TY - BOOK ID - 77882803 TI - On psychological prose AU - Ginzburg, Lidii︠a︡ AU - Rosengrant, Judson PY - 1991 SN - 1400811775 1282751484 9786612751486 1400820553 9781400820559 9781400811779 0691068496 0691015139 9780691068497 9780691015132 1400802822 9781400802814 1400802814 9781400802821 9781282751484 PB - Princeton, N.J. Princeton University Press DB - UniCat KW - Psychological fiction KW - Prose literature KW - Psychology in literature. KW - Psychology as a theme in literature KW - History and criticism. UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:77882803 AB - Comparable in importance to Mikhail Bakhtin, Lydia Ginzburg distinguished herself among Soviet literary critics through her investigation of the social and historical elements that relate verbal art to life in a particular culture. Her work speaks directly to those Western critics who may find that deconstructionist and psychoanalytical strategies by themselves are incapable of addressing the full meaning of literature. Here, in her first book to be translated into English, Ginzburg examines the reciprocal relationship between literature and life by exploring the development of the image of personality as both an aesthetic and social phenomenon. Showing that the boundary between traditional literary genres and other kinds of writing is a historically variable one, Ginzburg discusses a wide range of Western texts from the eighteenth century onward--including familiar letters and other historical and social documents, autobiographies such as the Memoires of Saint-Simon, Rousseau's Confessions, and Herzen's My Past and Thoughts, and the novels of Stendhal, Flaubert, Turgenev, and Tolstoi. A major portion of the study is devoted to Tolstoi's contribution to the literary investigation of personality, especially in his epic panorama of Russian life, War and Peace, and in Anna Karenina. ER -