(MOVED) Christian Høgel: "Hagiographic Traits in the European Novel from Flaubert to Dostoevsky"

Professor Christian Høgel, Odense, Visiting Professor at Uppsala: "Hagiographic Traits in the European Novel from Flaubert to Dostoevsky"

Chair: Torsten Pettersson

Presentation
Hagiography has in literary studies often been seen as remnant of a medieval past and been treated as less than a literary form per se. This presentation will look across hagiographic traits in three ‘novels’: Flaubert’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1849, 1856, 1872), Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-72), and Dostoevsky’s The Idiot (1868-69) and search for the specific hagiographic traits that conveyed new notions of sublimity into the western novel. Hagiography may be primarily a religious mode of narration, but hagiographic features – highlighting ideas of dependable love, inexplicable goodness, and meaning vs. chance – are everywhere, from biographies of artists to revolutionary songs. Instances of exchange between hagiography and novelistic narrative can in fact be demonstrated at various points in literary history – e.g. in ancient and medieval romances, in Boccaccio and Goethe, and more.