Holy Foolishness

Holy Foolishness
By:"Harriet Murav"
Published on 1992 by Stanford University Press

This book examines the ways in which Dostoevsky's adoption and reinvention of the medieval Russian holy fool - in Russian Orthodoxy, a person who feigned madness or folly as an ascetic feat of self-humiliation - serves as a locus for a critique of his culture's increasing reliance on the scientific paradigms of Claude Bernard's physiology, and as a source of formal narrative innovation in his novels. The author first explores the paradoxical hagiography of the holy fool, whose saintly acts are disguised under the mask of demonic folly. She then traces the rise of medical science in the nineteenth century and the increasing authority of the new scientific models of human behavior, especially the all-important notion of \

This Book was ranked 37 by Google Books for keyword novels.