Joe Andrew - Böcker

This anthology offers an introduction to the first major flowering of Russian women's writing between 1835 and 1860. The work produced during this period, like nearly all writing by Russian women, has been, until very recently, 'hidden from history'. None of the ten stories have been translated before and several have not been republished since their original publication in the nineteenth century. These works bear witness to the great contribution made by women to the overall development of Russian fiction in its formative period. The selection shows the diversity of women's writing in the period, as well as the inevitably interconnected nature of theme and treatment among different authors. It will demonstrate to the reader, specialist and amateur alike, that women's writing in nineteenth-century Russia is an area that certainly repays further exploration.

Editors Robert Reid and Joe Andrew present eleven contributions by international scholars which highlight Tolstoi’s influence on his contemporaries and posterity through his fiction and thought. A figure of Tolstoi’s intellectual stature has naturally inspired an impressive range of responses. These encompass stage versions of his novels (War and Peace and Resurrection), communes founded in his name, and translations which have sought to capture the essence of his works for successive generations. Tolstoi is also compared in this volume with his contemporaries in chapters on Dostoevskii, Veselitsakaia, Rozanov and Elizabeth Gaskell. The reader of this work will gain new and unique insights into an unparalleled genius of world literature, especially into his immense cultural reach which continues to this day.Contributors: Carol Apollonio, Katherine Jane Briggs, Elena Govor, Nel Grillaert, Susan Layton, Cynthia Marsh, Henrietta Mondry, Richard Peace, Alexandra Smith, Olga Sobolev, Willem Weststeijn, Kevin Windle.

The present volume has as its primary aim readings, from a feminist perspective, of a number of works from Russian literature published over the period in which the ‘woman question’ rose to the fore and reached its peak. All the works considered here were produced in, or hark back to, a fairly narrowly defined period of not quite 20 years (1846-1864) in which issues of gender, of male and female roles were discussed much more keenly than in perhaps any other period in Russian literature.The overall project is summed up by the three key words of this book’s title, narrative, space and gender, and, especially, the interconnections between them. That is, what do the way these stories were told tell us about gender identities in mid-nineteenth-century Russia? Which spaces were central to these fictional worlds? Which spaces suggested which gender identities? The discussions therefore focus on issues of narrative and space, and how they acted as ‘technologies of gender’.This volume will be of interest to all interested in nineteenth-century Russian literature, as well as students of gender, and of the semiotics of narrative space.