A Plot of Her Own : Female Protagonist in Russian Literature

Neither a discussion of literary works written by women nor a survey of female images in male-authored texts, this work can be said to be revisionist in several senses.

It takes issue with the old, ""unconscious"" assumption of critics, male and female alike, that women characters in fiction - even if idealized - are marginal, mere appendages to male protagonists, not worthy of investigation in their own right.

This collection demonstrates that when we transform these old habits of thought and old ways of seeing and enter texts from a new and fresh perspective, which foregrounds women and the female protagonist in particular, the results are fruitful.

Authors discussed include Chekov, Dostoevsky, Pushkin and Tolstoy, and the novels considered range from ""Fathers and Children"" to Zamyatin's anti-Utopian ""We"".

Throughout, the contributors' revisions expand our understanding of the major works they address and reveal new significance in them.