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Female Gothic Histories: Gender, History and the Gothic is an innovative new study of the ways in which women writers have used Gothic historical fiction to symbolise and counter their exclusion from traditional historical narratives.
This revised and expanded volume examines the intersections of aesthetics and morality and asks what Decadence means to art and society at various moments in British literature. As time passes, the definition of what it takes to be D/decadent changes. The decline from a higher standard, social malaise, aesthetic ennui – all these ideas presume certain facts about the past, the present, and the linear nature of time itself. To reject the past as a given, and to relish the subtleties of present nuance, is the beginning of Decadence. The conflict underlying the contributions to this collection is that of society's moral contempt vis-a-vis the focus on the fleeting present on part of the purportedly decadent artists; who in turn thought the truly decadent to be the stranglehold society maintained on individual interpretation and the interpretation of oneself.
Contends that gender politics were influential in the early development of literary criticism and the writings of female critics
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 q...
Women on Philosophy of Art is the first study of women's philosophies of art in long nineteenth-century Britain. It looks at seven women spanning the time from the Enlightenment to the beginning of modernism. They are Anna Barbauld, Joanna Baillie, Harriet Martineau, Anna Jameson, Frances Power Cobbe, Emilia Dilke, and Vernon Lee. The central issue that concerned them was how art related to morality and religion. Baillie and Martineau treated art as an agency of moral instruction, whereas Dilke and Lee argued that art must be made for beauty's sake. Barbauld, Jameson, and Cobbe thought that beauty and religion were linked, while other women believed that art and religion must be decoupled. O...
Contains previously unpublished and uncollected works of Karen Horney.
Towards an Aisthetics of the Victorian Novel: Senses and Sensations establishes a new analytical method in the broader context of sensory studies in order to explain how the genre of the novel can impact on our perception of ourselves and our social contexts. Taking cultural literary studies ahead, the book re-integrates aesthetics – a much fraught concept in cultural studies that long favoured ‘popular’ over ‘high culture’ – into cultural studies as aisthetics in the word’s root sense of ‘perception’. Zooming in on period shifts and changes in taste spanning realism, sensation fiction and aestheticism, aisthetics reveals how these shifts also pertain to new ways of perceiving in selected novels by George Eliot, Wilkie Collins and Vernon Lee. Connecting Victorian and current literary theories, aisthetics helps explore the way in which the novel can shape the way we perceive the world, what remains excluded from the realm of the perceivable and how our conduct is consequently always also influenced by the dominant genres of our time.
Shedding new light on the alternative, emancipatory Germany discovered and written about by progressive women writers during the long nineteenth century, this illuminating study uncovers a country that offered a degree of freedom and intellectual agency unheard of in England. Opening with the striking account of Anna Jameson and her friendship with Ottilie von Goethe, Linda K. Hughes shows how cultural differences spurred ten writers' advocacy of progressive ideas and provided fresh materials for publishing careers. Alongside well-known writers – Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Michael Field, Elizabeth von Arnim, and Vernon Lee – this study sheds light on the lesser-known writers Mary and Anna Mary Howitt, Jessie Fothergill, and the important Anglo-Jewish lesbian writer Amy Levy. Armed with their knowledge of the German language, each of these women championed an extraordinarily productive openness to cultural exchange and, by approaching Germany through a female lens, imported an alternative, 'other' Germany into English letters.
An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. 2009 was the bicentenary of the birth of the English writer, translator, critic and amateur artist Elizabeth Rigby, Lady Eastlake (1809-1893). Bringing together a comprehensive collection of her surviving correspondence, the Letters of Elizabeth Rigby, Lady Eastlake reveals significant new material about this extraordinary figure in Victorian society. The scope of Lady Eastlake’s writing is wide and interdisciplinary, which recommends her as a significant figure in Victorian culture, giving rise to revelations about the ways in which different cultural activities were linked. L...
Humanity and the Global Odyssey: Cosmopolitanism in Postcolonial Fiction explores the diverse ingredients of cosmopolitanism as the need of the hour in the globalised era. It is a qualitative study that includes sociological (socio-cultural and socio-political), philosophical (moral and existential), and diasporic perspectives. It addresses the key questions of inequality, justice, belonging, freedom, and democracy in the postcolonial world. The book is positioned in postcolonial literature as it paves the way to analyse the set of issues that shape our socio-cultural and political environment of the present day. This book holds an introduction to the various literatures and the epistemology...