Download or read book Victorian Women s Fiction written by Shirley Foster and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-08-21 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the ways in which female novelists have, in their creative work, challenged or scrutinised contemporary assumptions about their own sex, this book's critical interest in women’s fiction shows how mid-nineteenth-century women writers confront the conflict between the pressures of matrimonial ideologies and the often more attractive alternative of single or professional life. In arguing that the tensions and dualities of their work represent the honest confrontation of their own ambivalence rather than attempted conformity to convention, it calls for a fresh look at patterns of imaginative representation in Victorian women’s literature. Making extensive use of letters and non-fiction, this study relates the opinions expressed there to the themes and methods of the fictional narratives. The first chapter outlines the social and ideological framework within which the authors were writing; the subsequent five chapters deal with the individual novelists, Craik, Charlotte Bronté, Sewell, Gaskell, and Eliot, examining the works of each and also pointing to the similarities between them, thus suggesting a shared female ‘voice’. Dealing with minor writers as well as better-known figures, it opens up new areas of critical investigation, claiming not only that many nineteenth-century female novelists have been undeservedly neglected but also that the major ones are further illuminated by being considered alongside their less familiar contemporaries.
Download or read book Imperialism at Home written by Susan Meyer and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-30 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The implicit link between white women and "the dark races" recurs persistently in nineteenth-century English fiction. Imperialism at Home examines the metaphorical use of race by three nineteenth-century women novelists: Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and George Eliot. Susan Meyer argues that each of these domestic novelists uses race relations as a metaphor through which to explore the relationships between men and women at home in England. In the fiction of, for example, Anthony Trollope and Charles Dickens, as in nineteenth-century culture more generally, the subtle and not-so-subtle comparison of white women and people of color is used to suggest their mutual inferiority. The Bronte sisters and George Eliot responded to this comparison, Meyer contends, transforming it for their own purposes. Through this central metaphor, these women novelists work out a sometimes contentious relationship to established hierarchies of race and gender. Their feminist impulses, in combination with their use of race as a metaphor, Meyer argues, produce at times a surprising, if partial, critique of empire. Through readings of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, The Mill on the Floss, Daniel Deronda, and Charlotte Brontë's African juvenilia, Meyer traces the aesthetically and ideologically complex workings of the racial metaphor. Her analysis is supported by careful attention to textual details and thorough grounding in recent scholarship on the idea of race, and on literature and imperialism.
Download or read book Dress Culture in Late Victorian Women s Fiction written by Christine Bayles Kortsch and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-13 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In her immensely readable and richly documented book, Christine Bayles Kortsch asks us to shift our understanding of late Victorian literary culture by examining its inextricable relationship with the material culture of dress and sewing. Even as the Education Acts of 1870, 1880, and 1891 extended the privilege of print literacy to greater numbers of the populace, stitching samplers continued to be a way of acculturating girls in both print literacy and what Kortsch terms "dress culture." Kortsch explores nineteenth-century women's education, sewing and needlework, mainstream fashion, alternative dress movements, working-class labor in the textile industry, and forms of social activism, showing how dual literacy in dress and print cultures linked women writers with their readers. Focusing on Victorian novels written between 1870 and 1900, Kortsch examines fiction by writers such as Olive Schreiner, Ella Hepworth Dixon, Margaret Oliphant, Sarah Grand, and Gertrude Dix, with attention to influential predecessors like Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot. Periodicals, with their juxtaposition of journalism, fiction, and articles on dress and sewing are particularly fertile sites for exploring the close linkages between print and dress cultures. Informed by her examinations of costume collections in British and American museums, Kortsch's book broadens our view of New Woman fiction and its relationship both to dress culture and to contemporary women's fiction.
Download or read book The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime written by Michael Sims and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2011-01-25 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A wonderfully wicked new anthology from the editor of The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime It is the Victorian era and society is both entranced by and fearful of that suspicious character known as the New Woman. She rides those new- fangled bicycles and doesn't like to be told what to do. And, in crime fiction, such female detectives as Loveday Brooke, Dorcas Dene, and Lady Molly of Scotland Yard are out there shadowing suspects, crawling through secret passages, fingerprinting corpses, and sometimes committing a lesser crime in order to solve a murder. In The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime, Michael Sims has brought together all of the era's great crime-fighting females- plus a few choice crooks, including Four Square Jane and the Sorceress of the Strand.
Download or read book The Victorian Woman Question in Contemporary Feminist Fiction written by J. King and published by Springer. This book was released on 2005-06-01 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Victorian Woman Question in Contemporary Feminist Fiction explores the representation of Victorian womanhood in the work of some of today's most important British and North American novelists including A.S. Byatt, Sarah Waters, Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter and Toni Morrison. By analysing these novels in the context of the scientific, religious and literary discourses that shaped Victorian ideas about gender, it contributes to an important inter-disciplinary debate. For while showing the power of these discourses to shape women's roles, the novels also suggest how individual women might challenge that power through their own lives.
Download or read book New Women in the Late Victorian Novel written by Lloyd Fernando and published by University Park : Pennsylvania State University Press, c[1977]. This book was released on 1977 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most of the major challenges of the women's liberation movement, argues this book, were reflected in late 19th-century fiction, and this concern had a significant effect on the art of the novel. Although primarily a work of criticism, the presentation is informed more than is customary by social history since the period covered was "a particularly tumultuous phase of the women's liberation movement" throughout Europe. Professor Fernando's book was inspired by dissatisfaction with both the literary and social history of the late Victorian era. For one thing, histories of the women's emancipation movement are presented in conventional political terms, neglecting "the degree of imaginative adjustment individuals were called upon to make in response to the movement"--leaving that to the best novelists. For another, there is a common assumption that the interest of the major English novelists in the women's issue "was marginal to their art compared to their minor contemporaries." This book demonstrates that the ideas generated by the women's movement not only contributed to the abandonment of older ethical values, but also materially affected the greatest fictional achievements. Following an introduction relating the novel to ideology in the period 1865-95, Professor Fernando presents chapters on George Eliot, Meredith, Moore, Gissing, and Hardy. He concludes with an epilogue showing echoes from these novelists in the writings of current supporters of the women's movement. The result is a work establishing links between an influential historical movement and the development of a modern literary genre.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women s Writing written by Linda H. Peterson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-10-14 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women's Writing brings together chapters by leading scholars to provide innovative and comprehensive coverage of Victorian women writers' careers and literary achievements. While incorporating the scholarly insights of modern feminist criticism, it also reflects new approaches to women authors that have emerged with the rise of book history; periodical studies; performance studies; postcolonial studies; and scholarship on authorship, readership, and publishing. It traces the Victorian woman writer's career - from making her debut to working with publishers and editors to achieving literary fame - and challenges previous thinking about genres in which women contributed with success. Chapters on poetry, including a discussion of poetry in colonial and imperial contexts, reveal women's engagements with each other and male writers. Discussions on drama, life writing, reviewing, history, travel writing, and children's literature uncover the remarkable achievement of women in fields relatively unknown.
Download or read book Women and Domestic Experience in Victorian Political Fiction written by Susan Johnston and published by Praeger. This book was released on 2001-02-28 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent revisions of the idea of separate spheres, which governed Victorian scholarship of the past two decades, have provoked considerable interest in both domestic and political fiction of the period and in the political dimensions of domestic life. This book challenges arguments about the division of the political from other fictional genres and divisions of the private from the public sphere. It shows that Victorian literature identified the household as the space in which the political rights-bearer came into being. While some thinkers maintained that the rights-bearer is defined by purely formal reasoning, this volume claims that Locke and other educational writers conceived reason as embodying emotion. It looks at works by Mary Wollstonecraft, Amelia Opie, Maria Edgeworth, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Charles Dickens to reveal how the emotional relations of the household shaped the political self and how women gained identity as rights-bearers. The book argues that the intimate space of the household does not exist separately from public, political, and economic domains. It revises generic understandings of political fiction and shows that domestic plots are integral to political plots. This is so because domestic fiction focuses on the cultivation of the liberal self in the household and the disclosure of that self in terms of its vision of the good. The volume concludes that domestic space is the foundation of liberal polity, and that an account of the household in which the liberal self is disclosed is at the heart of both Victorian political fiction and philosophy.
Download or read book Victorian Women and Wayward Reading written by Marisa Palacios Knox and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-22 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explains how Victorian women readers strategically identified with literature to defy stereotypes and inspire their action and creativity.
Download or read book Between Women written by Sharon Marcus and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-10 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women in Victorian England wore jewelry made from each other's hair and wrote poems celebrating decades of friendship. They pored over magazines that described the dangerous pleasures of corporal punishment. A few had sexual relationships with each other, exchanged rings and vows, willed each other property, and lived together in long-term partnerships described as marriages. But, as Sharon Marcus shows, these women were not seen as gender outlaws. Their desires were fanned by consumer culture, and their friendships and unions were accepted and even encouraged by family, society, and church. Far from being sexless angels defined only by male desires, Victorian women openly enjoyed looking at and even dominating other women. Their friendships helped realize the ideal of companionate love between men and women celebrated by novels, and their unions influenced politicians and social thinkers to reform marriage law. Through a close examination of literature, memoirs, letters, domestic magazines, and political debates, Marcus reveals how relationships between women were a crucial component of femininity. Deeply researched, powerfully argued, and filled with original readings of familiar and surprising sources, Between Women overturns everything we thought we knew about Victorian women and the history of marriage and family life. It offers a new paradigm for theorizing gender and sexuality--not just in the Victorian period, but in our own.
Download or read book Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question written by Nicola Diane Thompson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1999-07 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book was first published in 1999. This collection of essays by leading scholars from Britain, the USA and Canada opens up the limited landscape of Victorian novels by focusing attention on some of the women writers popular in their own time but forgotten or neglected by literary history. Spanning the entire Victorian period, this study investigates particularly the role and treatment of 'the woman question' in the second half of the century. There are discussions of marriage, matriarchy and divorce, satire, suffragette writing, writing for children, and links between literature and art. Moving from Margaret Oliphant and Charlotte Mary Yonge to Mary Ward, Marie Corelli, 'Ouida' and E. Nesbit, this book illuminates the complex cultural and literary roles, and the engaging contributions, of Victorian women writers.
Download or read book Antifeminism and the Victorian Novel written by and published by Cambria Press. This book was released on with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction 1860 1900 written by Phyllis Weliver and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-07-28 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the first half of the nineteenth century, writers like Austen and Brontë confined their critiques to satirical portrayals of women musicians. Later, however, a marked shift occurred with the introduction of musical female characters where were positively to be feared. First published in 2000, this book examines the reasons for this shift in representations of female musicians in Victorian fiction from 1860-1900. Focusing on changing gender roles, musical practices and the framing of both of these scientific discourses, the book explores how fictional notions of female musicians diverged from actual trends in music making. This book will be of interest to those studying nineteenth century literature and music.
Download or read book From Spinster to Career Woman written by Arlene Young and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2019-05-30 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The late Victorian period brought a radical change in cultural attitudes toward middle-class women and work. Anxiety over the growing disproportion between women and men in the population, combined with an awakening desire among young women for personal and financial freedom, led progressive thinkers to advocate for increased employment opportunities. The major stumbling block was the persistent conviction that middle-class women - "ladies" - could not work without relinquishing their social status. Through media reports, public lectures, and fictional portrayals of working women, From Spinster to Career Woman traces advocates' efforts to alter cultural perceptions of women, work, class, and the ideals of womanhood. Focusing on the archetypal figures of the hospital nurse and the typewriter, Arlene Young analyzes the strategies used to transform a job perceived as menial into a respected profession and to represent office work as progressive employment for educated women. This book goes beyond a standard examination of historical, social, and political realities, delving into the intense human elements of a cultural shift and the hopes and fears of young women seeking independence. Providing new insights into the Victorian period, From Spinster to Career Woman captures the voices of ordinary women caught up in the frustrations and excitements of a new era.
Download or read book Women Writing the Neo Victorian Novel written by Kathleen Renk and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-07-27 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women Writing the Neo-Victorian Novel: Erotic “Victorians” focuses on the work of British, Irish, and Commonwealth women writers such as A.S. Byatt, Emma Donoghue, Sarah Waters, Helen Humphreys, Margaret Atwood, and Ahdaf Soueif, among others, and their attempts to re-envision the erotic. Kathleen Renk argues that women writers of the neo-Victorian novel are far more philosophical in their approach to representing the erotic than male writers and draw more heavily on Victorian conventions that would proscribe the graphic depiction of sexual acts, thus leaving more to the reader’s imagination. This book addresses the following questions: Why are women writers drawn to the neo-Victorian genre and what does this reveal about the state of contemporary feminism? How do classical and contemporary forms of the erotic play into the ways in which women writers address the Victorian “woman question”? How exactly is the erotic used to underscore women’s creative potential?
Download or read book Rediscovering Victorian Women Sensation Writers written by Anne-Marie Beller and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-09-07 with total page 125 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholarly understanding of the Victorian literary field has changed dramatically in the past thirty years, due in large part to the extensive recovery of sensation fiction and a corresponding recognition of that genre’s importance in the literary debates, trends, and wider cultural practices of the period. Yet until very recently, work on sensationalism has focused on a narrow range of authors and works, with Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Ellen Wood retaining the preponderance of critical attention. This collection examines the fiction of ten women sensation writers who were immensely popular in the Victorian period but remain critically neglected today – writers such as Annie Edwardes, M.C. Houstoun, Annie French, Dora Russell and others. The Victorian sensation novel was categorically associated with women by Victorian reviewers and this collection extends our current understanding of this sub-genre by showing that female sensation writers were often sophisticated in their textual strategies, employing a range of metafictional techniques and narrative innovations. By moving beyond the novelists who have come to represent the genre, this book presents a fuller, more nuanced, understanding of the spectrum of writing that constructed the concept of ‘sensationalism’ for Victorian readers and critics. The book was originally published as a special issue of Women’s Writing.
Download or read book Women s Authorship and Editorship in Victorian Culture written by Beth Palmer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-02-17 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings new perspectives to the study of sensation fiction in the Victorian period. It examines Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Ellen Wood, and Florence Marryat's magazines alongside their fiction to explore the self-conscious and complex ways they used sensation to re-work contemporary notions of female agency.
