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Writing Fear

Russian Realism and the Gothic

Katherine Bowers author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:University of Toronto Press

Published:15th Apr '22

Should be back in stock very soon

Writing Fear cover

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.

"Bowers’s Writing Fear illuminates… how major Russian realists utilized the tropes of a genre generally considered realism’s perfect antithesis. An innovative, captivating study."

-- B.J. Nieubuurt, University of Michigan * CHOICE Connect *
"Appealing both for the insightful readings of specific works and for the big picture about Russian Realism’s encounters with the Gothic that ultimately emerges. Writing Fear is likely to be of keen interest to those who study nineteenth-century Russian literature as well as to colleagues who study non-Russian literary traditions and have an interest in the Gothic." -- Bella Grigoryan, University of Pittsburgh * The Russian Review *

"Writing Fear is an innovative, elegantly written book, underpinned by excellent scholarship. As such, it makes an important contribution not only to Russian studies, but to the literary history of nineteenth-century Gothic as a whole."

-- Margarita Vaysman, University of St Andrews * Slavonic and East European Review
  • Winner of 2022 Outstanding Acedemic Title awarded by Choice 2022 (United States)
  • Short-listed for 2023 Best Book in Literary Studies Awarded by the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL) 2024 (United States)

ISBN: 9781487526924

Dimensions: 235mm x 159mm x 19mm

Weight: 500g

264 pages