Women's Literary Collaboration, Queerness, and Late-Victorian Culture

Women's Literary Collaboration, Queerness, and Late-Victorian Culture PDF Author: Jill R. Ehnenn
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351871242
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
The first full-length study to focus exclusively on nineteenth-century British women while examining queer authorship and culture, Jill R. Ehnenn's book is a timely interrogation into the different histories and functions of women's literary partnerships. For Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) and 'Kit' Anstruther-Thomson; Somerville and Ross (Edith Somerville and Violet Martin); Elizabeth Robins and Florence Bell; and Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, the couple who wrote under the pseudonym of 'Michael Field', collaborative life and work functioned strategically, as sites of discursive resistance that critique Victorian culture in ways that would be characterized today as feminist, lesbian, and queer. Ehnenn's project shows that collaborative texts from such diverse genres as poetry, fiction, drama, the essay, and autobiography negotiate many limitations of post-Enlightenment patriarchy: Cartesian subjectivity and solitary creativity, industrial capitalism and alienated labor, and heterosexism. In so doing, these jointly authored texts employ a transgressive aesthetic and invoke the potentials of female spectatorship, refusals of representation, and the rewriting of history. Ehnenn's book will be a valuable resource for scholars and students of Victorian literature and culture, women's and gender studies, and collaborative writing.

Women's Literary Collaboration, Queerness, and Late-Victorian Culture

Women's Literary Collaboration, Queerness, and Late-Victorian Culture PDF Author: Jill R. Ehnenn
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351871242
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
The first full-length study to focus exclusively on nineteenth-century British women while examining queer authorship and culture, Jill R. Ehnenn's book is a timely interrogation into the different histories and functions of women's literary partnerships. For Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) and 'Kit' Anstruther-Thomson; Somerville and Ross (Edith Somerville and Violet Martin); Elizabeth Robins and Florence Bell; and Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, the couple who wrote under the pseudonym of 'Michael Field', collaborative life and work functioned strategically, as sites of discursive resistance that critique Victorian culture in ways that would be characterized today as feminist, lesbian, and queer. Ehnenn's project shows that collaborative texts from such diverse genres as poetry, fiction, drama, the essay, and autobiography negotiate many limitations of post-Enlightenment patriarchy: Cartesian subjectivity and solitary creativity, industrial capitalism and alienated labor, and heterosexism. In so doing, these jointly authored texts employ a transgressive aesthetic and invoke the potentials of female spectatorship, refusals of representation, and the rewriting of history. Ehnenn's book will be a valuable resource for scholars and students of Victorian literature and culture, women's and gender studies, and collaborative writing.

Late Victorian Literary Collaboration

Late Victorian Literary Collaboration PDF Author: Annachiara Cozzi
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1835536875
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
An exciting new contribution to the expanding but still largely uncharted territory of collaboration studies, Late Victorian Literary Collaboration is the first book-length study of the trend for collaborative writing that emerged in the last decades of the nineteenth century. As a result of the rapidly growing literary market, the years between 1870 and the turn of the century witnessed an unprecedented flow of collaboratively written novels. In the 1890s, co-authorship became a craze, with literary partnerships multiplying and fiction co-written by twenty and more authors appearing in the pages of popular magazines. By 1900, however, the trend had already reversed, and it quickly slipped into oblivion. Late Victorian Literary Collaboration investigates the factors that made the period so conducive to collaboration, tracing the reasons for its success and subsequent decline. Drawing on a vast range of original sources, the book discusses and compares different models of collaboration, from life-long, exclusive partnerships to one-time, widely-advertised collaborative ventures between best-selling novelists. It deals with authors such as Walter Besant, Somerville and Ross, Andrew Lang, H.R. Haggard and Rhoda Broughton, all favourites of the Victorian public but subsequently neglected and only recently reevaluated. By unpacking the debate that developed around co-authorship in the periodical press of the time, the book also sheds light on how collaborative authorship was imagined by the general public, and illustrates how the trend effectively – if temporarily – challenged Victorian assumptions about the author as a solitary genius.

Queer Books of Late Victorian Print Culture

Queer Books of Late Victorian Print Culture PDF Author: Frederick D. King
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1399525964
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Queer books, like LGBTQ+ people, adapt heteronormative structures and institutions to introduce space for discourses of queer desire. Queer Books of Late-Victorian Print Culture explores print culture adaptations of the material book, examining the works of Aubrey Beardsley, Michael Field, John Gray, Charles Ricketts, Charles Shannon and Oscar Wilde. It closely analyses the material book, including the elements of binding, typography, paper, ink and illustration, and brings textual studies and queer theory into conversation with literary experiments in free verse, fairy tales and symbolist drama. King argues that queer authors and artists revised the Revival of Printing's ideals for their own diverse and unique desires, adapting new technological innovations in print culture. Their books created a community of like-minded aesthetes who challenged legal and representational discourses of same-sex desire with one of aesthetic sensuality.

Dress Culture in Late Victorian Women's Fiction

Dress Culture in Late Victorian Women's Fiction PDF Author: Dr Christine Bayles Kortsch
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 1409475492
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
In her immensely readable and richly documented book, Christine Bayles Kortsch asks us to shift our understanding of late Victorian literary culture by examining its inextricable relationship with the material culture of dress and sewing. Even as the Education Acts of 1870, 1880, and 1891 extended the privilege of print literacy to greater numbers of the populace, stitching samplers continued to be a way of acculturating girls in both print literacy and what Kortsch terms "dress culture." Kortsch explores nineteenth-century women's education, sewing and needlework, mainstream fashion, alternative dress movements, working-class labor in the textile industry, and forms of social activism, showing how dual literacy in dress and print cultures linked women writers with their readers. Focusing on Victorian novels written between 1870 and 1900, Kortsch examines fiction by writers such as Olive Schreiner, Ella Hepworth Dixon, Margaret Oliphant, Sarah Grand, and Gertrude Dix, with attention to influential predecessors like Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot. Periodicals, with their juxtaposition of journalism, fiction, and articles on dress and sewing are particularly fertile sites for exploring the close linkages between print and dress cultures. Informed by her examinations of costume collections in British and American museums, Kortsch's book broadens our view of New Woman fiction and its relationship both to dress culture and to contemporary women's fiction.

Before Queer Theory

Before Queer Theory PDF Author: Dustin Friedman
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421431491
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
A reimagining of how the aesthetic movement of the Victorian era ushered in modern queer theory. Late Victorian aesthetes were dedicated to the belief that an artwork's value derived solely from its beauty, rather than any moral or utilitarian purpose. Works by these queer artists have rarely been taken seriously as contributions to the theories of sexuality or aesthetics. But in Before Queer Theory, Dustin Friedman argues that aestheticism deploys its "art for art's sake" rhetoric to establish a nascent sense of sexual identity and community. Friedman makes the case for a claim rarely articulated in either Victorian or modern culture: that intellectually, creatively, and ethically, being queer can be an advantage not in spite but because of social hostility toward nonnormative desires. Showing how aesthetes—among them Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, Vernon Lee, and Michael Field—harnessed the force that Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel called "the negative," Friedman reveals how becoming self-aware of one's sexuality through art can be both liberating and affirming of humanity's capacity for subjective autonomy. Challenging one of the central precepts of modern queer theory—the notion that the heroic subject of Enlightenment thought is merely an effect of discourse and power—Friedman develops a new framework for understanding the relationship between desire and self-determination. He also articulates an innovative, queer notion of subjective autonomy that encourages reflecting critically on one's historical moment and envisioning new modes of seeing, thinking, and living that expand the boundaries of social and intellectual structures. Before Queer Theory is an audacious reimagining that will appeal to scholars with interests in Victorian studies, queer theory, gender and sexuality studies, and art history.

Women Writers and the Dark Side of Late-Victorian Hellenism

Women Writers and the Dark Side of Late-Victorian Hellenism PDF Author: T. Olverson
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 023024680X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
Examining the appropriation of transgressive, violent female figures from ancient Greek literature and myth by late Victorian writers, Olverson reveals the extent to which ancient antagonists like the murderous Medea and the sinister Circe were employed as a means to protest against and comment upon contemporary social and political institutions.

Modernist Literary Collaborations between Women and Men

Modernist Literary Collaborations between Women and Men PDF Author: Russell McDonald
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009080385
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
Major figures including W. B. Yeats, Marianne Moore, D. H. Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford, and Virginia Woolf viewed 'cross-sex' collaboration as a valuable, and often subversive, strategy for bringing women and men's differing perspectives into productive dialogue while harnessing the creative potential of gendered discord. This study is the first to acknowledge collaboration between women and men as an important part of the modernist effort to 'make it new.' Drawing on current methods from textual scholarship to read modernist texts as material, socially constructed products of multiple hands, the study argues that cross-sex collaboration involved writers working not just with each other, but also with publishers and illustrators. By documenting and tracing the contours of their desire for cross-sex collaboration, we gain a new understanding of the modernists' thinking about sex and gender relations, as well as three related topics of great interest to them: marriage, androgyny, and genius.

Queer Victorian Families

Queer Victorian Families PDF Author: Duc Dau
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317647068
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
The Victorians elevated the home and heteronormative family life to an almost secular religion. Yet alongside the middle-class domestic ideal were other families, many of which existed in the literature of the time. Queer Victorian Families: Curious Relations in Literature is chiefly concerned with these atypical or "queer" families. This collection serves as a corrective against limited definitions of family and is a timely addition to Victorian studies. Interdisciplinary in nature, the collection opens up new possibilities for uncovering submerged, marginalized, and alternative stories in Victorian literature. Broad in scope, subjects range from Count Fosco and his animal "children" in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, to male kinship within and across Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, and the nexus between disability and loving relationships in the fiction of Dinah Mulock Craik and Charlotte M. Yonge. Queer Victorian Families is a wide-ranging and theoretically adventurous exposé of the curious relations in the literary family tree.

Habit in the English Novel, 1850-1900

Habit in the English Novel, 1850-1900 PDF Author: S. O'Toole
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137349409
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
This book offers new perspectives on the concept of habit in the nineteenth-century novel, delineating the complex, changing significance of the term and exploring the ways in which its meanings play out in a range of narratives, from Dickens to James.

Gender, Collaboration, and Authorship in German Culture

Gender, Collaboration, and Authorship in German Culture PDF Author: John B. Lyon
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501351028
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
Gender, Collaboration, and Authorship in German Culture challenges a model of literary production that persists in literary studies: the so-called Geniekult or the idea of the solitary male author as genius that emerged around 1800 in German lands. A closer look at creative practices during this time indicates that collaborative creative endeavors, specifically joint ventures between women and men, were an important mode of literary production during this era. This volume surveys a variety of such collaborations and proves that male and female spheres of creation were not as distinct as has been previously thought. It demonstrates that the model of the male genius that dominated literary studies for centuries was not inevitable, that viable alternatives to it existed. Finally, it demands that we rethink definitions of an author and a literary work in ways that account for the complex modes of creation from which they arose.