ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book focuses on strategies of professional and disciplinary self-representation, highlighting the key role that they played in the institutionalization of Russia's literary academy at the turn of the twentieth century. It analyses the rhetoric of the self-referential texts and their largely ceremonial contexts as particular 'rites of institution' that enabled the creation and reproduction of literary scholarship's institutional hierarchies and of literary scholars' professional dispositions. The book argues that literary scholarship's self-representation took the precise form of a negotiation with the 'outside world' and that act of self-representation itself was consequently positioned on boundaries of professional literary scholarship. It discusses the institutionalization of literary scholarship in Russia has been the latter's role in the construction of Russia's dominant, legitimate national culture and its contribution to the transformation of the Russian Empire into a modern state defined in national terms.
