The Heritage Of Armenian Literature

The second volume of The Heritage of Armenian Literature continues the highly acclaimed and monumental project of presenting Armenia's literary treasures to an English-speaking audience. Nowhere else can students and general readers easily find a comprehensive, English-language guide to these masterpieces, complete with important background information and vivid, accurate translations of key sample passages. Volume 2 takes readers through the medieval period up to the eighteenth century. As in the previous volume, the editors here offer a wide and varied range of readings that encompasses the literary panorama of this ancient civilization. They situate each work as extensively as possible within its theological, historical, and philosophical contexts, while highlighting aspects that will be meaningful to readers in light of modern scholarship.

Armenian written literature originated almost 16 centuries ago with the invention of the Armenian alphabet. This anthology, translated into English, takes a comprehensive approach to capturing the essence of of the literature of the entire period covered.

Preserving Armenia's rich literary tradition from a multitude of viewpoints has been the aim of this three-volume work. This third volume joins the previous two in making excerpts of Armenian masterpieces accessible in beautifully rendered English translations, while enabling readers to enjoy the immediacy of these works through lively discussions of the authors and their times. Here the focus is on the eighteenth through twentieth centuries. The volume begins with a comprehensive overview of the entire historical, social, and literary panorama of the periods covered: the Armenian Renaissance, the development of modern Armenian (with its Western and Eastern versions), the emergence of a national identity and democratic thinking (with their impact on literature and theater), and such literary schools as Romanticism, Realism, and Aestheticism. Biographies of more than 130 prominent authors appear in these pages, together with critical comments concerning their works and extensive excerpts from the works themselves. The texts are edited, annotated with footnotes, and presented in a format that permits easy comprehension. Literature unveils a rich pageant of works in historical perspective. The varied experiences from the Armenian past come alive, allowing for new understandings and comparisons to literatures of other nations.

This volume goes through the pertinent moments in Armenian history to prepare an understanding of perhaps the most important fact of Armenian life, the genocide of 1915 which gave rise to the Armenian Diaspora. It employs a theoretical approach developed by Jurgen Link called collective symbols.

In this meditation on loss, inheritance, and survival, renowned historian Harry Harootunian explores the Armenian genocide's multigenerational afterlives that remain at the heart of the Armenian diaspora by sketching the everyday lives of his parents, who escaped the genocide in the 1910s.