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Writing Fear: Russian Realism and the Gothic (with Katherine Bowers and Discussant Katya Hokanson)

October 19, 2022 @ 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm

Join us for another 19v seminar!

In Russia, gothic fiction is often seen as an aside – a literary curiosity that experienced a brief heyday and then disappeared. In fact, its legacy is much more enduring, persisting within later Russian literary movements. Writing Fear explores Russian literature’s engagement with the gothic by analysing the practices of borrowing and adaptation. Katherine Bowers shows how these practices shaped literary realism from its romantic beginnings through the big novels of the 1860s and 1870s to its transformation during the modernist period.
Bowers traces the development of gothic realism with an emphasis on the affective power of fear. She then investigates the hybrid genre’s function in a series of case studies focused on literary texts that address social and political issues such as urban life, the woman question, revolutionary terrorism, and the decline of the family. By mapping the myriad ways political and cultural anxiety take shape via the gothic mode in the age of realism, Writing Fear challenges the conventional literary history of nineteenth-century Russia.

Watch the event recording on YouTube here.

Details

Date:
October 19, 2022
Time:
12:00 pm - 1:30 pm

Organizer

The Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia

Venue

New York, NY + Google Map