Bridging Bildungsromane from London to Russia---paradigms of masculinity in Charles Dickens's and Leo Tolstoy's fiction

Masculinity as an evolving social construct undergoes many changes associated with cultural changes. This project examines nineteenth-century paradigms of masculinity and dimensions of male experiences from childhood and adolescence to adulthood and maturity as reflected in works by Charles Dickens and Leo Tolstoy. Their male characters grow up, mature, and face masculine expectations which they must live up to, reject, or compromise. Issues of labor, sexuality, parenting, class, control over self and the 'Other,' femininity and so forth in the 'politics of masculinity' are interconnected with masculinity in the Bildungsromane of Charles Dickens and Leo Tolstoy.;The Introduction theorizes paradigms of masculinity in both nineteenth-century England and Russia and introduces the Bildungsroman as a literary genre and its role in the English and Russian novel. The project also briefly discusses the reception of Charles Dickens's works in England and Russia. Chapter One looks at the protagonists of David Copperfield and Childhood, who in growing up actively question the prevailing masculine patterns around them. Chapter Two is concerned with the stages beyond childhood, boyhood and youth through which men move in developing their sense of manhood in Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby and Tolstoy's Boyhood and Youth. Chapter Three traces the variant patterns of masculinity in American, British and Russian settings in Martin Chuzzlewit and The Cossacks. Chapter Four explores the different masculine models and the roles expected of men on the home front and the battlefield in Great Expectations and War and Peace. The Conclusion of the dissertation reviews the struggle between masculinities that characterizes both Victorian and Russian "novels of development" as epitomized by the works of Dickens and Tolstoy.