Representing the Marginal Woman in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature: Personalism, Feminism, and Polyphony (Contributions in Womens Studies)
by Svetlana Slavskaya Grenier
Category: Literary Criticism

Gender-oriented studies of 19th-century Russian literature have struggled with how to determine the feminism or misogyny of particular authors. By focusing on the character type of the ward, or young female dependent, this book examines the narrative strategies used by such writers as Pushkin, Zhukova, Tolstoy, Herzen, and Dostoevsky to represent socially marginal women in their works. Drawing on Bakhtin's concepts of dialogue and polyphony, this volume examines the following question: does he present them dialogically, i.e., as subjects in their own right, with their own point of view. By proposing this new way of approaching the texts, the book corrects the charges of misogyny leveled at classical Russian literature.