Awards

• Winner of Shortlisted, 2023 AATSEEL Best Book in Literary Studies.

Overview

This book offers a new understanding of the relationship between family structures and narrative structure in the nineteenth-century novel. Comparing Russia and England, it argues that the two nations had fundamentally different conceptions of the family and that these, in turn, shaped the way they constructed plots. The English placed primary value on the vertical, diachronic family axis--looking back to ancestors and head to progeny--while the Russians emphasized the lateral, synchronic axis--family expanding outward in the present from nuclear core, to extended and chosen kin. This difference shaped the way authors plotted consanguineal relations, courtship and marriage, and alternative kinship constructions. Idealizing the domestic sphere and emphasizing family continuity, the English novel made family a conservative force, while Russian novels approached it as a backward site of patriarchal tyranny in desperate need of reform. Russian family plots offered a progressive, liberalizing push toward new, nontraditional family constructions. The book's comparative approach calls for a re-evaluation of reigning theories of the novel, theories that are based on the linear English family model and cannot accommodate the more complex, Russian alternative. It reveals where these theories fall short, explains the reasons for their shortcomings, and offers a new way of conceptualizing family's role in shaping the nineteenth-century novel. Classics from Dickens, Eliot, and Trollope, to Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Turgenev are contextualized in the broader literary landscape of their day, and Russia's great women writers regain their rightful place alongside their male counterparts as the book draws together family history, literary analysis, and novel theory.

Full Product Details

9780192866622

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Reviews

At a time when 'traditional values' are vigorously promoted by politicians around the globe and the nuclear family is vaunted as the essential building block of stable societies, Berman's study reminds us of the messy contingency of human relations and the power of fiction to allow us to imagine alternative ways of understanding what really constitutes fellow feeling. * Philip Ross Bullock, Slavonic and East European Review * Berman's clarity of expression and crystalline organization make clear her commitment to making her ideas thoroughly understood, so that they can have a larger resonance. For scholars of the Russian novel it offers a new framework for understanding the family novel; for scholars of the English novel, the comparison with the Russian tradition productively challenges old assumptions. Young scholars will especially profit from reading The Family Novel in Russia and England, as in its scope, power, and careful scholarship it offers a model of what academic writing can do. * Anne Hruska, The Russian Review *

At a time when 'traditional values' are vigorously promoted by politicians around the globe and the nuclear family is vaunted as the essential building block of stable societies, Berman's study reminds us of the messy contingency of human relations and the power of fiction to allow us to imagine alternative ways of understanding what really constitutes fellow feeling. * Philip Ross Bullock, Slavonic and East European Review *

Author Information

Anna A. Berman is an Assistant Professor in Slavonic Studies at Cambridge University and a fellow of Clare College. She is the author of Siblings in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky: The Path to Universal Brotherhood (Northwestern University Press, 2015) and editor of Tolstoy in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2022). She has published numerous articles on Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, the family novel, the relationship of science and literature in nineteenth-century Russia, and operatic adaptations of Russian literary classics.

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