Tzvetan Todorov (1939–2017) was an influential literary theorist, historian of ideas, and cultural and political analyst and commentator who published over 40 books in his lifetime. Born in Bulgaria, he lived and worked in France, and wrote in French, for most of his adult life. He first emerged in the 1960s as a formidable practitioner of formalist and structuralist literary theory and analysis, but from the early 1980s his work began to broaden out to explore a wide range of concerns that would eventually include literature, painting, colonialist discourse, the Enlightenment, totalitarianism, the Gulag, the Holocaust, the perception and construction of the “other”, and European identity. His explorations were increasingly cast in the form of
le récit exemplaire, the exemplary…
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Citation: Tredell, Nicolas. "Tzvetan Todorov". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 22 August 2017 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=4408, accessed 26 November 2024.]
