Georgia -- The Literature of Georgia: A History by Donald Rayfield

Donald Rayfield. The Literature of Georgia: A History. New York. Oxford University Press. 1995 ((C) 1994). xvi + 360 pages. $55. ISBN 0-19-815191-8.

There is much in Donald Rayfield's critical, comprehensive survey to stimulate both specialists in Georgian literature and scholars with wider interests in the Near East. It is by far the most complete and authoritative account of its subject in English, and in a number of ways it adds significantly to the scholarly literature in Georgian, especially on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It makes up for the absence of a reliable general monograph on Georgian literature in the nineteenth century and fills in the numerous gaps and corrects the distortions in literary history and criticism of the communist period. Byzantinists, Iranists, those who study the literary and cultural expansion of Europe,...