Description
Book SynopsisEconomies of Feeling offers new explanations for the fantastical plots of mad or blocked ambition that set the nineteenth-century Russian prose tradition in motion. Jillian Porter compares the conceptual history of social ambition in post-Napoleonic France and post-Decembrist Russia and argues that the dissonance between foreign and domestic understandings of this economic passion shaped the literature of Nicholas I's reign (1825-1855). Porter shows how for Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Faddei Bulgarin, ambition became a staging ground for experiments with transnational literary exchange. In its encounters with the celebrated Russian cultural value of hospitality and the age-old vice of miserliness, ambition appears both timely and anachronistic, suspiciously foreign and disturbingly Russian - it challenges readers to question the equivalence of local and imported words, feelings, and forms. Economies of Feeling examines founding texts of nineteenth-century Russian prose alongsid
Trade ReviewAn extremely impressive study of some canonical Russian classics in highly sophisticated dialogue with European literary, critical, and philosophical tradition. Porter’s writing is precise, even elegant, and is a pleasure to read."" - Susan McReynolds, translator of
The Brothers Karamazov (Norton Critical Edition) and author of
Redemption and the Merchant God: Dostoevsky’s Economy of Salvation and Antisemitism
