The Unsexed Mind and Psychological Androgyny, 1790-1848

The Unsexed Mind and Psychological Androgyny, 1790-1848 PDF Author: Victoria F. Russell
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030881164
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 247

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book explores a significant lacuna in British history. Between the 1790s and the 1840s, the concept of psychological androgyny or the unsexed mind emerged as a notion of psychosexual equality, promoted by a small though influential network of heterodox radicals on the margins of Rational Dissent. Deeply concerned with the growing segregation of the sexes, supported seemingly by arbitrary and increasingly binary models of sexual difference, heterodox radicals insisted that while the body might be sexed, the mind was not. They argued that society and the prejudicial masculinist institutions of patriarchy should be reformed to accommodate and protect what one radical described as an ‘infinitely varied humanity’. In placing the concept of psychological androgyny centre stage, this book offers a substantial revision to understandings of progressive debates on gender in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century in Britain.

The Unsexed Mind and Psychological Androgyny, 1790-1848

The Unsexed Mind and Psychological Androgyny, 1790-1848 PDF Author: Victoria F. Russell
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030881164
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 247

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book explores a significant lacuna in British history. Between the 1790s and the 1840s, the concept of psychological androgyny or the unsexed mind emerged as a notion of psychosexual equality, promoted by a small though influential network of heterodox radicals on the margins of Rational Dissent. Deeply concerned with the growing segregation of the sexes, supported seemingly by arbitrary and increasingly binary models of sexual difference, heterodox radicals insisted that while the body might be sexed, the mind was not. They argued that society and the prejudicial masculinist institutions of patriarchy should be reformed to accommodate and protect what one radical described as an ‘infinitely varied humanity’. In placing the concept of psychological androgyny centre stage, this book offers a substantial revision to understandings of progressive debates on gender in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century in Britain.

Straight

Straight PDF Author: Hanne Blank
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 080704444X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Get Book Here

Book Description
It's surprising that the term "heterosexuality" is less than 150 years old and that heterosexuality's history has never before been written, given how obsessed we are with it. In Straight, independent scholar Hanne Blank delves deep into the contemporary psyche as well as the historical record to chronicle the realm of heterosexual relations--a subject that is anything but straight and narrow. Consider how Catholic monasticism, the reading of novels, the abolition of slavery, leisure time, divorce, and constipation of the bowels have all at some time been labeled enemies of the heterosexual state. With an extensive historical scope and plenty of juicy details and examples, Straight provides a fascinating look at the vagaries, schisms, and contradictions of what has so often been perceived as an irreducible fact of nature.

The Hermaphrodite

The Hermaphrodite PDF Author: Julia Ward Howe
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803204270
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Get Book Here

Book Description
Written in the 1840s and published here for the first time, Julia Ward Howe's novel about a hermaphrodite is unlike anything of its time--or, in truth, of our own. Narrated by Laurence, who is raised and lives as a man, is loved by men and women alike, and can respond to neither, this unconventional story explores the understanding "that fervent hearts must borrow the disguise of art, if they would win the right to express, in any outward form, the internal fire that consumes them." Laurence describes his repudiation by his family, his involvement with an attractive widow, his subsequent wanderings and eventual attachment to a sixteen-year-old boy, his own tutelage by a Roman nobleman and his sisters, and his ultimate reunion with his early love. His is a story unique in nineteenth-century American letters, at once a remarkable reflection of a largely hidden inner life and a richly imagined tale of coming of age at odds with one's culture. Howe wrote "The Hermaphrodite" when her own marriage was challenged by her husband's affection for another man--and when prevailing notions regarding a woman's appropriate role in patriarchal structures threatened Howe's intellectual and emotional survival. The novel allowed Howe, and will now allow her readers, to occupy a speculative realm otherwise inaccessible in her historical moment.

Houses, Secrets, and the Closet

Houses, Secrets, and the Closet PDF Author: Gero Bauer
Publisher: transcript Verlag
ISBN: 3839434688
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 235

Get Book Here

Book Description
»Houses, Secrets, and the Closet« investigates the literary production of masculinities and their relation to secrets and sexualities in 18th and 19th century fiction. It focusses on close readings of Gothic fiction, Sensation Novels, and tales by Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, William Godwin, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins, and Henry James. The study approaches these texts through the lens of domestic space, gender, knowledge, and power. This approach serves to investigate the cultural roots of the ›closet‹ - the male homosexual secret - which reveals a more general notion of male secrecy in modern society. The study thus contributes to a better understanding of the cultural history of masculinities and sexualities.

Making a Difference

Making a Difference PDF Author: Gayle Green
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000158705
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Get Book Here

Book Description
Feminist scholarship employs gender as a fundamental organizing category of human experience, holding two related premises: men and women have different perceptions or experiences in the same contexts, the male perspective having been dominant in fields of knowledge; and that gender is not a natural fact but a social construct, a subject to study in any humanistic discipline. This challenging collection of essays by prominent feminist literary critics offers a comprehensive introduction to modes of critical practice being used to trace the construction of gender in literature. The collection provides an invaluable overview of current femionist critical thinking. Its essays address a wide range of topics: the rerlevance of gender scholarship in the social sciences to literary criticism; the tradition of women's literature and its relation to the canon; the politics of language; French theories of the feminine; psychoanalysis and feminism; feminist criticism of writing by lesbians and black women; the relationship between female subjectivity, class, and sexuality; feminist readings of the canon.

Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britain, 1861-1913

Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britain, 1861-1913 PDF Author: S. Brady
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230272363
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book is part of a new generation of historical research that challenges prevailing arguments for the medical and legal construction of male homosexual identities in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain. British society could not tolerate the discussion necessary to form medical or legal concepts of 'the homosexual'. The development of masculinity as a social status is examined, for its influence in shaping societal attitudes towards sex and sexuality between men and fostering resistance to any kind of recognition of these phenomena. Imperatives to bolster masculinity as a social status precluded public recognition of the existence of sex and sexuality between men, even in terms that were hostile and pejorative.

Black Sea

Black Sea PDF Author: Neal Ascherson
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780809015931
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 326

Get Book Here

Book Description
The author demonstrates, through the history of the Black Sea area and the disputed regions of Russia, Turkey, Romania, Greece, and Caucasus, that "the meanings of 'community, ' 'nationhood, ' and 'cultural independence' are both fierce and disturbingly uncertain."

William Blake and the Daughters of Albion

William Blake and the Daughters of Albion PDF Author: H. Bruder
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230379575
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 311

Get Book Here

Book Description
William Blake and the Daughters of Albion offers a challenge to the Blake establishment. By placing some of Blake's early prophetic works in startingly new historical contexts (most provocatively those of female conduct and pornography) a very different image of the radical Blake emerges. The book shows what can be achieved when a challenging methodology, feminist historicism, is brought to bear on a canonical writer and on now canonized interpretations of his work.

The Madwoman in the Attic

The Madwoman in the Attic PDF Author: Sandra M. Gilbert
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300246722
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 742

Get Book Here

Book Description
Called "a feminist classic" by Judith Shulevitz in the New York Times Book Review, this pathbreaking book of literary criticism is now reissued with a new introduction by Lisa Appignanesi that speaks to how The Madwoman in the Attic set the groundwork for subsequent generations of scholars writing about women writers, and why the book still feels fresh some four decades later. "Gilbert and Gubar have written a pivotal book, one of those after which we will never think the same again."--Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Washington Post Book World

George Eliot's Feminism

George Eliot's Feminism PDF Author: June Szirotny
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137406151
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 296

Get Book Here

Book Description
The question of whether or not George Eliot was what would now be called a feminist is a contentious one. This book argues, through a close study of her fiction, informed by examination of her life's story and by a comparison of her views to those of contemporary feminists, that George Eliot was more radical and more feminist than commonly thought.