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This title is no longer available from this publisher at this time. To let the publisher know you are interested in the title, please email bv-help@uchicago.edu.
Thin Culture, High Art: Gogol, Hawthorne, and Authorship in Nineteenth-Century Russia and America
Thin Culture, High Art: Gogol, Hawthorne, and Authorship in Nineteenth-Century Russia and America
by Anne Lounsbery
Harvard University Press Cloth: 978-0-674-02381-9 | Paper: 978-0-674-02382-6
ABOUT THIS BOOK | REVIEWS
ABOUT THIS BOOK
In Russia and America a perceived absence of literature gave rise to grandiose notions of literature's importance. This book examines how two traditions worked to refigure cultural lack, not by disputing it but by insisting on it, by representing the nation's (putative) cultural deficit as a moral and aesthetic advantage. Through a comparative study of Gogol and Hawthorne, this book examines parallels that seem particularly striking when we consider that these traditions had virtually no points of contact. Yet the unexpected parallels between these authors are the result of historical similarities: Russians and Americans felt obliged to develop a manifestly national literature ex nihilo, and to do so in an age when an unprecedented diversity of printed texts were circulating among an ever more heterogeneous reading public. Responding to these conditions, Gogol and Hawthorne articulated ideas that would prove influential for their nations' literary development: that is, despite the culture's thinness and deviation from European norms, it would soon produce works that would surpass European literature in significance.
REVIEWS
This interesting study of Gogol and Hawthorne points out the similarities in the works, ideas, and careers of the two authors...[Lounsbery’s] book, as the first major comparison of the works, ideas, and careers of one of America’s and one of Russia’s most original nineteenth-century writers, is one of great importance to Gogol and Hawthonre specialists, as well as scholars of comparative literature.
-- Maya Zeigler Slavic and East European Journal