Gender and Russian Literature
New Perspectives

A 1996 overview of key issues in Russian women's writing and of important representations of women by men, from 1600 onwards.

Rosalind Marsh (Adapted by)

9780521552585, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 28 March 1996

374 pages
21.6 x 14 x 2.5 cm, 0.62 kg

"...the collection is a rich source, well indexed, covering a wide range of generic and teporal territory, and a fine choice both for scholars of Russian literature and for nonspecialists who would like to compare their own areas of expertise with analogous periods or authors in Russia." Signs

Originally published in 1996, this collection of fascinating essays by leading western and Russian specialists gives an overview of key issues in Russian women's writing and of important representations of women by men, between 1600 and the present. This volume contributes to the contemporary feminist project of rediscovering many hitherto unjustly neglected Russian women writers and sheds further light on the literary construction of women's identity by Russian men. It combines a study of the history and biography of women writers with close readings of literary texts, and explores certain controversial issues in Russian women's literary studies such as whether there is a separate women's literary tradition in Russia, whether the treatment of the woman question by Russian male writers reflected women's interests and experience, and whether a feminist reinterpretation of Russian women's literature is possible or even desirable.

Acknowledgements
List of contributors
1. Introduction: new perspectives on women and gender in Russian literature Rosalind Marsh
Part I. Historical and Biographical Perspectives: 2. Women in seventeenth-century Russian literature Rosalind McKenzie
3. Conflicts over gender and status in early nineteenth-century Russian literature: the case of Anna Bunina and her Padenie faetona Wendy Rosslyn
4. Reading the future: women and fortune-telling in Russia (1770–1840) Faith Wigzell
5. Russian women writers of the nineteenth century Ol'ga Demidova
6. The 'woman question' of the 1860s, and the ambiguity of the 'learned woman' Arja Rosenholm
7. Carving out a career: women prose writers, 1885–1920, the biographical background Charlotte Rosenthall
8. The fate of women writers in literature at the beginning of the twentieth century: 'A. Mire', Anna Mar, Lidiia Zinov'eva-Annibal Mariia Mikhailova
9. Lidiia Zinov'eva-Annibal's 'The singing ass': a woman's view of men and Eros Pamela Davidson
10. Anastasiia Verbitskaia reconsidered Rosalind Marsh
11. Soviet woman of the 1980s: self-portrait in poetry Elena Trofimova
Part II. The Perspective Of Literary Criticism: 12. The silence of rebellion: women in the work of Leonid Andreev Eva Buchwald
13. Poor Liza: the sexual politics of Elizaveta Bam Daniil Kharms Graham Roberts
14. The crafting of a self: Lidiia Ginzburg's early journal Jane Gary Harris
15. Voyeurism and ventriloquism: Anatolii Velichanskii's Podzemnaia nimfa Gerald S. Smith
16 Thinking (self) in the poetry of Ol'ga Sedakova Stephanie Sandler
17. Women's space and women's place in contemporary Russian fiction Helena Goscilo
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]