Women and Literary Celebrity in the Nineteenth Century

Women and Literary Celebrity in the Nineteenth Century
Author: Brenda R. Weber
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2016-02-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1134772122

Focusing on representations of women's literary celebrity in nineteenth-century biographies, autobiographical accounts, periodicals, and fiction, Brenda R. Weber examines the transatlantic cultural politics of visibility in relation to gender, sex, and the body. Looking both at discursive patterns and specific Anglo-American texts that foreground the figure of the successful woman writer, Weber argues that authors such as Elizabeth Gaskell, Fanny Fern, Mary Cholmondeley, Margaret Oliphant, Elizabeth Robins, Eliza Potter, and Elizabeth Keckley helped create an intelligible category of the famous writer that used celebrity as a leveraging tool for altering perceptions about femininity and female identity. Doing so, Weber demonstrates, involved an intricate gender/sex negotiation that had ramifications for what it meant to be public, professional, intelligent, and extraordinary. Weber's persuasive account elucidates how Gaskell's biography of Charlotte Brontë served simultaneously to support claims for Brontë's genius and to diminish Brontë's body in compensation for the magnitude of those claims, thus serving as a touchstone for later representations of women's literary genius and celebrity. Fanny Fern, for example, adapts Gaskell's maneuvers on behalf of Charlotte Brontë to portray the weak woman's body becoming strong as it is made visible through and celebrated within the literary marketplace. Throughout her study, Weber analyzes the complex codes connected to transatlantic formations of gender/sex, the body, and literary celebrity as women authors proactively resisted an intense backlash against their own success.

Women and Literary Celebrity in the Nineteenth Century

Women and Literary Celebrity in the Nineteenth Century
Author: Dr Brenda R Weber
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Total Pages: 453
Release: 2013-05-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 140947934X

Focusing on representations of women's literary celebrity in nineteenth-century biographies, autobiographical accounts, periodicals, and fiction, Brenda R. Weber examines the transatlantic cultural politics of visibility in relation to gender, sex, and the body. Looking both at discursive patterns and specific Anglo-American texts that foreground the figure of the successful woman writer, Weber argues that authors such as Elizabeth Gaskell, Fanny Fern, Mary Cholmondeley, Margaret Oliphant, Elizabeth Robins, Eliza Potter, and Elizabeth Keckley helped create an intelligible category of the famous writer that used celebrity as a leveraging tool for altering perceptions about femininity and female identity. Doing so, Weber demonstrates, involved an intricate gender/sex negotiation that had ramifications for what it meant to be public, professional, intelligent, and extraordinary. Weber's persuasive account elucidates how Gaskell's biography of Charlotte Brontë served simultaneously to support claims for Brontë's genius and to diminish Brontë's body in compensation for the magnitude of those claims, thus serving as a touchstone for later representations of women's literary genius and celebrity. Fanny Fern, for example, adapts Gaskell's maneuvers on behalf of Charlotte Brontë to portray the weak woman's body becoming strong as it is made visible through and celebrated within the literary marketplace. Throughout her study, Weber analyzes the complex codes connected to transatlantic formations of gender/sex, the body, and literary celebrity as women authors proactively resisted an intense backlash against their own success.

Women Writers and the Artifacts of Celebrity in the Long Nineteenth Century

Women Writers and the Artifacts of Celebrity in the Long Nineteenth Century
Author: Maura Ives
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2016-12-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351871781

In 1788, the Catalogue of Five Hundred Celebrated Authors of Great Britain, Now Living forecast a form of authorship that rested on biographical revelation and media saturation as well as literary achievement. This collection traces the unique experiences of women writers within a celebrity culture that was intimately connected to the expansion of print technology and of visual and material culture in the nineteenth century. The contributors examine a wide range of artifacts, including prefaces, portraits, frontispieces, birthday books, calendars and gossip columns, to consider the nature of women's celebrity and the forces that created it. How did authors like Jane Austen, the Countess of Blessington, Louisa May Alcott, Alice Meynell, and Marie Corelli negotiate the increasing demands for public revelation of the private self? How did gender shape the posthumous participation of women writers such as Jane Austen, Ellen Wood, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Christina Rossetti in celebrity culture? These and other important questions related to the treatment of women in celebrity genres and media, and the strategies women writers used to control their public images, are taken up in this suggestive exploration of how nineteenth and early twentieth century women writers achieved popular, critical, and commercial success.

Women and Literary Celebrity in the Nineteenth Century

Women and Literary Celebrity in the Nineteenth Century
Author: Brenda R. Weber
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2016-02-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 113477219X

Focusing on representations of women's literary celebrity in nineteenth-century biographies, autobiographical accounts, periodicals, and fiction, Brenda R. Weber examines the transatlantic cultural politics of visibility in relation to gender, sex, and the body. Looking both at discursive patterns and specific Anglo-American texts that foreground the figure of the successful woman writer, Weber argues that authors such as Elizabeth Gaskell, Fanny Fern, Mary Cholmondeley, Margaret Oliphant, Elizabeth Robins, Eliza Potter, and Elizabeth Keckley helped create an intelligible category of the famous writer that used celebrity as a leveraging tool for altering perceptions about femininity and female identity. Doing so, Weber demonstrates, involved an intricate gender/sex negotiation that had ramifications for what it meant to be public, professional, intelligent, and extraordinary. Weber's persuasive account elucidates how Gaskell's biography of Charlotte Brontë served simultaneously to support claims for Brontë's genius and to diminish Brontë's body in compensation for the magnitude of those claims, thus serving as a touchstone for later representations of women's literary genius and celebrity. Fanny Fern, for example, adapts Gaskell's maneuvers on behalf of Charlotte Brontë to portray the weak woman's body becoming strong as it is made visible through and celebrated within the literary marketplace. Throughout her study, Weber analyzes the complex codes connected to transatlantic formations of gender/sex, the body, and literary celebrity as women authors proactively resisted an intense backlash against their own success.

The Female Romantics

The Female Romantics
Author: Caroline Franklin
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2012-09-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1136245510

Awarded the Elma Dangerfield Prize by the International Byron Society in 2013 The nineteenth century is sometimes seen as a lacuna between two literary periods. In terms of women’s writing, however, the era between the death of Mary Wollstonecraft and the 1860s feminist movement produced a coherent body of major works, impelled by an ongoing dialogue between Enlightenment ‘feminism’ and late Romanticism. This study focuses on the dynamic interaction between Lord Byron and Madame de Staël, Lady Morgan, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen, challenging previous critics’ segregation of the male Romantic writers from their female peers. The Romantic movement in general unleashed the creative ambitions of nineteenth-century female novelists, and the public voice of Byron in particular engaged them in transnational issues of political, national and sexual freedom. Byronism had itself been shaped by the poet’s incursion onto a literary scene where women readers were dominant and formidable intellectuals such as Madame de Staël were lionized. Byron engaged in rivalrous dialogue with the novels of his female friends and contemporaries, such as Caroline Lamb, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen, whose critiques of Romantic egotism helped prompt his own self-parody in Don Juan. Later Victorian novelists, such as George Sand, the Brontë sisters and Harriet Beecher Stowe, wove their rejection of their childhood attraction to Byronism, and their dawning awareness of the significance for women of Lady Byron’s actions, into the feminist fabric of their art.

Women Writers and the Artifacts of Celebrity in the Long Nineteenth Century

Women Writers and the Artifacts of Celebrity in the Long Nineteenth Century
Author: Ann R. Hawkins
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2012
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780754667025

This collection traces the unique experiences of nineteenth-century women writers within a celebrity culture that was intimately connected to the expansion of print technology and of visual and material culture in the nineteenth century. The contributors examine a range of artifacts, including prefaces, portraits, frontispieces, birthday books and even gossip columns, in this suggestive exploration of how nineteenth-century women writers achieved popular, critical and commercial success.

Literary Celebrity, Gender, and Victorian Authorship, 1850–1914

Literary Celebrity, Gender, and Victorian Authorship, 1850–1914
Author: Alexis Easley
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2011-04-29
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1611490162

This study examines literary celebrity in Britain from 1850 to 1914. Through lively analysis of rare cultural materials, Easley demonstrates the crucial role of the celebrity author in the formation of British national identity. As Victorians toured the homes and haunts of famous writers, they developed a sense of shared national heritage. At the same time, by reading sensational accounts of writers' lives, they were able to reconsider conventional gender roles and domestic arrangements. As women were featured in interviews and profiles, they were increasingly associated with the ephemerality of the popular press and were often excluded from emerging narratives of British literary history, which defined great literature as having a timeless appeal. Nevertheless, women writers were able to capitalize on celebrity media as a way of furthering their own careers and retelling history on their own terms. Press attention had a more positive effect on men's literary careers since they were expected to assume public identities; however, in some cases, media exposure had the effect of sensationalizing their lives, bodies, and careers. With the development of proto-feminist criticism and historiography, the life stories of male writers were increasingly used to expose unhealthy domestic relationships and imagine ideal forms of British masculinity. The first section of Literary Celebrity explores the practice of literary tourism in Victorian Britain, focusing specifically on the homes and haunts of Charles Dickens, Christina Rossetti, George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Harriet Martineau. This investigation incorporates analysis of fascinating cultural texts, including maps, periodicals, and tourist guidebooks. Easley links the practice of literary tourism to a variety of cultural developments, including nationalism, urbanization, spiritualism, the women's movement, and the expansion of popular print culture. The second section provides fresh insight into the ways that celebrity culture informed thedevelopment of Victorian historiography. Easley demonstrates how women were able to re-tell history from a proto-feminist perspective by writing contemporary history, participating in architectural reform movements, and becoming active in literary societi

Kate Field

Kate Field
Author: Gary Scharnhorst
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2008-04-21
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780815608745

Kate Field was among the first celebrity journalists. A literary and cultural sensation, she reported the news while frequently becoming news herself because of her sharp wit and vibrant presence. She wrote for several prestigious newspapers, such as the Boston Post, Chicago Tribune, and New York Herald, as well her own Kate Field’s Washington. Field’s friends and professional acquaintances included Charles Dickens, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Anthony Trollope, and George Eliot. Legendary novelist Henry James patterned the character of Henrietta Stackpole after her in The Portrait of a Lady. In this eloquent and immensely readable biography, Gary Scharnhorst offers a fascinating, often poignant portrait of a fiercely intelligent and enormously independent woman who contributed significantly to America’s intellectual and social life in the late nineteenth century. Kate Field was an outspoken advocate for the rights of black Americans and founder of the first woman’s club in America. She campaigned to make Yosemite a national park and saved John Brown’s Adirondack farm for the nation. The range of Field’s activities should foster interest in her biography from students and scholars of nineteenth-century American literature, women’s studies, journalism, and biography, and from both public and academic libraries.

The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture

The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture
Author: Juliet John
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 813
Release: 2016-07-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0191082104

The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture is a major contribution to the dynamic field of Victorian studies. This collection of 37 original chapters by leading international Victorian scholars offers new approaches to familiar themes including science, religion, and gender, and gives space to newer and emerging topics including old age, fair play, and economics. Structured around three broad sections (Ways of Being: Identity and Ideology, Ways of Understanding: Knowledge and Belief, and Ways of Communicating: Print and Other Cultures), the volume is sub-divided into nine sub-sections each with its own 'lead' essay: on subjectivity, politics, gender and sexuality, place and race, religion, science, material and mass culture, aesthetics and visual culture, and theatrical culture. The collection, like today's Victorian studies, is thoroughly interdisciplinary and yet its substantial Introduction explores a concern which is evident both implicitly and explicitly in the volume's essays: that is, the nature and status of 'literary' culture and the literary from the Victorian period to the present. The diverse and wide-ranging essays present original scholarship framed accessibly for a mixed readership of advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and established scholars.

Transatlantic Travels in Nineteenth-Century Latin America

Transatlantic Travels in Nineteenth-Century Latin America
Author: Adriana Méndez Rodenas
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2013-12-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1611485088

Transatlantic Travels in Nineteenth-Century Latin America: European Women Pilgrims retraces the steps of five intrepid “lady travelers” who ventured into the geography of the New World—Mexico, the Southern Cone, Brazil, and the Caribbean—at a crucial historical juncture, the period of political anarchy following the break from Spain and the rise of modernity at the turn of the twentieth century. Traveling as historians, social critics, ethnographers, and artists, Frances Erskine Inglis (1806–82), Maria Graham (1785–1842), Flora Tristan (1803–44), Fredrika Bremer (1801–65), and Adela Breton (1849–1923) reshaped the map of nineteenth-century Latin America. Organized by themes rather than by individual authors, this book examines European women’s travels as a spectrum of narrative discourses, ranging from natural history, history, and ethnography. Women’s social condition becomes a focal point of their travels. By combining diverse genres and perspectives, women’s travel writing ushers a new vision of post-independence societies. The trope of pilgrimage conditions the female travel experience, which suggests both the meta-end of the journey as well as the broader cultural frame shaping their individual itineraries.