Anne Stiles, Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century

In The Poetry of Chartism (2009), Mike Sanders describes the temptation which confronts literary scholars of working-class and radical political movements to present their endeavors as “archival work [of] discovery, a bringing to light of long forgotten artefacts” (36). Such posture, though dramatic, is unwarranted in Sanders's view because a critical tradition beginning in the late nineteenth century has continued to republish, analyze, and appreciate the writing of Chartist poets. Yet, if the temptation persists (for students of radical poetry and fiction alike), it does so for reasons beyond the difficulties inherent in accessing literature printed in ephemeral newspapers by movements which suffered state persecution. New generations of scholars must “discover” the radical corpus anew because in a profound sense this corpus has not been integrated into broader literary history but has remained a separate tradition, found and lost again and again.

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Transnational Romance, Terror, and Heroism: Russia in American Popular Fiction, 1860–1917

Comparative Studies in Society and History ◽

10.1017/s0010417508000327 ◽

2008 ◽

Vol 50 (3) ◽

pp. 753-777 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Choi Chatterjee

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Early Modern ◽

Eastern Europe ◽

Western Europe ◽

Popular Fiction ◽

Late Nineteenth Century ◽

Modern History ◽

Early Modern History ◽

Russian State ◽

Late Nineteenth

Scholars of Russian-American relations in the late nineteenth century have long been concerned with the personalities and writings of university-based experts, journalists, diplomats, and political activists. We are well acquainted with the observations of various American commentators on the backward state of Russian state, society, economy, and politics. While the activities of prominent men such as George Kennan have effortlessly dominated the historical agenda, the negative discourses that they produced about Russia have subsumed other important American representations of the country. Since the period of early modern history, European travelers had seen Russia as a barbarous land of slave-like people, responsive only to the persuasions of the whip and the knout wielded by an autocratic tsar. Subsequently, Larry Wolff has shown that Voltaire and other Enlightenment philosophers created images of a despotic and backward Eastern Europe in order to validate the idea of a progressive, enlightened, and civilized Western Europe.

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