“Entertaining Strangers” reveals how theories and practices of hospitality shaped and were shaped by the early modern print and theater industries. Whereas earlier studies of hospitality and literature have focused on aristocratic patronage, in this dissertation I reveal the vital importance of commercial hospitality as a framework for ethical and...
Though they lived a century apart and wrote in starkly disparate historical, cultural, and literary contexts, Russian poets Aleksandr Pushkin and Vladimir Mayakovsky were both victims of the posthumous processes of bureaucratization and monumentalization at the hands of the Soviet regime. Their biographies, politics, and poetry were sanitized and manipulated...
Patrick F. Quinn states that Edgar Allan Poe wrote poems at an age “too young to have any knowledge of the world but from his own breast,” and attributes Poe’s decision to leave flaws in his “smaller pieces” intact to “[fondness fostered by] his old age” (Quinn 9). While readers...
