The Woman Reader

The Woman Reader
Author: Belinda Jack
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2012-07-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0300120451

Explores what and how women of widely differing cultures have read through the ages, from Cro-Magnon caves to the digital readers of today, drawing distinctions between male and female readers and detailing how female literacy has been suppressed in some parts of the world.

Victorian Sensations

Victorian Sensations
Author: Kimberly Harrison
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2006
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0814210317

"Wildly popular with Victorian readers, sensation fiction was condemned by most critics for scandalous content and formal features that deviated from respectable Victorian realism. Victorian Sensations is the first collection to examine sensation fiction as a whole, showing it to push genre boundaries and resist easy classification. Comprehensive in scope, this collection includes twenty original essays employing various critical approaches to cover a range of topics that will interest many readers." "Essays are organized thematically into three sections: issues of genre; sensational representations of gender and sexuality; and the texts' complex readings of diverse social and cultural phenomena such as class, race, and empire. The introduction reviews the critical reception of sensation fiction to situate these new essays within a larger scholarly context."--BOOK JACKET.

Victorian Sensation Fiction

Victorian Sensation Fiction
Author: Jessica Cox
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 190
Release: 2019-04-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1137471727

Since the establishment of sensation fiction in the 1860s, key trends have emerged in critical readings of these texts. From Victorian responses emphasising the 'lowbrow' or potentially dangerous qualities of the genre to the prolific critical attention of the present day, this Reader's Guide identifies the dominant approaches to sensation fiction and charts the critical trends of various scholarly evaluations and interpretations. With coverage spanning empire, class, sexuality and adaptation, this is the ideal companion for students of Victorian Literature looking for an introduction to the key debates surrounding sensation fiction.

Victorian Women and Wayward Reading

Victorian Women and Wayward Reading
Author: Marisa Palacios Knox
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2020-10-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108853471

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.

The Doctor in the Victorian Novel

The Doctor in the Victorian Novel
Author: Tabitha Sparks
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 211
Release: 2016-03-23
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317035402

With the character of the doctor as her subject, Tabitha Sparks follows the decline of the marriage plot in the Victorian novel. As Victorians came to terms with the scientific revolution in medicine of the mid-to-late nineteenth century, the novel's progressive distance from the conventions of the marriage plot can be indexed through a rising identification of the doctor with scientific empiricism. A narrative's stance towards scientific reason, Sparks argues, is revealed by the fictional doctor's relationship to the marriage plot. Thus, novels that feature romantic doctors almost invariably deny the authority of empiricism, as is the case in George MacDonald's Adela Cathcart. In contrast, works such as Wilkie Collins's Heart and Science, which highlight clinically minded or even sinister doctors, uphold the determining logic of science and, in turn, threaten the novel's romantic plot. By focusing on the figure of the doctor rather than on a scientific theme or medical field, Sparks emulates the Victorian novel's personalization of tropes and belief systems, using the realism associated with the doctor to chart the sustainability of the Victorian novel's central imaginative structure, the marriage plot. As the doctors Sparks examines increasingly stand in for the encroachment of empirical knowledge on a morally formulated artistic genre, their alienation from the marriage plot and its interrelated decline succinctly herald the end of the Victorian era and the beginning of Modernism.

Edith Wharton in Context

Edith Wharton in Context
Author: Laura Rattray
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 423
Release: 2012-10-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1107010195

This collection of essays examines the various social, cultural and historical contexts surrounding Edith Wharton's popular and prolific literary career.

Well-Read Lives

Well-Read Lives
Author: Barbara Sicherman
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 393
Release: 2010-04-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0807898244

In a compelling approach structured as theme and variations, Barbara Sicherman offers insightful profiles of a number of accomplished women born in America's Gilded Age who lost--and found--themselves in books, and worked out a new life purpose around them. Some women, like Edith and Alice Hamilton, M. Carey Thomas, and Jane Addams, grew up in households filled with books, while less privileged women found alternative routes to expressive literacy. Jewish immigrants Hilda Satt Polacheck, Rose Cohen, and Mary Antin acquired new identities in the English-language books they found in settlement houses and libraries, while African Americans like Ida B. Wells relied mainly on institutions of their own creation, even as they sought to develop a literature of their own. It is Sicherman's masterful contribution to show that however the skill of reading was acquired, under the right circumstances, adolescent reading was truly transformative in constructing female identity, stirring imaginations, and fostering ambition. With Little Women's Jo March often serving as a youthful model of independence, girls and young women created communities of learning, imagination, and emotional connection around literary activities in ways that helped them imagine, and later attain, public identities. Reading themselves into quest plots and into male as well as female roles, these young women went on to create an unparalleled record of achievement as intellectuals, educators, and social reformers. Sicherman's graceful study reveals the centrality of the era's culture of reading and sheds new light on these women's Progressive-Era careers.

WOMEN’S WRITINGS IN THE NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH CENTURIES

WOMEN’S WRITINGS IN THE NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH CENTURIES
Author: TAISHA ABRAHAM
Publisher: PHI Learning Pvt. Ltd.
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2013-03-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 8120347366

Intended as a text for undergraduate students of English for their course on Women’s Writings in the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries, this compact and well-organized book provides both the history of the development of the short story in America and Britain and a comprehensive introduction to the modes on critical practices based on feminist thinking. It takes into account the strategies used by women writers, and discusses the politics of reception and production keeping especially the gender issue in mind. The text is divided into three parts—Part I: Introduction—containing two chapters that deal with the development of the American short story and the resurgence of radical feminism in America. These provide the historical and the feminist frame within which the short stories by the Anglo American Women’s Writers should be read. Part II gives four short stories: Kate Chopin—The Story of An Hour; Charlotte Perkins Gilman—The Yellow Wallpaper; Willa Cather—Coming, Aphrodite!; and Katherine Mansfield—Bliss. Each short story is preceded by a critical introduction, detailed references for further reading, and a biographical time line. Part III comprises three critical essays which provide sharp insights into the period in which the four women writers were writing. This book will be treasured not only by students but also by those who wish to study critically the feminist writings of the period. In addition, it will enrich readers’ understanding of American and British literary history and culture. The critical introduction to each short story traces the development of the form from its origins, both historically and in terms of female literary contributions to its development. The chapter on Radical Feminism is mapped in the context of social, political and cultural development. The book provides historical, literary and biographical contexts of the writers and their short stories.

Late-Victorian Heroic Lives in the Writings of Frank Mundell

Late-Victorian Heroic Lives in the Writings of Frank Mundell
Author: Moniez Baptiste
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2017-08-21
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1527500640

This study explores the work of Frank Mundell, a late-Victorian author for the Sunday School Union. Mundell focused on heroism and represented various kinds of heroic deeds and figures, regardless of gender, in his books. Writing for educative, as well as entertaining, purposes, he avoided the use of didacticism and he endeavoured to combine the traditional and the modern in the stories he chose to tell. Mundell’s favourite format was that of the prosopography, putting together several heroic lives or incidents. He was careful to dedicate each of his volumes to one topic in particular, thus distinguishing the different types of heroic deeds from one another. His writings belong to four series, or collections, each highlighting a specific version of heroism, from instances of the mundane performed in a familial context to extraordinary deeds. He wrote about such bold acts as those featuring in the stories of brave firemen fighting devouring flames, fearless sailors in tempestuous seas, determined miners risking their lives to save their comrades, or intrepid explorers facing perils in the wide world. This book analyses each of his publications, highlighting the elements belonging to his representation of heroism as a whole.