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“Rarely does a study of a literary masterpiece of the stature of Anna Karenina generate a perspective which breaks new ground to the extent that Amy Mandelker's does. . . . A stimulating, unique perspective on Tolstoy and the era in which he lived. . . . Highly recommended.” —Choice
Mandelker's revisionist
analysis begins with the contention that Anna Karenina rejects the
textual conventions of realism and the stereotypical representation of women,
especially in Victorian English fiction. In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy uses
the theme of art and visual representation to articulate an aesthetics freed
from gender bias and class discrimination. As Mandelker shows, Tolstoy compares
the theme of the representation of women in society with the representation of
women in art to critique Western bourgeois traditions that trivialize the
beautiful as a feminine category in aesthetics and a purchasable commodity in
society. In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy both creates and theorizes an
aesthetics that transcends boundaries and liberates the individual.
Amy
Mandelker's feminist reinterpretation of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina
challenges prevailing critical notions of Tolstoy as a misogynist and Anna
Karenina as a classic realist novel. Instead, Mandelker reads Tolstoy as a
radical feminist at the vanguard of Russia's “woman
question” debates and Anna Karenina as a modernist novel that breaks
tradition.
An important and compelling work, Framing Anna
Karenina is essential reading for scholars and students of Russian and
Victorian literature, particularly those interested in feminist approaches to
nineteenth-century novels. Amy
Mandelker is associate professor of comparative literature at the
Graduate Center of the City
University of New York. Her publications include an edition of Anna Karenina
with notes and introduction (2003). She is also the editor or co-editor of
Bakhtin in Contexts: Across the Disciplines (1995), Pilgrim Souls: An
Anthology of Spiritual Autobiography (1999), and Approaches to Teaching
Anna Karenina (2003).
| 1993 241 pp. | |
| Theory and Interpretation of Narrative |