The dissertation examines the way that love narratives render allegorically historical and social questions in the novels of Ivan Turgenev and his contemporaries. In a representative love narrative of this sort, a Westernizing suitor competes with a Slavophile one for the attention and hand of a young, markedly Russian woman. Commentators construe the heroine's choice (or non-choice) of suitors as an expression of the author's position on the conflict the suitors incarnate. The range of oppositions embodied by suitors varies, but these love narratives consistently function allegorically, and most often the grand narratives they enact touch upon Russia's destiny. Turgenev's novels and their reception play a key role in the development of this plot template.

Chapter one examines the concepts of types and typicality, and chapter two discusses the condensation of sublime national qualities in the relatively invariant figure of the marriageable young heroine. The final two chapters provide close readings of Turgenev's first four novels and the voluminous critical discourse they elicited.

Do the allegorical love narratives of Turgenev and his contemporaries represent a new development in the history of the novel, and if so, how and why is this the case? The conclusion examines the role of novelistic romance first in western Europe, and then in other late-rising novelistic traditions (Spain, Latin America, Japan). In these contexts, Russia's amorous allegories appear only as most extensive set of examples of a subgenre in which the combinatorial possibilities of romance enables it to homologize the cultural anxieties peculiar to young nationalisms. Novelistic love narrative, ever foreign in traditional societies insofar as it hinges on the heroine's freedom to choose her own mate and fate, are at once fellow travelers and bearers of the ideologies of westernization and modernization which so often subtend the opposition expressed by novelistic suitors. Romance in the novel is ideally suited to model a nation's collective rumination on the assimilation or rejection of new and foreign ideas, because it itself begins as one of those ideas.