Literary Pairs in Comparative Readings across National and Cultural Divides

Book excerpt: This collection of essays focuses on works by prominent poets and writers of the 19th and 20th centuries, with a particular focus on (post)Romantics and modernists. These authors belong to essentially different socio-historical, linguistic, cultural and geopolitical contexts, and the studies examine some of their emblematic texts from a comparative critical perspective. Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire, William Butler Yeats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Emily Dickinson and Marina Tsvetaeva are some of the paired authors, who, due to the originality of their thought and work, have come to be considered amongst the most significant literary figures of their contemporary world. The volume offers an original and insightful reading of the literary text as a powerful means of both representing and shaping the inherent dialogism of different cultures. As such, it transcends, in an imaginative way, the national, racial and cultural boundaries of human existence.