Narrative, Space and Gender in Russian Fiction, 1846-1903

The present volume has as its primary aim readings, from a feminist perspective, of a number of works from Russian literature published over the period in which the ‘woman question’ rose to the fore and reached its peak. All the works considered here were produced in, or hark back to, a fairly narrowly defined period of not quite 20 years (1846-1864) in which issues of gender, of male and female roles were discussed much more keenly than in perhaps any other period in Russian literature. The overall project is summed up by the three key words of this book’s title, narrative, space and gender, and, especially, the interconnections between them. That is, what do the way these stories were told tell us about gender identities in mid-nineteenth-century Russia? Which spaces were central to these fictional worlds? Which spaces suggested which gender identities? The discussions therefore focus on issues of narrative and space, and how they acted as ‘technologies of gender’. This volume will be of interest to all interested in nineteenth-century Russian literature, as well as students of gender, and of the semiotics of narrative space.