Rossen Lilianov Djagalov

This project is dedicated to understanding the forms and evolutions of post-WWII leftist culture. Taking its cue from Benedict Anderson, it argues that literary culture helped constitute the imagined community of the international left. Leftist culture supplied the common reading that sustained it and the aesthetic forms in terms of which it imagined and represented itself. Focusing on three distinct genres—the proletarian novel of the 1940s and 50s, the guitar poetry of the 1960s and 70s, and the third-world novel of the same period—their circulation networks, and international reception, this project accounts for the fragmentation of socialist internationalism in the postwar decades and its replacement by globalization as the primary vehicle of transnational culture.