REEEC Noontime Scholars Lecture: Felix Cowan (University of Illinois), "Narratives of Backwardness and Modernization in the Late Imperial Russian Penny Press"
- Event Type
- Lecture
- Sponsor
- Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center
- Date
- Mar 2, 2021 12:00 pm
- Speaker
- Felix Cowan (PhD Candidate in History, University of Illinois)
- Cost
- Free and Open to the Public
- Registration
- Registration Link
- Contact
- Stephanie Porter; REEEC
- chung88@illinois.edu; reec@illinois.edu
- Views
- 14
- Originating Calendar
- Campus Humanities Calendar
In the final years of the Russian Empire, debates over Russia's "backwardness" could be found throughout the public sphere. Russia's kopeck newspapers, the empire's most popular press outlets, regularly examined "backwardness" in comparative perspective, relating perceptions of Russian underdevelopment to perceptions of Western modernity in every aspect of life. This talk explores how late imperial Russia's kopeck newspapers constructed images of Russian backwardness and Western modernity, and how they instrumentalized those images to argue that Russia's future lay in imitating the West.