Awards

• Winner of Winner, BASEES Womens Forum Prize 2022.

Overview

Russomania: Russian Culture and the Creation of British Modernism provides a new account of modernist literature's emergence in Britain. British writers played a central role in the dissemination of Russian literature and culture during the early twentieth century, and their writing was transformed by the encounter. This study restores the thick history of that moment, by analyzing networks of dissemination and reception to recover the role of neglected as well as canonical figures, and institutions as well as individuals. The dominant account of British modernism privileges a Francophile genealogy, but the turn-of-the century debate about the future of British writing was a triangular debate, a debate not only between French and English models, but between French, English, and Russian models. Francophile modernists associated Russian literature, especially the Tolstoyan novel, with an uncritical immersion in 'life' at the expense of a mastery of style, and while individual works might be admired, Russian literature as a whole was represented as a dangerous model for British writing. This supposed danger was closely bound up with the politics of the period, and this book investigates how Russian culture was deployed in the close relationships between writers, editors, and politicians who made up the early twentieth-century intellectual class--the British intelligentsia. Russomania argues that the most significant impact of Russian culture is not to be found in stylistic borrowings between canonical authors, but in the shaping of the major intellectual questions of the period: the relation between language and action, writer and audience, and the work of art and lived experience. The resulting account brings an occluded genealogy of early modernism to the fore, with a different arrangement of protagonists, different critical values, and stronger lines of connection to the realist experiments of the Victorian past, and the anti-formalism and revived romanticism of the 1930s and 1940s future.

Full Product Details

9780198802129

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Reviews

... this densely argued book exudes warm commitment and unflagging intellectual energy. [...] Dr Beasley is a worthy successor to an illustrious line of specialists in English literature who have made inspired contributions to Russian studies: the names of John Bayley, Donald Davie, and Henry Gifford spring immediately to mind. The seventy-plus-page bibliography that rounds out her book, and the punctilious undergirding of footnotes that it documents, give detailed evidence of a formidable feat of assimilated documentation, a good proportion of it in Russian. * G. S. Smith, Essays in Criticism * In addition to the contribution of this reading against the grain to the history of British modernism, the book will be appreciated for the great richness of this plunge into always complex and intense debates. * Delphine Rumeau, Universite Toulouse Jean Jaures [Translated from French] * Full of intriguing detail, Russomania is so complete a history that it seems greedy to want more. [...] Beasleys meticulous footnotes and bibliography offer the reader all the information needed for further investigation. * Pilgrimages: A Journal of Dorothy Richardson Studies * many a Russianist would find numerous rewarding insights in Russomania ... Beasley offers many more analytical examples that uncover routes of multidirectional cultural exchange in the modernist age. Her account of the British fascination with Russia, both positive and negative ... reveals important aspects of what Russianness meant in early twentieth-century Britain. In turn, this knowledge will likely be indispensable for understanding not only European modernism, but in addition, later developments in the British-Soviet cultural dialogue. * Roman Utkin, Russian Review *

many a Russianist would find numerous rewarding insights in Russomania ... Beasley offers many more analytical examples that uncover routes of multidirectional cultural exchange in the modernist age. Her account of the British fascination with Russia, both positive and negative ... reveals important aspects of what Russianness meant in early twentieth-century Britain. In turn, this knowledge will likely be indispensable for understanding not only European modernism, but in addition, later developments in the British-Soviet cultural dialogue. * Roman Utkin, Russian Review *

Author Information

Rebecca Beasley is Associate Professor in English at the University of Oxford, and Fellow of The Queen's College. She is the author of Ezra Pound and the Visual Culture of Modernism (Cambridge University Press, 2007), and Theorists of Modernist Poetry: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and T.E. Hulme (Routledge Critical Thinkers, 2007), and editor, with Philip Ross Bullock, of Russia in Britain: From Melodrama to Modernism (Oxford University Press, 2013). She has also published articles on modernism and translation, periodical culture, the British 'intelligentsia', and the history of comparative literature.

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