly paranoid regime." "On the night of December 13, 1981, the so-called Successor was shot dead, sometime between midnight and early morning. Did he commit suicide or was he murdered? This is the burning question. There are a number of potential murderers: the architect in charge of renovating the Successor's new quarters, who knew of the secret underground passage to his home; a rising political figure, Adrian Hasobeu, who if the current successor were to disappear would surely be named Number Two; the dictator himself - known to his countrymen as the Guide - now ailing and almost blind, unable to countenance even the idea of being replaced; and, incredibly, the Successor's wife." "The Successor combines a tantalizing mystery with a historical novel (Who killed Mehmet Shehu?), a psychological examination (How do you live in a world where nothing is sure?), and an analysis of a dictatorship so repressive that its followers treat it as a religious faith, where love, and indeed all personal relations, are subject to the whims and demands of the state."--BOOK JACKET.
Author: Ismail Kadare
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 161145994X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 135
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Book Description
In the mid-1930s, two Irish Americans travel to the Albanian highlands with an early model of a marvelous invention, the tape recorder. Their mission? To discover how Homer could have composed works as brilliant and as long as The Iliad and The Odyssey without ever putting pen to paper. The answer, they believe, can be found only in Albania, the last remaining habitat of the oral epic. But immediately upon their arrival, the scholars’ seemingly arcane research excites suspicion and puts them at the center of ethnic strife in the Balkans. Mistaken for foreign spies, they are placed under surveillance and are dogged by gossip and intrigue. It isn’t until a fierce-eyed monk from the Serbian side of the mountains makes his appearance that the scholars glimpse the full political import of their search for the key to the Homeric question.
Author: Robert Elsie
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 513
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Book Description
Author: Ismail Kadare
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1640094237
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 100
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Book Description
In this autobiographical novel, Albania’s most renowned novelist and poet Ismail Kadare explores his relationship with his mother in a delicately wrought tale of home, family, creative aspirations, and personal and political freedom. “Houses like ours seemed constructed with the specific purpose of preserving coldness and misunderstanding for as long as possible.” In his father’s great stone house with hidden rooms and even a dungeon, Ismail grows up with his mother at the center of his universe. Fragile as a paper doll, she finds herself at odds with her tight–lipped and wise mother–in–law who, as is the custom for women of a certain age, will never again step foot over the threshold to leave her home. Young Ismail finds it difficult to understand his mother’s tears, though he can understand her boredom. She told him the reason herself in a phrase that terrified and obsessed the boy: “The house is eating me up!” As Ismail explores his world, his mother becomes fearful of her intellectual son—he uses words she does not understand, writes radical poetry, falls in love far too easily, and seems to renounce everything she believes in. He will, she fears, have to exchange her for some other superior mother when he becomes a famous writer. The Doll is a delicate and disarming autobiographical novel, an exploration of Kadare’s creative aspirations and their tangled connections to his childhood home and his mother’s tenuous place within it.
Author: Robert Elsie
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781544294094
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 118
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Book Description
The hundred years between 1750 and 1850 were an age of astounding orthographic diversity in Albania. In this period, the Albanian language was put to writing in at least ten different alphabets - most certainly a record for European languages. This book introduces the diverse forms in which this old Balkan language was recorded, from the earliest documents to the beginning of the twentieth century. They consist of adaptations of the Latin, Greek, Arabic and Cyrillic alphabets and, what is even more interesting, a number of locally invented writing systems. Most of the latter alphabets have now been forgotten and are unknown, even to the Albanians themselves.
Author: Robert Elsie
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0857725866
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384
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Book Description
Northern Albania and Montenegro are the only regions in Europe to have retained a true tribal society up to the mid-twentieth century. This book provides the first scholarly investigation of this tribal society, a pioneer work that offers a detailed survey of all the major Albanian-speaking tribes in Albania, Montenegro and Kosovo. Robert Elsie provides comprehensive material on the 69 different tribes, including data on their locations, religious affiliations, tribal structures and relations, population statistics, tribal folklore, legends and history. Also included are excerpts from the works of prominent nineteenth and early-twentieth century writers, such as Edith Durham and Johann Georg von Hahn, who travelled through the tribal regions, as well as short biographies on prominent figures linked to the tribes. As the first book of its kind, The Tribes of Albania will be of interest to scholars and students of the Balkans, of southeastern European anthropology, ethnography and history.
