The dark mirror : American literary response to Russia, 1860-1917

• Main Author: Wilkinson, Myler, 1953-
• Format: Others
• Language: en
• Published: McGill University 1992
• Subjects: Russia > In literature.; American literature > 19th century
• Online Access: http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=70290

This thesis is an intercultural and intertextual study of the ways in which an American literary identity has emerged out of an intense imaginative and political dialogue with Russian culture. Early portions of this study trace the historical connections which have drawn American writers into the orbit of Russian literature and culture during the period, 1860-1917. A theoretical chapter attempts to explain the intensity of this dialogue on several related levels: the figural relationship between two literatures which constantly transform each other; the psychic experience of an otherness between individuals and cultures which leads to provisional patterns of literary identity; and the transformation of a purely literary dialogue into the realm of social praxis. The second half of the thesis examines the careers of three major American writers--Henry James, Willa Carter, and Sherwood Anderson--as each reads the figures of Russian literature against a native American tradition, and in the process incorporates this "other" literature into that tradition. A concluding chapter initiates a discussion of the ways in which literary influence is also bound up with the dialogue of politics and power.