Far-Right Fictions and Authoritarian Authors: A Comparative Analysis of Contemporary Russian and US American Far-Right Literature and Its Producers, 2010-2020

Focusing on the entanglement of authorship, authority and authoritarianism, this thesis engages with fiction texts written by US American and Russian far-right writers in the timespan of 2010-2020 and their authorial performances. A threefold approach reveals that firstly, analyzing the novels shows a preoccupation with the far-right ‘postmodern’, with notions of (counter-)hegemonic forms of masculinity, and postcolonial and neo-imperial discourse intertwined with narratives of national exceptionalism, reflecting their context’s far-right and authoritarian politics and discourse. Secondly, by analyzing what Jérôme Meizoz has termed the ‘literary posture,’ the thesis shows how claims to authority are performed by these writers in their public performances, with varying levels of success. This reveals that thirdly, this kind of literature has a very different standing in Russia and the US. Using Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory, this thesis illuminates how the Russian tradition of ‘literaturocentrism’ is currently revived under the Putin regime, presenting these authors as new national writers while co-opting their texts. In the US, it is but a small ‘metapolitical’ fraction that sees literature as essential in their struggle for hegemony, while it is generally not relevant for radicalization and the 21st-century mainstreaming of far-right politics. Hence, while the specific articulations and importance of these texts and their producers differ greatly, they mirror the current global far-right and authoritarian turn, in which culture has become a contested and politicized issue.