"Americans long have been fascinated by Russians and have wished to know their real appraisals of American culture and their judgments of literature free from the tint of party politics. In the past such information about Soviet criticism of American literature was hard to come by. Now, in the age of glasnost, perestroika, and the debacle of the old order, comes this unique volume, a post-Soviet collection of essays about American literature written especially for American readers by some of the foremost literary critics of the former U.S.S.R." "In association with the A. M. Gorky Institute of World Literature in Moscow the University Press of Mississippi offers this exciting collection in which eyes from Russia appraise the American literary mainstream as well as favorite masters in American literature. It is the first cooperative venture between the institute and an American university press." "No longer influenced entirely by the perspectives of socialist realism or the guidelines of political ideology, these critics take fresh and stimulating approaches to things literary in America and demonstrate an intellectual independence that will be revealing to specialists and general readers alike." "Addressing a great variety of general topics and specific authors, and translated from the Russian language, Russian Eyes on American Literature includes views on the secular literary tradition in Colonial times, character in American fiction, the individual and the community in the modern novel, and neoconservatism in writings of the 1980s, as well as careful focus upon such masters as Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Eliot, O'Neill, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Nabokov, and Faulkner." "Here Americans can see themselves as Russian eyes perceive them through the prisms of literature."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved