Lucia Aiello

More often than not, monographs on the reception of an author are either detailed, chronologically organized accounts of the reputation of that author, or studies in literary influence. This study adopts neither of those approaches and deals with the reception of Fedor Dostoevskii in Britain from a double perspective. The detailed analysis of primary sources such as reviews, essays and monographs on Dostoevskii is associated here with a critical investigation of the dynamics of the reception process. On the one hand, the available sources are examined with the intention of exposing their underlying ideological tensions and impact on British literary circles. On the other hand, Fedor Dostoevskii's novels are shown to function as a prism, through which significant aspects of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British intellectual life are refracted. In the final analysis, by using Dostoevskii as an exemplary case study, this book develops both a methodology that aims at clarifying what we mean when we refer to 'reception' and a theoretical alternative to prevalent notions of reception. Book jacket.

Fedor Dostoevskii in Britain, 1869-1935

After Reception Theory

Mariangela Palladino

Joy Charnley

The essays included in this volume mostly originate from the conference organised by the editors at Glasgow Women’s Library in March 2012. Language, multilingual narratives and interaction between cultures and languages were key themes of the conference. Interdisciplinary and international, the conference, like this edited volume, brought together specialists working in a range of fields and provided an opportunity for exchanges between historians, sociologists, scientists and literary scholars, as well as between theoreticians and practitioners, academics and non-academics. In spite of these many different approaches, all the papers presented here transcend the idea of ‘national identity’ as an epic heritage or destiny, both linguistic and literary, and suggest a much more fluid definition of citizenship. Working from this perspective and within this general framework, both the editors and the contributors of this volume encourage a broader discussion on women’s narratives of displacement that compels us to rethink the notions of ‘mother tongue’ and ‘native speaker’ and raises philosophical questions about linguistic ownership; in other words, whether a language is owned, appropriated, imposed or rejected and how women experience and express their sense of ‘permanent strangeness’.

Lucia Aiello

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