Love Letter In Cuneiform

From a leading voice in the vibrant literary scene of today's Czech Republic, a love story rooted in the atrocities of the past and tethered to fading hopes for the future Set in Czechoslovakia between the 1940s and the 1990s, Tomás Zmeskal's stimulating novel focuses on one family's tragic story of love and the unspoken. Josef meets his wife, Kveta, before the Second World War at a public lecture on Hittite culture. Kveta chooses to marry Josef over their mutual friend Hynek, but when her husband is later arrested and imprisoned for an unnamed crime, Kveta gives herself to Hynek in return for help and advice. The author explores the complexities of what is not spoken, what cannot be said, the repercussions of silence after an ordeal, the absurdity of forgotten pain, and what it is to be an outsider. In Zmeskal's tale, told not chronologically but rather as a mosaic of events, time progresses unevenly and unpredictably, as does one's understanding. The saga belongs to a particular family, but it also exposes the larger, ongoing struggle of postcommunist Eastern Europe to come to terms with suffering when catharsis is denied. Reporting from a fresh, multicultural perspective, Zmeskal makes a welcome contribution to European literature in the twenty-first century.

In the hands of a genius a love letter can become a great, even an immortal work of literature in its own right. Love Letters: Great Literary Romances examines the lives of great writers (John Keats; Franz Kafka; Leonard Woolf), a celebrated composer (Leoš Janácek) and two great lovers of mediaeval Europe (Abelard and Heloise) to see their turbulent and sometimes tormented romantic lives played out in the passionate declarations of love in the letters they wrote.

The cuneiform script, the writing system of ancient Mesopotamia, was witness to one of the world's oldest literate cultures. For over three millennia, it was the vehicle of communication from (at its greatest extent) Iran to the Mediterranean, Anatolia to Egypt. The Oxford Handbook of Cuneiform Culture examines the Ancient Middle East through the lens of cuneiform writing. The contributors, a mix of scholars from across the disciplines, explore, define, and to some extent look beyond the boundaries of the written word, using Mesopotamia's clay tablets and stone inscriptions not just as 'texts' but also as material artefacts that offer much additional information about their creators, readers, users and owners.

Scholars of state socialism have frequently invoked “nostalgia” to identify an uncritical longing for the utopian ambitions and lived experience of the former Eastern Bloc. However, this concept seems insufficient to describe memory cultures in the Czech Republic and other contexts in which a “retro” fascination with the past has proven compatible with a steadfast critique of the state socialist era. This innovative study locates a distinctively retro aesthetic in Czech literature, film, and other cultural forms, enriching our understanding of not only the nation’s memory culture, but also the ways in which popular culture can structure collective memory.

This volume investigates the form of love letters and erotic letters in Greek and Latin up to the 7th Century CE, encompassing both literary and documentary letters (the latter inscribed and on papyrus), and prose and poetry. The potential for, and utility of treating this large and diverse corpus as a ‘genre’ is examined. To this end, approaches from ancient literary criticism and modern theory of genre are made; mutual influences between the documentary and the literary form are sought; and origins in proto-epistolary poetic texts are examined. In order to examine the boundaries of a form, limit cases, which might have less claim to the label ‘love letter’, are compared with more clear-cut examples. A series of case studies focuses on individual letters and letter-collections. Some case studies situate their subjects within the history and literary evolution of the love letter, using both intertextuality and comparative approaches; others placing them in their cultural and historical contexts, particularly uncovering the contribution of epistolarity to erotic discourse, and to the history of sexuality and gender in diverse eras and locations within Classical to Late Antiquity.

Yael Dayan, novelist daughter of the legendary Moshe Dayan and? a public figure with a long and illustrious political career behind her, looks back at her life, scrutinizing it without illusions. Once a desirable, free-spirited young woman and a successful author, she lived with the sense that she held the world in the palm of her hand. And the world adulated both her and the young state she came from. She was an officer in the Israel Defense Force, the daughter of a renowned general, a successful writer—Death Had Two Sons, A Soldier’s Diary: Sinai 1967—much in demand on the lecture tour, and a star of the gossip columns. Now in her 70s, she admits with touching honesty to missing both the vibrant 20-something she was, and the sober woman she became—a fierce political activist and parliamentarian for the left, a fighter for justice, women’s rights and peace. Having resigned her last public position, she must reconcile herself to being a mentor, a participant instead of a leader, yet remaining center-stage on the Peace Camp scene. The narrator’s warm, intimate voice and her rich intellect, as well as her insights, make for a powerful reading experience.