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Podcast: New Books in Literary Studies
Episode: Ainsley Morse, "Word Play: Experimental Poetry and Soviet Children's Literature" (Northwestern UP, 2021)
Description: Ainsley Morse's book Word Play: Experimental Poetry and Soviet Children's Literature (Northwestern UP, 2021) traces the history of the relationship between experimental aesthetics and Soviet children’s books, a relationship that persisted over the seventy years of the Soviet Union’s existence. From the earliest days of the Soviet project, children’s literature was taken unusually seriously—its quality and subject matter were issues of grave political significance. Yet, it was often written and illustrated by experimental writers and artists who found the childlike aesthetic congenial to their experiments in primitivism, minimalism, and other avant‑garde trends. In the more repressive e...