The History of British Women's Writing, 1830-1880

The History of British Women's Writing, 1830-1880
Author: Lucy Hartley
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 371
Release: 2018-09-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1137584653

This volume charts the rise of professional women writers across diverse fields of intellectual enquiry and through different modes of writing in the period immediately before and during the reign of Queen Victoria. It demonstrates how, between 1830 and 1880, the woman writer became an agent of cultural formation and contestation, appealing to and enabling the growth of female readership while issuing a challenge to the authority of male writers and critics. Of especial importance were changing definitions of marriage, family and nation, of class, and of morality as well as new conceptions of sexuality and gender, and of sympathy and sensation. The result is a richly textured account of a radical and complex process of feminization whereby formal innovations in the different modes of writing by women became central to the aesthetic, social, and political formation of British culture and society in the nineteenth century.

The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women's Writing

The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women's Writing
Author: Lesa Scholl
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 1753
Release: 2022-12-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3030783189

Since the late twentieth century, there has been a strategic campaign to recover the impact of Victorian women writers in the field of English literature. However, with the increased understanding of the importance of interdisciplinarity in the twenty-first century, there is a need to extend this campaign beyond literary studies in order to recognise the role of women writers across the nineteenth century, a time that was intrinsically interdisciplinary in approach to scholarly writing and public intellectual engagement.

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

British Women's Writing from Brontë to Bloomsbury, Volume 2
Author: Adrienne E. Gavin
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2020-08-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3030385280

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.

Model Women of the Press

Model Women of the Press
Author: Teja Varma Pusapati
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2024-02-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000988007

This book offers the first extended account of the mid-century rise of ‘model women of the press’: women who not only stormed the male bastions of social and political journalism but also presented themselves as upholders of the highest standards of professional journalistic practice. They broke the codes of anonymity in several ways, including signing articles in their own names and developing distinctly female personae. They proved, by example, women’s fitness for conventionally masculine lines of journalism. By placing Victorian women’s serious, high-minded journalism firmly within the context of ‘the widening sphere’ of female professions in mid-nineteenth-century England, the book shows how a wide range of women writers, including leading Victorian feminists and female reformers, contributed to the professionalization of women’s authorship. Drawing on extensive archival research and close analysis of a wide range of printed texts, from Victorian newspapers and periodicals to autobiographies, memoirs, and fiction, this book elucidates several aspects of Victorian women’s journalism that have been previously ignored: the market interest of the feminist English Woman’s Journal; the ability of women like Eliza Meteyard and Frances Power Cobbe to write consistently on serious social and political issues in mainstream periodicals; Harriet Ward’s astonishing reportage from the war fields of South Africa; and Harriet Martineau’s reports on Famine-devastated Ireland and her role as a transatlantic commentator on American abolitionism. The study also offers the first focused account of the figure of the female professional journalist in Victorian novels, showing how these texts move away from the dominant myth of the author as a solitary genius to present the female journalist as a collaborator who adapts her writing to fit various newspapers and periodicals, and works closely with male editors and peers. In examining the rise of the Victorian woman writer as a serious social and political journalist, this book adds to current critical understanding of female political expression, authorial agency, and cultural authority in nineteenth-century England.

Literature in a Time of Migration

Literature in a Time of Migration
Author: Josephine McDonagh
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2021-05-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0192648861

Literature in a Time of Migration offers a profound rethinking of British fiction in light of the new practices of human mobility that reshaped the nineteenth-century world. Building on the growing critical engagement with globalization in literary studies, it confronts the paradox that at a time when transnational human movement occurred globally on an unprecedented scale, British fiction appeared to turn inward to tell stories of local places that valorized stability and rootedness. In contrast, this book reveals how literary works, from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the advent of the New Imperialism, were active components of a culture of colonization and emigration. Fictional texts, as print commodities, were enmeshed in technologies of transport and communication, and innovations in literary form were spurred by the conditions and consequences of human movement. Examining works by Scott, Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, and George Eliot, as well as popular contemporaries, Mary Russell Mitford, John Galt, and Thomas Martin Wheeler, this volume demonstrates how literary texts overlap with an agenda set in public discussions of colonial emigration that they also helped to shape. Debates about assisted emigration, 'forced' and 'free' migration, colonization, settlement, and the removal of native peoples, figure in fictions in complex ways. Read alongside writings by emigration theorists, practitioners, and enthusiasts for colonization, fictional texts reveal a powerful and sustained engagement with British migratory practices and their worldwide consequences. Literature in a Time of Migration is a timely reminder of the place and importance of migration within British cultural heritage.

Gone Girls, 1684-1901

Gone Girls, 1684-1901
Author: Nora Gilbert
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2023-07-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0198876548

In Gone Girls, 1684-1901, Nora Gilbert argues that the persistent trope of female characters running away from some iteration of 'home' played a far more influential role in the histories of both the rise of the novel and the rise of modern feminism than previous accounts have acknowledged. For as much as the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novel may have worked to establish the private, middle-class, domestic sphere as the rightful (and sole) locus of female authority in the ways that prior critics have outlined, it was also continually showing its readers female characters who refused to buy into such an agenda--refusals which resulted, strikingly often, in those characters' physical flights from home. The steady current of female flight coursing through this body of literature serves as a powerful counterpoint to the ideals of feminine modesty and happy homemaking it was expected officially to endorse, and challenges some of novel studies' most accepted assumptions. Just as the #MeToo movement has used the tool of repeated, aggregated storytelling to take a stand against contemporary rape culture, Gone Girls, 1684-1901 identifies and amplifies a recurrent strand of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British storytelling that served both to emphasize the prevalence of gendered injustices throughout the period and to narrativize potential ways and means for readers facing such injustices to rebel, resist, and get out.

The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature

The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature
Author: Dennis Denisoff
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 753
Release: 2019-11-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0429018177

The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature offers 45 chapters by leading international scholars working with the most dynamic and influential political, cultural, and theoretical issues addressing Victorian literature today. Scholars and students will find this collection both useful and inspiring. Rigorously engaged with current scholarship that is both historically sensitive and theoretically informed, the Routledge Companion places the genres of the novel, poetry, and drama and issues of gender, social class, and race in conversation with subjects like ecology, colonialism, the Gothic, digital humanities, sexualities, disability, material culture, and animal studies. This guide is aimed at scholars who want to know the most significant critical approaches in Victorian studies, often written by the very scholars who helped found those fields. It addresses major theoretical movements such as narrative theory, formalism, historicism, and economic theory, as well as Victorian models of subjects such as anthropology, cognitive science, and religion. With its lists of key works, rich cross-referencing, extensive bibliographies, and explications of scholarly trajectories, the book is a crucial resource for graduate students and advanced undergraduates, while offering invaluable support to more seasoned scholars.

Frances Power Cobbe

Frances Power Cobbe
Author: Alison Stone
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2022-02-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 0197628222

This volume brings together essential writings by the unjustly neglected nineteenth-century philosopher Frances Power Cobbe (1822-1904). A prominent ethicist, feminist, champion of animal welfare, and critic of Darwinism and atheism, Cobbe was well known and highly regarded in the Victorian era. This collection of her work introduces contemporary readers to Cobbe and shows how her thought developed over time, beginning in 1855 with her Essay on Intuitive Morals, in which she set out her duty-based moral theory, arguing that morality and religion are indissolubly connected. This work provided the framework within which she addressed many theoretical and practical issues in her prolific publishing career. In the 1860s and early 1870s, she gave an account of human duties to animals; articulated a duty-based form of feminism; defended a unique type of dualism in the philosophy of mind; and argued against evolutionary ethics. Cobbe put her philosophical views into practice, campaigning for women's rights and for first the regulation and later the abolition of vivisection. In turn her political experiences led her to revise her ethical theory. From the 1870s onwards she increasingly emphasized the moral role of the emotions, especially sympathy, and she theorized a gradual historical progression in sympathy. Moving into the 1880s, Cobbe combatted secularism, agnosticism, and atheism, arguing that religion is necessary not only for morality but also for meaningful life and culture. Shedding light on Cobbe's philosophical perspective and its applications, this volume demonstrates the range, systematicity and philosophical character of her work and makes her core ethical theory and its central applications and developments available for teaching and scholarship.

Democratising Beauty in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Democratising Beauty in Nineteenth-Century Britain
Author: Lucy Hartley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 317
Release: 2017-08-03
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1107184088

This book examines nineteenth-century interests in beauty, and considers whether these aesthetic pursuits were necessary to British public life.

Serial Forms

Serial Forms
Author: Clare Pettitt
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2020-06-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0192566172

Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815–1848 proposes an entirely new way of reading the transition into the modern. It is the first book in a series of three which will take the reader up to the end of the First World War, moving from a focus on London to a global perspective. Serial Forms sets out the theoretical and historical basis for all three volumes. It suggests that, as a serial news culture and a stadial historicism developed together between 1815 and 1848, seriality became the dominant form of the nineteenth century. Through serial newsprint, illustrations, performances, and shows, the past and the contemporary moment enter into public visibility together. Serial Forms argues that it is through seriality that the social is represented as increasingly politically urgent. The insistent rhythm of the serial reorganizes time, recalibrates and rescales the social, and will prepare the way for the 1848 revolutions which are the subject of the next book. By placing their work back into the messy print and performance culture from which it originally appeared, Serial Forms is able to produce new and exciting readings of familiar authors such as Scott, Byron, Dickens, and Gaskell. Rather than offering a rarefied intellectual history or chopping up the period into ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’, Clare Pettitt tracks the development of communications technologies and their impact on the ways in which time, history and virtuality are imagined.