Writing Fear

In Russia, gothic fiction is often seen as an aside a literary curiosity that experienced a brief heyday and then disappeared. In fact,I Iits legacy is much more enduringI, Ipersisting within later Russian literary movementsI. Writing Fear Iexplores Russian literatures engagement with the gothic by analysing the practices of borrowing and adaptation. Katherine Bowers shows how these practices shaped literary realism from its romantic beginnings through the big novels of the 1860s and 1870s to its transformation during the modernist period._x000D_Bowers traces the development of gothic realism with an emphasis on the affective power of fear. She then investigates the hybrid genres function in a series of case studies focused on literary texts that address social and political issues such as urban life, the woman question, revolutionary terrorism, and the decline of the family. By mapping the myriad ways political and cultural anxiety take shape via the gothic mode in the age of realism, IWriting Fear Ichallenges the conventional literary history of nineteenth-century Russia.