BiblioVault - Books by Knapp, Liza

Anna Karenina and Others

Liza Knapp

University of Wisconsin Press, 2018

With its complex structure, Anna Karenina places special demands on readers who must follow multiple plotlines and discern their hidden linkages. In her well-conceived and jargon-free analysis, Liza Knapp offers a fresh approach to understanding how the novel is constructed, how it creates patterns of meaning, and why it is much more than Tolstoy’s version of an adultery story.
Knapp provides a series of readings of Anna Karenina that draw on other works that were critical to Tolstoy’s understanding of the interconnectedness of human lives. Among the texts she considers are The Scarlet Letter, a novel of adultery with a divided plot; Middlemarch, a multiplot novel with neighborly love as its ideal; and Blaise Pascal’s Pensées, which fascinated Tolstoy during his own religious crisis. She concludes with a tour-de-force reading of Mrs. Dalloway that shows Virginia Woolf constructing this novel in response to Tolstoy’s treatment of Anna Karenina and others.

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The Annihilation of Inertia

Dostoevsky and Metaphysics

Liza Knapp

Northwestern University Press, 1996

Winner of 1996 AATSEEL Outstanding Translation Award

This study is an exploration of the dichotomy of faith and science as presented in the writings of the 19th-century Russian novelist Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky.

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Dostoevsky's "The Idiot"

A Critical Companion

Liza Knapp

Northwestern University Press, 1998

This book, part of the acclaimed AATSEEL Critical Companions series, is designed to guide readers through Dostoevsky's most mysterious and confusing work. It begins with introductory essays looking at where, when, and how The Idiot was written and at the novel's major characters. Other essays guide the reader through the author's plans and notebooks; use contemporary feminist criticism to shed light on how this novel explores alternatives to traditional roles; examine the ways in which the novel reflects Dostoevsky's concern with apocalypse, modernity, and time; and address the ways the novel's hero, Prince Myshkin, can be compared to Christ. A final section offers a rich collection of primary sources, including Dostoevsky's letters concerning The Idiot, and an annotated bibliography.

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