What Ricks does in this volume -- it may never have been done for any poet in such careful density -- is recreate the literary conditions under which the poet labored.
After the unification of Italy, writers began to explore subjects theretofore considered too lowly for literary consideration, such as poverty and living conditions in the Mezzogiorno.
Both have literary status.
Between 1896 and 1909 his output included translations of stories by Turgenev, Nikolay Gogol, Leo Tolstoy, and Maksim Gorky; articles on Esperanto, literary criticism, and social conditions; and two novels, Sono omokage (1906; An Adopted Husband) and Heibon (1907; Mediocrity).
These included "A General Survey of Recent Political Progress" by Edward Dicey (vol. 26), "The Growth of Toleration" by Leslie Stephen (vol. 28), "Modern Conditions of Literary Production" by Augustine Birrell (vol. 30), "The Influence of Commerce on International Conflict" by Frederick Greenwood (vol. 31), and "The Function of Science in the Modern State" by Karl Pearson (vol. 32).
Defined by changes in the political landscape, each of them likewise offered distinctly different conditions for literary undertakings, reader reception, relations between the authorities and the creative individual.
Plastic realism is nostalgic, reactionary, willfully inverted to the extent that its producers succumb to the collectivized impetus for fiction-making, collaborating in the construction of a false identity of the author (amateur charisma) that has little connection to the real conditions of literary production.
The insularity of the regime, sealing off the country from the West's postwar currents, preserved there a prewar literary modernism in nearly pristine condition, and under those circumstances misery had its uses.
From this realm of symbolism she tries to convey both the terror and the seductive glitter of a manic episode, largely through the imagery of the god Mercury, totem of this most mercurial condition, and his literary incarnations.
The natural condition of a literary production, play, novel, or volume of poetry – as Tom Stoppard writes in Shakespeare in Love – "is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster".
This geographical dividing of the city into the rational and planned (the New Town, where the wealthy made their homes) and the mazy, dark, and nefarious Old Town gave rise to literary metaphors for the human condition and provided Stevenson with his major inspiration for Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
