New Book by U.R. Bowie, THE FUTILE SEARCH FOR A LIVING SOUL (on Nikolai Gogol's DEAD SOULS)

 

First published in 1842, Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls still ranks as one of the most prominent comic novels in the history of world literature. U.R. Bowie, Ph.D., who taught Russian literature for thirty years at Miami University, delves into the book’s multivarious themes and stylistic quirks, including, e.g., the grotesque in Gogol, the socio-political thematics, the leitmotif of boots, the metaphysics of Dead Souls, irony and satire, misogyny, the theme of the creative imagination, names and naming, the leitmotif of food, megalomania, the laughter of Dead Souls, verisimilitude, expanded metaphors and digressions, liars and lying, the music of Gogol’s prose, the leitmotif of the road, stylistic skazifications, authorial prolepsis, narrators omniscient and otherwise, the leitmotif of dumbfounded, and more. In an appendix six different translations of the novel into English are compared and evaluated.

 [book available for purchase on Amazon.com]