Our Lady of Victorian Feminism

Our Lady of Victorian Feminism PDF Author: Kimberly VanEsveld Adams
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Christianity and literature
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
Our Lady of Victorian Feminism is about three nineteenth-century women, Protestants by background and feminists by conviction, who are curiously and crucially linked by their extensive use of the Madonna in arguments designed to empower women. In the field of Victorian studies, few scholars have looked beyond the customary identification of the Christian Madonna with the Victorian feminine ideal--the domestic Madonna or the Angel in the House. Kimberly VanEsveld Adams shows, however, that these three Victorian writers made extensive use of the Madonna in feminist arguments. They were able to see this figure in new ways, freely appropriating the images of independent, powerful, and wise Virgin Mothers. In addition to contributions in the fields of literary criticism, art history, and religious studies, Our Lady of Victorian Feminism places a needed emphasis on the connections between the intellectuals and the activists of the nineteenth-century women's movement. It also draws attention to an often neglected strain of feminist thought, essentialist feminism, which proclaimed sexual equality as well as difference, enabling the three writers to make one of their most radical arguments, that women and men are made in the image of the Virgin Mother and the Son, the two faces of the divine.

Our Lady of Victorian Feminism

Our Lady of Victorian Feminism PDF Author: Kimberly VanEsveld Adams
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Christianity and literature
Languages : en
Pages : 328

Get Book Here

Book Description
Our Lady of Victorian Feminism is about three nineteenth-century women, Protestants by background and feminists by conviction, who are curiously and crucially linked by their extensive use of the Madonna in arguments designed to empower women. In the field of Victorian studies, few scholars have looked beyond the customary identification of the Christian Madonna with the Victorian feminine ideal--the domestic Madonna or the Angel in the House. Kimberly VanEsveld Adams shows, however, that these three Victorian writers made extensive use of the Madonna in feminist arguments. They were able to see this figure in new ways, freely appropriating the images of independent, powerful, and wise Virgin Mothers. In addition to contributions in the fields of literary criticism, art history, and religious studies, Our Lady of Victorian Feminism places a needed emphasis on the connections between the intellectuals and the activists of the nineteenth-century women's movement. It also draws attention to an often neglected strain of feminist thought, essentialist feminism, which proclaimed sexual equality as well as difference, enabling the three writers to make one of their most radical arguments, that women and men are made in the image of the Virgin Mother and the Son, the two faces of the divine.

Christian and Lyric Tradition in Victorian Women’s Poetry

Christian and Lyric Tradition in Victorian Women’s Poetry PDF Author: F. Elizabeth Gray
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135237948
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
Women in the Victorian period were acknowledged to be the "religious sex," but their relationship to the doctrines, practices, and hierarchies of Christianity was both highly circumscribed, which has been well documented, and complexly creative, which has not. Gray visits the importance of the literature of Christian devotion to women's creative lives through an examination of the varied ways in which Victorian women reproduced and recreated traditional Christian texts in their own poetic texts. Investigating how women poets redeployed the discourse of Christianity to uncover the multiple voices of the scriptures, to expand identity and gender constructions, and to question traditional narratives and processes of authorization, Gray contends that women found in religious poetry unexpected, liberating possibilities. Taking into account multiple voices, from the best-known female poets of the day to some of the most obscure, this study provides a comprehensive account of Victorian women's religious poetic creativity, and argues that this body of work helped shape the development of the lyric in the Victorian period.

Victorians and the Virgin Mary

Victorians and the Virgin Mary PDF Author: Carol Engelhardt-Herringer
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1847797156
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
This interdisciplinary study of competing representations of the Virgin Mary examines how anxieties about religious and gender identities intersected to create public controversies that, whilst ostensibly about theology and liturgy, were also attempts to define the role and nature of women. Drawing on a variety of sources, this book seeks to revise our understanding of the Victorian religious landscape, both retrieving Catholics from the cultural margins to which they are usually relegated, and calling for a reassessment of the Protestant attitude to the feminine ideal. This book will be useful to advanced students and scholars in a variety of disciplines including history, religious studies, Victorian studies, women’s history and gender studies.

Antifeminism and the Victorian Novel

Antifeminism and the Victorian Novel PDF Author:
Publisher: Cambria Press
ISBN: 1621969797
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description


Germaine de Staël, George Sand, and the Victorian Woman Artist

Germaine de Staël, George Sand, and the Victorian Woman Artist PDF Author: Linda M. Lewis
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 0826264077
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
"By examining literary portraits of the woman as artist, Linda M. Lewis traces the matrilineal inheritance of four Victorian novelists and poets: George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Geraldine Jewsbury, and Mrs. Humphry Ward. She argues that while the male Romantic artist saw himself as god and hero, the woman of genius lacked a guiding myth until Germaine de Stael and George Sand created one. The protagonists of Stael's Corinne and Sand's Consuelo combine attributes of the goddess Athena, the Virgin Mary, Virgil's Sibyl, and Dante's Beatrice. Lewis illustrates how the resulting Corinne/Consuelo effect is exhibited in scores of English artist-as-heroine narratives, particularly in the works of these four prominent writers who most consciously and elaborately allude to the French literary matriarchs." "Exploring a connection between French and English literature and providing fresh insight, Germaine de Stael, George Sand, and the Victorian Woman Artist makes a major contribution to our understanding of nineteenth-century feminism."--Jacket.

Victorian Women Writers and the Other Germany

Victorian Women Writers and the Other Germany PDF Author: Linda Hughes
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316512843
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
A vivid account of the alternative, emancipatory Germany that progressive British women writers discovered and wrote about, 1833-1910.

Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question

Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question PDF Author: Nicola Diane Thompson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521641020
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
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.

How to Make It as a Woman

How to Make It as a Woman PDF Author: Alison Booth
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226065464
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description
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Victorian Women Poets

Victorian Women Poets PDF Author: Tess Cosslett
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315293714
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
Through her selection of fourteen essays, Tess Cosslett charts the rediscovery by feminist critics of the Victorian Women Poets such as Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti, and the subsequent developments as critics use a range of modern theoretical approaches to understand and promote the work of these non-canonical and marginalised poets. While the essays chosen for this volume focus on these three major figures, work is also included on less well-known poets who have only recently been brought into critical prominence. The introduction clarifies for the reader the themes, problems and preoccupations that inform the criticism and provides a useful guide to the debates surrounding poetry and feminism, investigating such questions as, how feminist are these poems, and does a women s tradition really exist? The advantages and disadvantages of applying different critical approaches, such as psychoanalytic and historicist, to the understanding of this period and genre are also fully explored.

Suffer and be Still

Suffer and be Still PDF Author: Martha Vicinus
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 9780416743401
Category : Great Britain
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
The ideal woman of the Victorian era was a combination of sexual innocence, conspicuous consumption, and worship of the family hearth -- with marriage and procreation being a woman's only function. Suffer and Be Still is a collection of ten lively essays which document the feminine stereotypes that Victorian women fought against, but only partially defeated.