Dr. Katherine Bowers has published her first monograph, Writing Fear: Russian Realism and the Gothic. The book was printed last week and is now available from the University of Toronto Press website: https://utorontopress.com/9781487526924/writing-fear/
About the book:
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. Dr. 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.
Dr. 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.
Praise:
“Writing Fear is a rich and innovative study that reinterprets the Russian realist tradition by tracing the pervasive presence of gothic thematics and aesthetics throughout the period that we usually perceive as more ‘modern’ and socially focused and thus unconcerned with the fantastic, gothic, or sublime. This is a major contribution to Russian literary studies, as well as studies of realism and the gothic more generally.”
Valeria Sobol, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
“The scholarship presented here is excellent. Writing Fear demonstrates a striking depth and breadth of reading not only of secondary literature but also of the various primary texts it discusses. Katherine Bowers impressively brings together works from the Russian, British, and other European traditions to offer comparative readings of the exploitation of gothic imagery, preoccupations, and plots in order to throw new light on the interpretation of these works. This text will become essential reading for courses on Russian literature and the gothic, and is just as valuable in terms of its studies of individual authors and works.”
Claire Whitehead, Reader in Russian, University of St. Andrews
Featured image: University of Toronto Press
