Download or read book Tirana Modern written by Matthew Rosen and published by Vanderbilt University Press. This book was released on 2022-08-31 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Guided by the thesis that literature can transform social reality, Tirana Modern draws on ethnographic and historical material to examine the public culture of reading in modern Albania. As its starting point, this book asks: How has Albanian literature and literary translation shaped social action during the longue durée of Albanian modernity? Drawing on material collected through fieldwork with a community of readers, writers, and translators attached to the independent Albanian publisher Pika pa sipërfaqe (Point without Surface), Tirana Modern provides a tightly focused ethnography of literary culture in Albania that brings into relief the more general dialectic between social imagination and social reality as mediated by reading and literature.