Adulterous Nations: Family Politics and National Anxiety in the European Novel Contributor(s): Kuzmic, Tatiana (Author) |
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ISBN: 0810133970 ISBN-13: 9780810133976 Publisher: Northwestern University Press OUR PRICE: $34.60 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: November 2016 |
Additional Information |
BISAC Categories: - Literary Criticism | Modern - 19th Century - Literary Criticism | Subjects & Themes - Women - Literary Criticism | European - General |
Dewey: 809.933 |
LCCN: 2016007596 |
Physical Information: 0.5" H x 5.9" W x 8.9" (0.75 lbs) 248 pages |
Themes: - Chronological Period - 19th Century - Sex & Gender - Feminine |
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
Publisher Description: In Adulterous Nations, Tatiana Kuzmic enlarges our perspective on the nineteenth-century novel of adultery, showing how it often served as a metaphor for relationships between the imperialistic and the colonized. In the context of the long-standing practice of gendering nations as female, the novels under discussion here--George Eliot's Middlemarch, Theodor Fontane's Effi Briest, and Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, along with August Senoa's The Goldsmith's Gold and Henryk Sienkiewicz's Quo Vadis--can be understood as depicting international crises on the scale of the nuclear family. In each example, an outsider figure is responsible for the disruption experienced by the family. Kuzmic deftly argues that the hopes, anxieties, and interests of European nations during this period can be discerned in the destabilizing force of adultery. Reading the work of Senoa and Sienkiewicz, from Croatia and Poland, respectively, Kuzmic illuminates the relationship between the literature of dominant nations and that of the semicolonized territories that posed a threat to them. Ultimately, Kuzmic's study enhances our understanding of not only these five novels but nineteenth-century European literature more generally. |