Joseph Frank ( Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time ) makes the intriguing argument that Dostoevsky’s use of Gogol (especially “The Overcoat”) in Poor Folk is parody, but parody that strengthens rather than undermines the central thematic thrust of Gogol’s work.  He writes: “Gogol’s narrative technique works to create a comic distance between character and reader that defeats emotional identification; Dostoevsky counteracts the purely satirical features of the model by taking over its elements and, through his use of the... Read more

David Bentley Hart writes somewhere about the revolutionary character of the gospel’s depiction of the tears of Peter after his denial of Jesus.  Ancient pagan writers, Hart argues, could only have seen the tears of a fisherman as material for parody, not pathos. This was explicitly the aim of Victor Hugo’s work: (more…) Read more

The Gothic romance of Ann Radcliffe are still in print, but who reads them besides students taking courses in the early English novel or specialists in English literature?  Yet, Radcliffe has some claim to being the proto-inventor of the modern novel. Austen read Radcliffe and laughed; her only Radcliffesque work was a parody. But Austen learned lessons about atmospherics, suspense, and setting from Radcliffe that played into her mature novels. When Dostoevsky was too young to read, he would listen... Read more