{"title":"Leona Toker","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"nabokov-book-leona-toker-9781501707223","title":"Nabokov","description":"Vladimir Nabokov described the literature course he taught at Cornell as a kind of detective investigation of the mystery of literary structures. Leona Toker here pursues a similar investigation of the enigmatic structures of Nabokov's own fiction. According to Toker, most previous critics stressed either Nabokov's concern with form or the...","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49601094058257,"sku":"GOR013428793","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50379495997713,"sku":"CIN1501707221VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51838668505361,"sku":"CIN1501707221G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1501707221.jpg?v=1761388078"},{"product_id":"return-from-the-archipelago-book-leona-toker-9780253337870","title":"Return from the Archipelago","description":"\"This is a ground-breaking book on a subject of capital importance, and I think [it] should start a debate about modern literature with a rich potential for further development.\" —Michael Scammell    Return from the Archipelago is the first comprehensive historical survey and critical analysis of the vast body of narrative literature about the Soviet gulag. Leona Toker organizes and characterizes both fictional narratives and survivors' memoirs as she explores the changing hallmarks of the genre from the 1920s through the Gorbachev era. Toker reflects on the writings and testimonies that shed light on the veiled aspects of totalitarianism, dehumanization, and atrocity. Identifying key themes that recur in the narratives-arrest, the stages of trial, imprisonment, labor camps, exile, escapes, special punishment, the role of chance, and deprivation.Toker discusses the historical, political, and social contexts of these accounts and the ethical and aesthetic imperative they fulfill. Her readings provide extraordinary insight into the prisoners' experiences of the Soviet penal system. Special attention is devoted to the writings of Varlam Shalamov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, but many works that are not well known in the West, especially those by women, are addressed. Consideration is also given to events that recently brought many memoirs to light years after they were written. A pioneering book on an important subject, Return from the Archipelago is an authoritative resource for scholars in Russian history and literature.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49727342608657,"sku":"NGR9780253337870","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51160344264977,"sku":"GOR004173822","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0253337879.jpg?v=1752315257"},{"product_id":"gulag-literature-and-the-literature-of-nazi-camps-book-leona-toker-9780253043535","title":"Gulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Camps","description":"Devoted to the ways in which Holocaust literature and Gulag literature provide contexts for each other, Leona Toker's book shows how the prominent features of one shed light on the veiled features and methods of the other. Toker views these narratives and texts against the background of historical information about the Soviet and the Nazi regimes of repression. Writers at the center of this work include Varlam Shalamov, Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Ka-Tzetnik, and others, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Evgeniya Ginzburg, and Jorge Semprún, illuminate the discussion. Toker's twofold analysis concentrates on the narrative qualities of the works as well as on the ways in which each text documents the writer's experience and in which fictionalized narrative can double as historical testimony. References to events might have become obscure owing to the passage of time and the cultural diversity of readers; the book explains them and shows how they form new meaning in the text. Toker is well-known as a skillful interpreter of Gulag literature, and this text presents new thinking about how Gulag literature and Holocaust literature enable a better understanding about testimony in the face of evil.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51000606949649,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51000609308945,"sku":"NIN9780253043535","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0253043530.jpg?v=1763125691"},{"product_id":"eloquent-reticence-book-leona-toker-9780813155166","title":"Eloquent Reticence","description":"The importance of the ethics of form in literature has only recently gained broad recognition and has thus far been explored mainly from the position of moral philosophy and critical theory. Leona Toker develops a narratological approach to the subject, based on studying reticence in works of fiction.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51008101253393,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008105283857,"sku":"NIN9780813155166","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":52448129712401,"sku":"NGR9780813155166","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0813155169.jpg?v=1751076208"},{"product_id":"towards-the-ethics-of-form-in-fiction-book-leona-toker-9780814252550","title":"Towards the Ethics of Form in Fiction","description":"Scholars and critics have long recognized the need for ethical criticism to address not only the idea-content but also the morphological aspects of narrative, yet the search continues for ways to study the ethics of narrative form. In Towards the Ethics of Form in Fiction: Narratives of Cultural Remission, Leona Toker suggests a method of linking formal features of narratives with the types of moral vision that they represent.Toker is especially interested in cultural remissions such as the carnivalesque-that is, the inverting of standard cultural hierarchies or the blurring of boundaries between normally separated social groups, actors and audiences, self and other. She argues that cultural remissions have the potential not simply to provide a break from the determinacies of our quotidian existence but also to return us to that existence with some alteration of our perceptions, beliefs, and values. Toker contends that the ethical consequences of reading fiction result from features of its aesthetics, particularly what she calls, following the semiotician Louis Hjemslev, the form of the content-the patterns arising from the artistic deployment of narrative details. In addition to addressing the carnivalesque discourse of Bakhtin as well as the theory of oppositionality developed by de Certeau and Chambers, she puts theory into practice through detailed analyses of canonical texts by Fielding, Sterne, Austen, Hawthorne, Dickens, Conrad, Joyce, and other writers.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51202604826897,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51202605416721,"sku":"NIN9780814252550","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52422606192913,"sku":"NLS9780814252550","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0814252559.jpg?v=1750882792"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-leona-toker.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}