Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel

Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel PDF Author: Monica F. Cohen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521591414
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
Much attention has recently been given by scholars to the widening of the gender gap in the nineteenth century and the concept of separate spheres. Testing such constructions, and questioning the stereotypes associated with Victorian domesticity, Monica F. Cohen offers new readings of narratives by Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, Eliot, Eden, Gaskell, Oliphant and Reade to show how domestic work, the most feminine of all activities, gained much of its social credibility by positioning itself in relation to the emergent professions. By exploring how novels cast the Victorian conception of female morality into the vocabulary of nineteenth-century professionalism, Cohen traces the ways in which women sought identity and privilege within a professionalised culture, and revises our understanding of Victorian domestic ideology.

Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel

Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel PDF Author: Monica F. Cohen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521591414
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 234

Get Book Here

Book Description
Much attention has recently been given by scholars to the widening of the gender gap in the nineteenth century and the concept of separate spheres. Testing such constructions, and questioning the stereotypes associated with Victorian domesticity, Monica F. Cohen offers new readings of narratives by Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, Eliot, Eden, Gaskell, Oliphant and Reade to show how domestic work, the most feminine of all activities, gained much of its social credibility by positioning itself in relation to the emergent professions. By exploring how novels cast the Victorian conception of female morality into the vocabulary of nineteenth-century professionalism, Cohen traces the ways in which women sought identity and privilege within a professionalised culture, and revises our understanding of Victorian domestic ideology.

Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud

Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud PDF Author: Carolyn Dever
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521622808
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
The cultural ideal of motherhood in Victorian Britain seems to be undermined by Victorian novels, which almost always represent mothers as incapacitated, abandoning or dead. Carolyn Dever argues that the phenomenon of the dead or missing mother in Victorian narrative is central to the construction of the good mother as a cultural ideal. Maternal loss is the prerequisite for Victorian representations of domestic life, a fact which has especially complex implications for women. When Freud constructs psychoanalytical models of family, gender and desire, he too assumes that domesticity begins with the death of the mother. Analysing texts by Dickens, Collins, Eliot, Darwin and Woolf, as well as Freud, Klein and Winnicott, Dever argues that fictional and theoretical narratives alike use maternal absence to articulate concerns about gender and representation. Psychoanalysis has long been used to analyse Victorian fiction; Dever contends that Victorian fiction has much to teach us about psychoanalysis.

Sensation Novels and Domestic Minds

Sensation Novels and Domestic Minds PDF Author: Mathilde Vialard
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003845347
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
Drawing on the recent academic interest in approaching health and wellbeing from a humanities perspective, Sensation Novels and Domestic Minds investigates how the Victorians dealt with questions of mental health by examining literary works in the genre of sensation fiction. The novels of Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins, two prominent writers of the genre, often portray characters suffering from mental illnesses commonly diagnosed at the time, among which are monomania, moral insanity, melancholia and hypochondria. By studying the fictional works of Braddon and Collins alongside medical texts from the nineteenth century, it sets out to investigate how these novels fictionally represented real mental sufferings. This book considers the different mental illnesses the characters of sensation novels develop inside and outside the home as they struggle to define their own identity against Victorian social expectations. It demonstrates how these novels fictionalised the crisis of the leisured upper classes, who spent most of their time at home, and found themselves at odds with a society that increasingly separated the domestic and working environments, while also considering the impact that a lack of a sense of domestic belonging could have on their mental health. Sensation Novels and Domestic Minds further analyses the extent to which domesticity—in its excess or lack—could afflict the mental health of Victorian men and women through the fictional representation of suicidal thoughts and acts in the novels of Braddon and Collins.

The Victorian Novel and Masculinity

The Victorian Novel and Masculinity PDF Author: P. Mallett
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 113749154X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
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.

Domesticity, Imperialism, and Emigration in the Victorian Novel

Domesticity, Imperialism, and Emigration in the Victorian Novel PDF Author: Diana C. Archibald
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 0826264107
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description


Pets and Domesticity in Victorian Literature and Culture

Pets and Domesticity in Victorian Literature and Culture PDF Author: Monica Flegel
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317564863
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Addressing the significance of the pet in the Victorian period, this book examines the role played by the domestic pet in delineating relations for each member of the "natural" family home. Flegel explores the pet in relation to the couple at the head of the house, to the children who make up the family’s dependents, and to the common familial "outcasts" who populate Victorian literature and culture: the orphan, the spinster, the bachelor, and the same-sex couple. Drawing upon both animal studies and queer theory, this study stresses the importance of the domestic pet in elucidating normative sexuality and (re)productivity within the familial home, and reveals how the family pet operates as a means of identifying aberrant, failed, or perverse familial and gender performances. The family pet, that is, was an important signifier in Victorian familial ideology of the individual family unit’s ability to support or threaten the health and morality of the nation in the Victorian period. Texts by authors such as Clara Balfour, Juliana Horatia Ewing, E. Burrows, Bessie Rayner Parkes, Anne Brontë, George Eliot, Frederick Marryat, and Charles Dickens speak to the centrality of the domestic pet to negotiations of gender, power, and sexuality within the home that both reify and challenge the imaginary structure known as the natural family in the Victorian period. This book highlights the possibilities for a familial elsewhere outside of normative and restrictive models of heterosexuality, reproduction, and the natural family, and will be of interest to those studying Victorian literature and culture, animal studies, queer studies, and beyond.

The Victorian Novel in Context

The Victorian Novel in Context PDF Author: Grace Moore
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1847064892
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
Structured in 3-parts, this book focuses on immediate contexts, key texts, and wider contexts enables development from background issues through the actual literary texts to criticism and afterlives.

A Concise Companion to the Victorian Novel

A Concise Companion to the Victorian Novel PDF Author: Francis O'Gorman
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0470757558
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
This volume presents fresh approaches to classic Victorian fiction from 1830-1900. Opens up for the reader the cultural world in which the Victorian novel was written and read. Crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries. Provides fresh perspectives on how Victorian fiction relates to different contexts, such as class, sexuality, empire, psychology, law and biology.

Dickens and the Business of Death

Dickens and the Business of Death PDF Author: Claire Wood
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107098637
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
The first ever full-length study exploring how Dickens's fiction engaged with, responded to, and even exploited Victorian attitudes to death.

Masculinity and the New Imperialism

Masculinity and the New Imperialism PDF Author: Bradley Deane
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107066077
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
This study uses popular literature to offer a fresh account of Victorian manliness as it was transformed by imperial and colonial politics.