Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 78-01(E), Section: A.

Adviser: Katie Trumpener.

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This book traverses two hundred years of British literary history to remake and remap the culturally comparative origins of English literature, excavating the virtually own but startlingly pervasive presence of Russian literature in British literary, cultural, and political life, from its first translations in the late eighteenth century to its canonization and absorption into English literary history in the twentieth. So doing, I look at British representations of Russian fiction -- analyzing British responses to Russian literature and critical perceptions of the effects of Russian literature on British readers, throughout the early modern, Victorian, and modernist periods. That is, rather performing a strictly literary analysis of Russian novels themselves, I take a broader approach of cultural analysis, exploring the cultural conditions of reading the Russian novel -- the currency it took on, the lessons it might teach, the experiences it might reveal, the uncontrollable effects it might have -- and what these deeply ambivalent responses might reveal about British perceptions of the stakes of literary experience and the psychic conditions of modernity.

The argument here is comprehensive but contained, making a case for the persistent influence of Russian literature at least as early as the early modern era --- that is, simultaneous with and profoundly significant for the origins of the British novel. This archaeology unearths the influence, so-called, of Russian literature throughout the British Empire and British literary consciousness, disclosing the discursive transformation of nationalist English literature from a singular, self-contained institution to a far more diffuse phenomenon: an archive inherently composite, complex, and comparative. New aspirations emerged for what the British novel could do, shifting away from the local pieties of cultural nationalism and the cultured leisure of bourgeois amusement into a form politically serious, aesthetically powerful, and existentially significant. This led to innovations beyond the norms of what had hitherto defined the British novel, as well as revealing deep ambivalences toward the influence of the Russian novel, Russian culture, and indeed literature at large. As I show in original periodical research into the cultural and literary criticism of the era, this revealed a deeper ambivalence within British culture and the British literary imagination toward of the act of reading itself, as well as its potential effects --- seen as both destructive and redemptive, threatening and entrancing. British writers and critics saw in the Russian novel's shocking effects upon the British mind and imagination an influence both dangerous and emancipatory, perceiving in its purported production of sympathy (and its supposedly otherworldly sway upon the soul) both the realization of their greatest fears about the involuntary, irrational aspects of reading and the one hope for Western Europe's redemption and transformation. In Russian writing (as translated and transformed for occidental readers), critics perceived both a cure for the "spiritual malady of the West" and a haunting premonition of the disintegration of the political structures and cultural ideologies of Western Europe, and of the pieties and principles of Western civilization.

Just in the same way that, as I will argue, Russian fiction was perceived to have an ambivalent influence within British fiction, so too is it the case that the concept of influence has occupied an ambivalent place in literary criticism. I suggest that this experience of influence was, above all, an ambivalent one, and that in order to avoid simple unilateral, causal, or mimetic understandings of influence, it is important to frame this literary-historical concept as international, intertextual, and multidirectional. So doing, I reclaim and reinvent the notion of influence for contemporary scholarship, in the context of poststructuralist notions of the subject. The unforeseen arrival and intricate transformations of the Russian novel into English not only reshaped the literary idioms of the English-speaking world, but also deepened and renewed the discourses surrounding the effects and existential significance of reading itself, redefining the stakes of literary experience and transforming the very notion of fiction.