Frames of the Imagination : Gogol's Arabesques and the Romantic Question of Genre

Taking Russian writer Nikolai Gogol's (1809-52) Ara besques as a necessarily idiosyncratic example of Romantic metaphysics in action, Frazier (Slavic language and literature, Sarah Lawrence College) looks at the work and the genre from the perspectives of imaginary Germans, ordered chaos, pictures without words, the need for endings, Romantic claustrophobia, and death and decomposition.