The Awkward Age in Women's Popular Fiction, 1850-1900

The Awkward Age in Women's Popular Fiction, 1850-1900 PDF Author: Sarah Bilston
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 9780191556760
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
This book demonstrates that 'the awkward age' formed a fault-line in Victorian female experience, an unusual phase in which restlessness, self-interest, and rebellion were possible. Tracing evolving treatments of female adolescence though a host of long-forgotten women's fictions, the book reveals that representations of the girl in popular women's literature importantly anticipated depictions of the feminist in the fin de siècle New Woman writing; conservative portrayals of girls' hopes, dreams, and subsequent frustrations helped clear a literary and cultural space for the New Woman's 'awakening' to disaffected consciousness. The book thus both historicises the evolution and mythic appeal of the female adolescent and works to receive suggestive exchanges between apparently diverse female literary traditions.

The Awkward Age in Women's Popular Fiction, 1850-1900

The Awkward Age in Women's Popular Fiction, 1850-1900 PDF Author: Sarah Bilston
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 9780191556760
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 284

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book demonstrates that 'the awkward age' formed a fault-line in Victorian female experience, an unusual phase in which restlessness, self-interest, and rebellion were possible. Tracing evolving treatments of female adolescence though a host of long-forgotten women's fictions, the book reveals that representations of the girl in popular women's literature importantly anticipated depictions of the feminist in the fin de siècle New Woman writing; conservative portrayals of girls' hopes, dreams, and subsequent frustrations helped clear a literary and cultural space for the New Woman's 'awakening' to disaffected consciousness. The book thus both historicises the evolution and mythic appeal of the female adolescent and works to receive suggestive exchanges between apparently diverse female literary traditions.

Mobility and Modernity in Women's Novels, 1850s-1930s

Mobility and Modernity in Women's Novels, 1850s-1930s PDF Author: W. Parkins
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230583113
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
Analyzing novels by women writers from the 1850s to the 1930s, this book argues that representations of mobility offer a fruitful way to explore the location of women within modernity and, specifically, the opportunities for (or limitations on) women's agency in this period, considering the mobility of the female subject in the city and beyond.

Constructions of the Irish Child in the Independence Period, 1910-1940

Constructions of the Irish Child in the Independence Period, 1910-1940 PDF Author: Ciara Boylan
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319928228
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
This volume explores how Irish children were ‘constructed’ by various actors including the state, youth organisations, authors and publishers in the period before and after Ireland gained independence in 1922. It examines the broad variety of ways in which the Irish child was constructed through social and cultural activities like education, sport, youth organizations, and cultural production such as literature, toys, and clothes, covering themes ranging from gender, religion and social class, to the broader politics of identity, citizenship, and nation-building. A variety of ideals and ideologies, some of them conflicting, competed to inform how children were constructed by the adults who looked on them as embodying the future of the nation. Contributors ask fundamental questions about how children were constructed as part of the idealisation of the state before its formation, and the consolidation of the state after its foundation.

Constructing Girlhood through the Periodical Press, 1850-1915

Constructing Girlhood through the Periodical Press, 1850-1915 PDF Author: Kristine Moruzi
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317161505
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Focusing on six popular British girls' periodicals, Kristine Moruzi explores the debate about the shifting nature of Victorian girlhood between 1850 and 1915. During an era of significant political, social, and economic change, girls' periodicals demonstrate the difficulties of fashioning a coherent, consistent model of girlhood. The mixed-genre format of these magazines, Moruzi suggests, allowed inconsistencies and tensions between competing feminine ideals to exist within the same publication. Adopting a case study approach, Moruzi shows that the Monthly Packet, the Girl of the Period Miscellany, the Girl's Own Paper, Atalanta, the Young Woman, and the Girl's Realm each attempted to define and refine a unique type of girl, particularly the religious girl, the 'Girl of the Period,' the healthy girl, the educated girl, the marrying girl, and the modern girl. These periodicals reflected the challenges of embracing the changing conditions of girls' lives while also attempting to maintain traditional feminine ideals of purity and morality. By analyzing the competing discourses within girls' periodicals, Moruzi's book demonstrates how they were able to frame feminine behaviour in ways that both reinforced and redefined the changing role of girls in nineteenth-century society while also allowing girl readers the opportunity to respond to these definitions.

Adolescence in Modern Irish History

Adolescence in Modern Irish History PDF Author: Catherine Cox
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230374913
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
This edited collection is the first to address the topic of adolescence in Irish history. It brings together established and emerging scholars to examine the experience of Irish young adults from the 'affective revolution' of the early nineteenth century to the emergence of the teenager in the 1960s.

Adolescent Girlhood and Literary Culture at the Fin de Siècle

Adolescent Girlhood and Literary Culture at the Fin de Siècle PDF Author: Beth Rodgers
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319326244
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
This book examines the construction of adolescent girlhood across a range of genres in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. It argues that there was a preoccupation with defining, characterising and naming adolescent girlhood at the fin de siècle. These ‘daughters of today’, ‘juvenile spinsters’ and ‘modern girls’, as the press variously termed them, occupying a borderland between childhood and womanhood, were seen to be inextricably connected to late nineteenth-century modernity: they were the products of changes taking place in education and employment and of the challenge to traditional conceptions of femininity presented by the Woman Question. The author argues that the shifting nature of the modern adolescent girl made her a malleable cultural figure, and a meeting point for many of the prevalent debates associated with fin-de-siècle society. By juxtaposing diverse material, from children’s books and girls’ magazines to New Woman novels and psychological studies, the author contextualises adolescent girlhood as a distinct but complex cultural category at the end of the nineteenth century.

Juvenile" Literature and British Society

Juvenile Author: Charles Ferrall
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135235082
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
In this study, Charles Ferrall and Anna Jackson argue that the Victorians created a concept of adolescence that lasted into the twentieth century and yet is strikingly at odds with post-Second World War notions of adolescence as a period of "storm and stress." In the enormously popular "juvenile" literature of the period, primarily boys’ and girls’ own adventure and school stories, adolescence is acknowledged as a time of sexual awareness and yet also of a romantic idealism that is lost with marriage, a time when boys and girls acquire adult duties and responsibilities and yet have not had to assume the roles of breadwinner or household manager. The book reveals a concept of adolescence as significant as the Romantic cult of childhood that preceded it, which will be of interest to scholars of both children’s literature and Victorian culture.

British Women's Writing from Brontë to Bloomsbury, Volume 2

British Women's Writing from Brontë to Bloomsbury, Volume 2 PDF Author: Adrienne E. Gavin
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030385280
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
This five-volume series, British Women’s Writing From Brontë to Bloomsbury, 1840–1940, historicallycontextualizes and traces developments in women’s fiction from 1840 to 1940. Critically assessingboth canonical and lesser-known British women’s writing decade by decade, it redefines the landscapeof women’s authorship across a century of dynamic social and cultural change. With each ofits volumes devoted to two decades, the series is wide in scope but historically sharply defined. Volume 2: 1860s and 1870s continues the series by historically and culturally contextualizing Victorianwomen’s writing distinctly within the 1860s and 1870s. Covering a range of fictional approaches,including short stories, religiously inflected novels, and comic writing the volume’s 16 original essaysconsider such developments as the sensation craze, the impact of new technologies, and the careeropportunities opening for women. Centrally, it reassesses key nineteenth-century female authors inthe context in which they first published while also recovering neglected women writers who helpedto shape the literary landscape of the 1860s and 1870s.

The Nineteenth-Century Child and Consumer Culture

The Nineteenth-Century Child and Consumer Culture PDF Author: Dennis Denisoff
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351884956
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 379

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Book Description
During the rise of consumer culture in the nineteenth century, children and childhood were called on to fulfill a range of important roles. In addition to being consumers themselves, the young functioned as both 'goods' to be used and consumed by adults and as proof that middle-class materialist ventures were assisting in the formation of a more ethical society. Children also provided necessary labor and raw material for industry. This diverse collection addresses the roles assigned to children in the context of nineteenth-century consumer culture, at the same time that it remains steadfast in recognizing that the young did not simply exist within adult-articulated cultural contexts but were agents in their formation. Topics include toys and middle-class childhood; boyhood and toy theater; child performers on the Victorian stage; gender, sexuality and consumerism; imperialism in adventure fiction; the idealization of childhood as a form of adult entertainment and self-flattery; the commercialization of orphans; and the economics behind formulations of child poverty. Together, the essays demonstrate the rising investment both children and adults made in commodities as sources of identity and human worth.

Male Adolescence in Mid-Victorian Fiction

Male Adolescence in Mid-Victorian Fiction PDF Author: Alice Crossley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317102126
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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Book Description
Focusing on works by George Meredith, W. M. Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope, Alice Crossley examines the emergence of adolescence in the mid-Victorian period as a distinct form of experience. Adolescence, Crossley shows, appears as a discrete category of identity that draws on but is nonetheless distinguishable from other masculine types. Important more as a stage of psychological awareness and maturation than as a period of biological youth, Crossley argues that the plasticity of male adolescence provides Meredith, Thackeray, and Trollope with opportunities for self-reflection and social criticism while also working as a paradigm for narrative and imaginative inquiry about motivation, egotism, emotional and physical relationships, and the possibilities of self-creation. Adolescence emerges as a crucial stage of individual growth, adopted by these authors in order to reflect more fully on cultural and personal anxieties about manliness. The centrality of male youth in these authors’ novels, Crossley demonstrates, repositions age-consciousness as an integral part of nineteenth-century debates about masculine heterogeneity.