Mimetic Lives
Journal: Directory of Open access Books (OAPEN Foundation)
Year: 2021

What makes some characters seem so real? Mimetic Lives explores this unprecedented question on the rich ground of Tolstoy’s and Dostoevsky’s fiction. Each author discovered techniques for intensifying the aesthetic illusion Kitzinger calls mimetic life: the reader’s sense of a character’s embodied existence. Both authors tested the limits of that illusion by pushing it toward the novel’s formal and generic bounds. Through new readings of War and Peace, Anna Karenina, The Brothers Karamazov, and