Author Description

With its complex structure, <i>Anna Karenina</i> places special demands on readers who must follow multiple plotlines and discern their hidden linkages. In her well-conceived and jargon-free analysis, Liza Knapp offers a fresh approach to understanding how the novel is constructed, how it creates patterns of meaning, and why it is much more than Tolstoy’s version of an adultery story.<br> Knapp provides a series of readings of <i>Anna Karenina</i> that draw on other works that were critical to Tolstoy’s understanding of the interconnectedness of human lives. Among the texts she considers are <i>The Scarlet Letter</i>, a novel of adultery with a divided plot; <i>Middlemarch</i>, a multiplot novel with neighborly love as its ideal; and Blaise Pascal’s <i>Pensées</i>, which fascinated Tolstoy during his own religious crisis. She concludes with a tour-de-force reading of <i>Mrs. Dalloway</i> that shows Virginia Woolf constructing this novel in response to Tolstoy’s treatment of Anna Karenina and others.