Russian writers and the fin de siècle : the twilight of realism / edited by Katherine Bowers and Ani Kokobobo.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Bowers, Katherine, editor.

Kokobobo, Ani, editor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Russian literature--19th century--History and criticism.

Russian literature.

Realism in literature.

Decadence in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xi, 304 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Other Title:

Russian Writers & the Fin de Siècle

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Russian literature has a reputation for gloomy texts, especially during the late nineteenth century. This volume argues that a 'fin-de-siècle' mood informed Russian literature long before the chronological end of the nineteenth century, in ways that had significant impact on the development of Russian realism. Some chapters consider ideas more readily associated with fin-de-siècle Europe such as degeneration theory, biodeterminism, Freudian psychoanalysis or apocalypticism alongside earlier Russian realist texts by writers such as Turgenev, Dostoevsky or Tolstoy. Other chapters explore the changes that realism underwent as modernism emerged, examining later nineteenth-century or early twentieth-century texts in the context of the earlier realist tradition or their own cultural moment. Overall, a team of emerging and established scholars of Russian literature and culture present a wide range of creative and insightful readings that shed new light on later realism in all its manifestations.

Contents:

Introduction : the fin-de-siècle mood in Russian literature / Ani Kokobobo and Katherine Bowers

Anxieties of disintegration. The Russian rougon-Macquart : degeneration and biological determinism in The Golovlev family / Kate Holland ; The hiding places of the self in Dostoevsky's Adolescent / Yuri Corrigan ; A childhood's garden of despair : Dostoevsky and "A boy at Christ's Christmas party" / Robin Feuer Miller ; The railway and the elemental force : slavophilism, pan-slavism, and apocalyptic anxieties in Anna Karenina / Alexander Burry and S. Ceilidh Orr

Destabilizing gender and sexuality. "Mister Russian beast" : civilization's discontents in Turgenev / Emma Lieber ; Masculine degeneration in Dostoevsky's Demons / Connor Doak ; The burden of superfluity : reconsidering female heroism in Chekhov's The seagull / Jenny Kaminer

Generic experimentation and hybridity. The fall of the house : Gothic narrative and the decline of the Russian family / Katherine Bowers ; Corpses of desire and convention : Tolstoy's and Artsybashev's grotesque realism / Ani Kokobobo ; The little man in the overcoat : Gogol and Krzhizhanovsky / Muireann Maguire ; Icons, eclipses, and stepping off the train : Vladimir Korolenko and the ocherk / Jane Costlow

Facing death and decay. Decadent ecosystems in Uncle Vanya : a chorographic mediation / Thomas Newlin ; The mute body : Leonid Andreev's abject realism / Edith W. Clowes ; The thinking oyster : Turgenev's "drama of dying" as the decay of Russian realism / Ilya Vinitsky

Afterword : on the potential of ends / Caryl Emerson.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 31 May 2016).

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

1-316-37937-X

1-316-38297-4

1-316-35897-6

1-107-42307-4

1-316-36017-2

1-316-36077-6

1-316-35957-3

1-139-68344-6

1-316-38477-2