Narrative Study of Transgender Autobiographies: Aleksandr Aleksandrov’s Notes of A Cavalry Maiden (1838)

Margarita Vaysman, Associate Professor and Fellow in Russian at New College, Oxford, presents a talk in the series “Current Research in Narrative Studies,” the research seminar of the British and Irish Association for Narrative Studies. These seminars are held in a hybrid format, with speakers and audience from the Association membership around the country, hosted at York by the Interdisciplinary Centre for Narrative Studies.

Abstract:

Transgender autobiographies have been a subject of narratology since the 1990s.  Most of these studies have focused predominantly on twentieth and, later, twenty-first-century texts, guided by the increasing availability of the primary sources and the temporal limitations of transgender history.  And yet, as Jay Prosser argued in his influential 1998 work Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Sexuality, ‘even without the official discourse of sex change, the plot lines of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century transgendered subjects are remarkably consistent with those of contemporary transsexuals’ (Prosser 1998:133). In this talk, I aim to expand the chronology and geography of narratological analysis of this genre through reading Notes of a Cavalry Maiden [Zapiski kavalerist-devitsy] (1836) by Aleksandr Aleksandrov (Nadezhda Durova) (1783–1866), a Russian-Ukrainian hero of the Napoleonic wars, as a transgender autobiography.

Bio:

Margarita Vaysman is Associate Professor and Fellow in Russian at New College, Oxford. Her first book, Self-Conscious Realism: Metafiction and the Nineteenth-Century Russian Novel, was published by Legenda (MHRA) in 2021.