Download or read book Suffering Mothers in Mid Victorian Novels written by Natalie McKnight and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 1997 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Victorian Era, women who became mothers faced unprecedented, unrealistic, and contradictory expectations from mainstream society. These expectations were expressed through a wide range of media including maternal guidebooks, popular periodicals, and Queen Victoria's maternal image. In Suffering Mothers in Mid-Victorian Novels, Natalie McKnight analyzes the influence of such cultural pressures on the fictional portrayals of mothers in mid-Victorian novels. Using a new historical and psychoanalytic approach, McKnight examines the climate created by a society that idolized mothers in theory but in reality positioned them to fail. The novels of Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Thackeray, and George Eliot are studied for their inclusion of mother characters who vary from the ambivalent to the monstrous, the angelic to the absent. In her thorough exploration of these novels, McKnight reveals the influences and the natures of characters who function more centrally in mid-Victorian fiction than has often been supposed.

Download or read book Narratives of Motherhood and Mothering in Fiction and Life Writing written by Helena Wahlström Henriksson and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-03-16 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access volume offers original essays on how motherhood and mothering are represented in contemporary fiction and life writing across several national contexts. Providing a broad range of perspectives in terms of geopolitical places, thematic concerns, and theoretical and interdisciplinary approaches, it demonstrates the significance of literary narratives for understanding and critiquing motherhood and mothering as social phenomena and subjective experiences. The chapters contextualize motherhood and mothering in terms of their particular national and cultural location and analyze narratives about mothers who are firmly placed in one national context, as well as those who are in “in-between” positions due to migrant experiences. The contributions foreground and link together the themes central to the volume: embodied experience and maternal embodiment; notions of what is “normal” or natural (or not) about motherhood; maternal health and illness; mother-daughter relations; maternality and memory; and the (im)possibilities of giving voice to the mother. They raise questions about how motherhood and mothering are marked by absence and/or presence, as well as by profound ambivalences.

Download or read book Dickens and the Despised Mother written by Shale Preston and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2013-01-25 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work offers an original interpretation of the mothers of the protagonists in Dickens's autobiographical novels. Taking Julia Kristeva's psychoanalytic concept of abjection and Mary Douglas's anthropological analysis of pollution as its conceptual framework, the book argues that Dickens's primary emotional response towards the mother who abandoned him to work in a blacking warehouse was disgust, and suggests that we can trace similar signs of disgust in the narrators of his fictional autobiographies, David Copperfield, Bleak House, and Great Expectations. The author provides a close reading of Dickens's autobiographical fragment and opens up the possibility that Dickens's feelings towards his mother actually bore a significant influence on his fiction. The book closes with a provocative discussion of Dickens's compulsive Sikes and Nancy public readings.

Download or read book The Maternal Image of God in Victorian Literature written by Rebecca Styler and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-07-10 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the study of a religious metaphor: the idea of God as a mother, in British and US literature 1850–1915. It uncovers a tradition of writers for whom divine motherhood embodied ideals felt to be missing from the orthodox masculine deity. Elizabeth Gaskell, Josephine Butler, George Macdonald, Frances Hodgson Burnett and Charlotte Perkins Gilman independently reworked their inherited faith to create a new symbol that better met their religious needs, based on ideal Victorian notions of motherhood and ‘Mother Nature’. Divine motherhood signified compassion, universal salvation and a realised gospel of social reform led primarily by women to establish sympathetic community. Connected to Victorian feminism, it gave authority to women’s voices and to ‘feminine’ cultural values in the public sphere. It represented divine immanence within the world, often providing the grounds for an ecological ethic, including human–animal fellowship. With reference also to writers including Charlotte Brontë, Anna Jameson, Charles Kingsley, Elizabeth Charles, Theodore Parker, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mary Baker Eddy and authors of literary utopias, this book shows the extent of maternal theology in Victorian thought and explores its cultural roots. The book reveals a new way in which Victorian writers creatively negotiated between religious tradition and modernity.

Download or read book The Absent Mother in the Cultural Imagination written by Berit Åström and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-07-11 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology explores the recurring trope of the dead or absent mother in Western cultural productions. Across historical periods and genres, this dialogue has been employed to articulate and debate questions of politics and religion, social and cultural change as well as issues of power and authority within the family. Åström seeks to investigate the many functions and meanings of the dialogue by covering extensive material from the 1200s to 2014 including hagiography, romances, folktales, plays, novels, children’s literature and graphic novels, as well as film and television. This is achieved by looking at the discourse both as products of the time and culture that produced the various narratives, and as part of an on-going cultural conversation that spans the centuries, resulting in an innovative text that will be of great interest to all scholars of gender, feminist and media studies.

Download or read book Fathers in Victorian Fiction written by Natalie McKnight and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2011-08-08 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the changing roles of fathers in the nineteenth century as seen in the lives and fiction of Victorian authors. Fatherhood underwent unprecedented change during this period. The Industrial Revolution moved work out of the home for many men, diminishing contact between fathers and their children. Yet fatherhood continued to be seen as the ultimate expression of masculinity, and being involved with the lives of one’s children was essential to being a good father. Conflicting and frustrating expectations of fathers and the growing disillusionment with other paternal authorities such as church and state yielded memorable portrayals of fathers from the best novelists of the age. The essays in this volume explore how Victorian authors (the Brontës, Dickens, Gaskell, Trollope, Eliot, Hardy, and Elizabeth Sewall and Mary Augusta Ward) responded to these tensions in their lives and in their fiction. The stern Victorian father cliché persisted, but it was countered by imaginative, involved, albeit faulty fathers and surrogate fathers. This volume poses fathering questions that are still relevant today: What does it mean to be a good father? And, with distrust in patriarchal authorities continuing to increase, are there any sources of authority left that one can trust?

Download or read book The Nineteenth Century English Novel written by J. Kilroy and published by Springer. This book was released on 2007-04-02 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through analysis of eight English novels of the Nineteenth century, this work explores the ways in which the novel contributes to the formation of ideology regarding the family, and, conversely, the ways in which changing attitudes toward the family shape and reshape the novel.

Download or read book Varieties of Women s Sensation Fiction 1855 1890 Vol 2 written by Andrew Maunder and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-10-28 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Five 'sensation' novels are here presented complete and fully reset, along with scholarly annotation, a bibliography of 'sensation' fiction and articles contributing to contemporary debate.

Download or read book Parents and Children in the Mid Victorian Novel written by Madeleine Wood and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-10-30 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book produces an original argument about the emergence of ‘trauma’ in the nineteenth-century through new readings of Dickens, Emily and Charlotte Bronte, Collins, Gaskell and Elliot. Madeleine Wood argues that the mid-Victorian novels present their protagonists in a state of damage, provoked and defined by the conditions of the mid-century family: the cross-generational relationship is presented as formative and traumatising. By presenting family relationships as decisive for our psychological state as well as our social identity, the Victorian authors pushed beyond the contemporary scientific models available to them. Madeleine Wood analyses the literary and historical conditions of the mid-century period that led to this new literary emphasis, and which paved the way for the emergence of psychoanalysis in Vienna at the fin de siècle. Analysing a series of theoretical texts, Madeleine Wood shows that psychoanalysis shares the mid-Victorian concern with the unequal relationship between adult and child, focusing her reading through Freud’s early writings and Jean Laplanche’s ‘general theory of seduction’.

Download or read book Fictions of Female Adultery 1684 1890 written by B. Overton and published by Springer. This book was released on 2002-09-06 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women's adultery provides many of the plots that run through nineteenth-century European fiction. This book discusses how novels of adultery have been theorized, argues its own theoretical perspective, and analyzes two 'circumtexts' of the fiction of female adultery: its pre-history in eighteenth-century Britain, and its decline during the Naturalist period in France. It is the first dedicated study of the theory of the novel of adultery, and of the representation of adultery in earlier British and later nineteenth-century French fiction.

Download or read book Domesticity Imperialism and Emigration in the Victorian Novel written by Diana C. Archibald and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book A Companion to Charles Dickens written by David Paroissien and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Companion to Charles Dickens concentrates on the historical, ideological, and social forces that defined Dickens’s world. Puts Dickens’s work into its literary, historical, and social contexts Traces the development of Dickens’s career as a journalist and novelist Includes original essays by leading Dickensian scholars on each of Dickens’s fifteen novels Explores a broad range of topics, including criticisms of his novels, the use of history and law in his fiction, language, and the effect of political and social reform Examines Dickens's legacy and surveys the mass of secondary materials that has been generated in response and reverence to his writing

Download or read book The Gothic Forms of Victorian Poetry written by Olivia Loksing Moy and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2023-08-30 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lonely damsel imprisoned within a castle or convent cell. The eavesdropping of a prisoner next door. The framed image of a woman with a sinister past. These familiar tropes from 1790s novels and tales exploded onto the English literary scene in 'low-brow' titles of Gothic romance. Surprisingly, however, they also re-emerged as features of major Victorian poems from the 1830s to 1870s. Such signature tropes - inquisitional overhearing; female confinement and the damsel in distress; supernatural switches between living and dead bodies - were transfigured into poetic forms that we recognise and teach today as canonically Victorian. The Gothic Forms of Victorian Poetry identifies a poetics of Gothic enclosure constitutive of high Victorian poetry that came to define key nineteenth-century poetic forms, from the dramatic monologue, to women's sonnet sequences and metasonnets, to Pre-Raphaelite picture poems.

Download or read book Writing Women of the Fin de Si cle written by Adrienne E. Gavin and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-02-16 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Concentrating on a period of significant social and political change and exploring both canonical and newly rediscovered texts, this book critically assess the changing culture of the late-Victorian period as represented by a range of women writers through a range of essays by leading academics in the field and cutting-edge work by newer scholars.

Download or read book Feminist Mothering written by Andrea O'Reilly and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2008-10-09 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Feminist Mothering goes beyond critiques of patriarchal motherhood to locate and investigate feminist maternal practices as sites for women's empowerment and social change. The contributors see "feminist mothering" as practices of mothering that seek to challenge and change the norms of patriarchal motherhood that are limiting and oppressive to women. For many women, practicing feminist mothering offers a way to disrupt the transmission of sexist and patriarchal values from generation to generation. Contributors explore the ways in which women integrate activism, paid employment, nonsexist childrearing practices, and non-child-centered interests in their lives - and other caregivers into their childrens' lives - in order to challenge existing societal inequality and create new egalitarian possibilities for women, men, and families."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book The Victorian Novel and Masculinity written by P. Mallett and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-01-22 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What did it mean, in the rapidly changing world of Victorian England, to 'be a man'? In essays written specially for this volume, nine distinguished scholars from Britain and the USA show how Victorian novelists from the Brontës to Conrad sought to discover what made men, what broke them, and what restored them.

Download or read book A Micro History of Victorian Liberal Parenting written by Kevin A. Morrison and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-02-14 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the theory and practice of Victorian liberal parenting by focusing on the life and writings of John Morley, one of Britain’s premier intellectuals and politicians. Reading Morley’s published works—much of which explicitly or implicitly addresses this relationship—with and against other writings of the period, and in the context of formative circumstances in his own life, it explores how living one’s life as a liberal extended to parenting. Although Victorian liberalism is currently undergoing reappraisal by scholars in the disciplines of literature and history, only a handful of studies have addressed its implications for intimate personal relations. None have considered the relationship of parent and child. Four of the chapters document how John Morley was parented and how he defined himself as a parent, based on newly available archival materials. Two other chapters analyze his many writings on or concerned with parenting and parenthood.