Adulterous Nations: Family Politics and National Anxiety in the European Novel

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Northwestern University Press, Nov 15, 2016 - Literary Criticism - 216 pages

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 Šenoa’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 Šenoa 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.

 

Contents

Acknowledgments
The English Heroine and the Polish
German Realism and the Young Empire
The Slavonic Question and the Dismembered
The Origins of Yugoslavism and
Polish Messianism and the Proselytizing Heroine
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
Copyright

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About the author (2016)

TATIANA KUZMIC is an assistant professor of Slavic and Eurasian studies at the University of Texas.

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