Gendered nations and their literary representation in Dostoevsky's and Dickens's novels and journalism (Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Russia, Charles Dickens)

In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson proposes a new definition of the nation as "imagined" through the modern literary genres of the novel and the newspaper. He contends that nation is similar to these literary genres since it also relies on the new "nonhierarchical" and "linear" understanding of history, which unites its seemingly unrelated parts through the common denominator of chronological time. The present work uses Anderson's thesis as a starting point: it considers Dostoevsky's and Dickens's novels and journalism as belonging to the historical period which is, in large part, defined by the emergence of nations and nationalism. At the same time, rather than focusing on the "linear" aspect of nineteenth-century nationalist, novelistic, and journalistic discourses, it explores what Walter Benjamin calls "the perplexity of living" in modernity, the break between rationalistic and mechanistic nature of modern historical development and man's nostalgic longing for the lost extrahistorical meaning that used to be associated with religion. This break is considered as gendered, for in nationalism in general and in Dostoevsky's and Dickens's novels and journalism in particular, the modern state is associated with the masculinist notions of rationalism and material power, while nation as an extrahistorical "family" is associated with the "feminine" concepts of eternal morality, self-sacrifice, innocence, and purity.; In analyzing Dickens's Bleak House, Dostoevsky's The Devils and both authors' journalism, a special emphasis is given to exploring nationalism's impact on ideological and formal aspects of their novelistic and journalistic narratives. The choice of the authors was motivated by my desire to grasp the principle difference between Dostoevsky and Dickens, who, although commonly compared in terms of their similar thematic interests and their similarly "unconventional" realism, remain profoundly different. Approaching their novels and journalism through the culturally specific ideology of nationalism has proven to be very helpful in defining this principle difference between the two nineteenth-century writers.