Anti-Portraits: Poetics of the Face in Modern English, Polish and Russian Literature (1835-1965)

Erscheinungsjahr 2015
ISBN: 978-90-04-30225-9
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 185, 240 Seiten, Format (B × H): 154 mm x 232 mm, Gewicht: 354 g

Reihe: Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft

Anti-Portraits: Poetics of the Face in Modern English, Polish and Russian Literature (1835-1965) is a study of a-physiognomic descriptions of the face. It demonstrates that writers such as George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy, Edgar Allan Poe, Nicolay Gogol, Virginia Woolf and Witold Gombrowicz vigorously resisted the belief that facial features reflect character.

While other studies tend to focus on descriptions which affirm physiognomy, this book examines portraits which question popular face-reading systems and contravene their common premise – the surface-depth principle. Such portraits reveal that physiognomic formula is a cultural construct, invented to abridge, organise and regulate legibility of the human face. Most importantly, strange and ‘unreadable’ fictional faces frequently expose the connection between physiognomic judgement and stereotyping, prejudice and racism.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Pawlikowska, Kamila

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturtheorie: Poetik und Literaturästhetik
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Slawische Literaturen Westslawische Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Slawische Literaturen Ostslawische Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Stoffe, Motive und Themen
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur

Inhaltsverzeichnis

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER I. GEORGE ELIOT AND TOLSTOY: THE HUMAN FACE – SUBSTANCE OR SPIRIT?

CHAPTER II. POE AND GOGOL: THE FACE AS PRINCIPLE OF ORDER

CHAPTER III. GOMBROWICZ AND WOOLF: THE FACE AS CULTURE

CONCLUSION

WORKS CITED

Über Autor(innen)

Kamila Pawlikowska, Ph.D. (2013), graduated from the University of Kent (UK) and is presently a British Academy/Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Seikei University in Tokyo. Her current research project examines reception of Japan in Europe in the second half of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century.