This chrestomathy is a selection of passages from the previously unpublished writings of Northrop Frye, much of it coming from his notebooks and diaries, which are now a part of his Collected Works (1996–2012). The passages, arranged alphabetically, form a discontinuous series of reflections on diverse topics that are worthy of extracting from their original source. The passages gathered here are aphoristic, insightful, clever, startling, amusing, contrarian, curious, powerful, salty, irreverent, unguarded, or otherwise noteworthy in the way they reveal Frye’s fertile mind at work. Frye is Canada’s greatest literary critic, and a good argument can be made that he is the greatest critical presence internationally of the last century. This book showcases the seeds of the ideas he often developed in his books and essays. The passages range widely across Frye’s sixty-year writing career, extending from the early 1930s until just before his death in 1991.

This volume provides a comprehensive overview of various Eastern European traditions of thought on the subject of translation as well as the discipline of Translation Studies. It sheds a light on how these traditions developed, how they are related to and how they differ from Western traditions. The volume shows nationally-framed histories of translation and Translation Studies and presents Eastern European pioneers and trailblazing thinkers in the discipline. This collection of articles, however, also shows that it is at times hard or even impossible to draw the line between theoretical and/or scientific thinking and pre-theoretical and/or pre-scientific thinking on translation. Furthermore, it shows that our discipline’s beginnings, which are supposedly rooted in Western scholarship, may have to be rethought and, consequently, rewritten.

This book explores the organization of creative industries, including the visual and performing arts, movies, theater, sound recordings, and book publishing. In each, artistic inputs are combined with other, "humdrum" inputs. But the deals that bring these inputs together are inherently problematic: artists have strong views; the muse whispers erratically; and consumer approval remains highly uncertain until all costs have been incurred. To assemble, distribute, and store creative products, business firms are organized, some employing creative personnel on long-term contracts, others dealing with them as outside contractors; agents emerge as intermediaries, negotiating contracts and matching creative talents with employers. Firms in creative industries are either small-scale pickers that concentrate on the selection and development of new creative talents or large-scale promoters that undertake the packaging and widespread distribution of established creative goods. In some activities, such as the performing arts, creative ventures facing high fixed costs turn to nonprofit firms. To explain the logic of these arrangements, the author draws on the analytical resources of industrial economics and the theory of contracts. He addresses the winner-take-all character of many creative activities that brings wealth and renown to some artists while dooming others to frustration; why the "option" form of contract is so prevalent; and why even savvy producers get sucked into making "ten-ton turkeys," such as Heaven's Gate. However different their superficial organization and aesthetic properties, whether high or low in cultural ranking, creative industries share the same underlying organizational logic.

Crucial to the world history of folkloristics is this key study, first published in 1992, of the development of folklore study in the Soviet Union. Nowhere else has political ideology been so heavily involved with folklore scholarship. Professor Howell has examined in depth the institutional development of folkloristics in the Soviet Union in the first half of the twentieth century, concentrating especially upon the transition from pre-revolutionary Russian to Soviet Marxist folkloristics. The study of folklore moved from narrator studies to the description of the relationship of lore to larger contexts of social groups and social classes. Showing an exceptional knowledge of Russian, political theory and folkloristics, Dana Howell provides a valuable window into the rise of folkloristics in a country undergoing almost unprecedented changes in social and political conditions.