Doktoratskolleg Grenzen, Grenzverschiebungen und Grenzüberschreitungen in Sprache, Literatur, Medien

modernism-and-intertextuality-the-influence-of-russian-literature-on-british-modernist-literary-production-.html - modernism-and-intertextuality-the-influence-of-russian-literature-on-british-modernist-literary-production-.html

Modernism and Intertextuality: the influence of Russian Literature on British Modernist Literary Production

Letizia Dolcini

The aim of this project is to understand how British modernist literary production found in the reading, re-writing, and re-interpretation of Russian XIX century literature the right artistic representation to portray a new self and a new modern reality. The project shall examine the concrete response of modernist writers to this artistic encounter, to illustrate what aspects of Russian literature pushed them to choose this partially undiscovered literature as their literary mirror to express their new interpretation of reality and subjectivity. Evidence will be presented that the incorporation of Russian literature into British modernism affects both form and content, since these two aspects of the literary process are necessarily intertwined, especially in a literary movement such as modernism. Thus, two main sections compose the core structure of the project. The first section will address the question of reception, consulting modernist non-fictional contribution about the influence of Russian literature and then discussing previous research on the matter, to produce a new angle on the understanding of the spreading of Russian works among the British modernist circle. The second section relates to the concrete literary process of modernist writers: through a close reading and active comparation of extracts from the two selected literatures, the intertextual process that allows modernists to create a new literary representation of reality through the incorporation of Russian literature shall be plainly exposed.