The Feminine Political Novel in Victorian England

The Feminine Political Novel in Victorian England PDF Author: Barbara Leah Harman
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813917726
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
In this book, Barbara Leah Harman convincingly establishes a new category in Victorian fiction: the feminine political novel. By studying Victorian female protagonists who participate in the public universe conventionally occupied by men - the world of mills and city streets, of political activism and labor strikes, of public speaking and parliamentary debates - she is able to reassess the public realm as the site of noble and meaningful action for women in Victorian England. Harman examines at length Bronte's Shirley, Gaskell's North and South, Meredith's Diana of the Crossways, Gissing's In the Year of Jubilee, and Elizabeth Robins's The Convert, reading these novels in relation to each other and to developments in the emerging British women's movement. She argues that these texts constitute a countertradition in Victorian fiction: neither domestic fiction nor fiction about the public "fallen" woman, these novels reveal how nineteenth-century English writers began to think about female transgression into the political sphere and about the intriguing meanings of women's public appearances.

The Feminine Political Novel in Victorian England

The Feminine Political Novel in Victorian England PDF Author: Barbara Leah Harman
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813917726
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this book, Barbara Leah Harman convincingly establishes a new category in Victorian fiction: the feminine political novel. By studying Victorian female protagonists who participate in the public universe conventionally occupied by men - the world of mills and city streets, of political activism and labor strikes, of public speaking and parliamentary debates - she is able to reassess the public realm as the site of noble and meaningful action for women in Victorian England. Harman examines at length Bronte's Shirley, Gaskell's North and South, Meredith's Diana of the Crossways, Gissing's In the Year of Jubilee, and Elizabeth Robins's The Convert, reading these novels in relation to each other and to developments in the emerging British women's movement. She argues that these texts constitute a countertradition in Victorian fiction: neither domestic fiction nor fiction about the public "fallen" woman, these novels reveal how nineteenth-century English writers began to think about female transgression into the political sphere and about the intriguing meanings of women's public appearances.

Between Women

Between Women PDF Author: Sharon Marcus
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400830850
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
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.

The Victorian Novel

The Victorian Novel PDF Author: Francis O'Gorman
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0470779853
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
This guide steers students through significant critical responses to the Victorian novel from the end of the nineteenth century to the present day.

The Hell of the English

The Hell of the English PDF Author: Barbara Weiss
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 9780838750995
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
This book identifies and traces bankruptcy as an archetypal experience of the Victorian age and as a major metaphor in the language, imagery, and structure of the Victorian novel. With reference to selected works by Eliot, Bronte, Gaskell, Dickens, and Thackeray, it presents the range of symbolic meanings of the bankruptcy metaphor.

The Material Interests of the Victorian Novel

The Material Interests of the Victorian Novel PDF Author: Daniel Hack
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813923451
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Taking as his point of departure the competing uses of the critical term the materiality of writing, Daniel Hack turns to the past in this provocative new book to recover the ways in which the multiple aspects of writing now conjured by that term were represented and related to one another in the mid-nineteenth century. Diverging from much contemporary criticism, he argues that attention to the writing's material components and contexts does not by itself constitute reading against the grain. On the contrary, the Victorian discourse on authorship and the novels Hack discusses--including works by Thackeray, Dickens, Collins, and Eliot--actively investigate the significance and mutual relevance of the written word or printed word's physicality, the exchange of texts for money, the workings of signification, and the corporeality of writers, readers, and characters. Hack shows how these investigations, which involve positioning the novel in relation to such widely denigrated forms of writing as the advertisement and the begging letter, bring into play such basic novelistic properties as sympathetic identification, narrative authority, and fictionality itself. Combining formalist and historicist critical methods in innovative fashion, Hack changes the way we think about the Victorian novel's simultaneous status as text, book, and commodity.

Class in Late-Victorian Britain: The Narrative Concern with Social Hierarchy and its Representation

Class in Late-Victorian Britain: The Narrative Concern with Social Hierarchy and its Representation PDF Author: Kevin Swafford
Publisher: Cambria Press
ISBN: 1621968111
Category : Class consciousness in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description


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.

The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women's Writing

The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women's Writing PDF Author: Linda H. Peterson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107064848
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
Innovative and comprehensive coverage of women writers' careers and literary achievements spanning many literary genres during the Victorian period.

Victorian Women and Wayward Reading

Victorian Women and Wayward Reading PDF Author: Marisa Palacios Knox
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781108791601
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In the nineteenth century, no assumption about female reading generated more ambivalence than the supposedly feminine facility for identifying with fictional characters. The belief that women were more impressionable than men inspired a continuous stream of anxious rhetoric about "female quixotes": women who would imitate inappropriate characters or apply incongruous frames of reference from literature to their own lives. While the overt cultural discourse portrayed female literary identification as passive and delusional, Palacios Knox reveals increasing accounts of Victorian women wielding literary identification as a deliberate strategy. Wayward women readers challenged dominant assumptions about "feminine reading" and, by extension, femininity itself. Victorian Women and Wayward Reading contextualizes crises about female identification as reactions to decisive changes in the legal, political, educational, and professional status of women over the course of the nineteenth century: changes that wayward reading helped women first to imagine and then to enact.

Ethics and the English Novel from Austen to Forster

Ethics and the English Novel from Austen to Forster PDF Author: Valerie Wainwright
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317141229
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
Complicating a pervasive view of the ethical thought of the Victorians and their close relations, which emphasizes the domineering influence of a righteous and repressive morality, Wainwright discerns a new orientation towards an expansive ethics of flourishing or living well in Austen, Gaskell, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy and Forster. In a sequence of remarkable novels by these authors, Wainwright traces an ethical perspective that privileges styles of life that are worthy and fulfilling, admirable and rewarding. Presenting new research into the ethical debates in which these authors participated, this rigorous and energetic work reveals the ways in which ideas of major theorists such as Kant, F. H. Bradley, or John Stuart Mill, as well as those of now little-known writers such as the priest Edward Tagart, the preacher William Maccall, and philanthropist Helen Dendy Bosanquet, were appropriated and reappraised. Further, Wainwright seeks also to place these novelists within the wider context of modernity and proposes that their responses can be linked to the on-going and animated discussions that characterize modern moral philosophy.