Transnational Tolstoy

<p>Transnational Tolstoy renews and enhances our understanding of Tolstoy's fiction in the context of World Literature a term that he himself used in What is Art? (1897). It offers a fresh perspective on Tolstoy's fiction as it connects with writers and works from outside his Russian context including Stendhal Flaubert Goethe Proust Lampedusa and Mahfouz. <p/>Foster provides an interlocking series of cross-cultural readings ranging from nineteenth-century Germany France and Italy through the rise of modernist fiction and the crisis of World War II to the growth of a worldwide literary outlook from 1960 onward. He emphasizes Tolstoy's writings with the most consistent international resonance: War and Peace and Anna Karenina two of the world's most compelling novels. <p/>Transnational Tolstoy also discusses a shorter work Hadji Murad. It shares the earlier novels' historical sweep social breadth and subtle interplay among a large cast of characters. Along with bringing Tolstoy's gifts to bear on a Muslim protagonist it also represents his most sustained attempt at world literature.</p>