On Psychological Prose / / Lydia Ginzburg; ed. by Judson Rosengrant.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Princeton University Press eBook-Package Archive 1927-1999
• VerfasserIn: Ginzburg, Lydia,
• MitwirkendeR: Brown, Edward J.,
• HerausgeberIn: Rosengrant, Judson,
• Place / Publishing House: Princeton, NJ : : Princeton University Press, , [1991]; ©1991
• Year of Publication: 1991
• Edition: Course Book
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (426 p.)

Comparable in importance to Mikhail Bakhtin, Lydia Ginzburg distinguished herself among Soviet literary critics through her investigation of the social and historical elements that relate verbal art to life in a particular culture. Her work speaks directly to those Western critics who may find that deconstructionist and psychoanalytical strategies by themselves are incapable of addressing the full meaning of literature. Here, in her first book to be translated into English, Ginzburg examines the reciprocal relationship between literature and life by exploring the development of the image of personality as both an aesthetic and social phenomenon. Showing that the boundary between traditional literary genres and other kinds of writing is a historically variable one, Ginzburg discusses a wide range of Western texts from the eighteenth century onward--including familiar letters and other historical and social documents, autobiographies such as the Memoires of Saint-Simon, Rousseau's Confessions, and Herzen's My Past and Thoughts, and the novels of Stendhal, Flaubert, Turgenev, and Tolstoi. A major portion of the study is devoted to Tolstoi's contribution to the literary investigation of personality, especially in his epic panorama of Russian life, War and Peace, and in Anna Karenina.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- FOREWORD -- TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE -- INTRODUCTION -- The "Human Document" and the Construction of Personality -- PART ONE. Bakunin, Stankevich, and the Crisis of Romanticism -- PART TWO.105 Belinskii and the Emergence of Realism -- Memoirs -- Introduction -- PART ONE. Saint-Simon's Mémoires and the Rationalist Schema -- PART TWO. Rousseau's Confessions and the Modifications of Personality -- PART THREE. Herzen's My Past and Thoughts and Historical Identity -- Problems of the Psychological Novel -- PART ONE. Causal Conditionality -- PART TWO. Direct Discourse -- PART THREE. Ethical Valuation -- NOTES -- INDEX