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Recent books and exhibitions have shown that Victorians were not so straitlaced about sexual matters as has been popularly assumed. Ellen Bayuk Rosenman's engrossing and enlightening book proves that the Victorians were extraordinarily articulate and resourceful when it came to expressing their sexual desires. Narratives of erotic experience were written, justified to the conservative culture, and circulated for the pleasure of readers. Rosenman's exploration of masculinity and femininity in Victorian sexual storytelling includes an account of the "spermatorrhea panic" that terrified the men of Britain, tells of Theresa Longworth's erotic revisions of the romance plot, and takes up the exhau...
"Other Mothers, edited by Ellen Bayuk Rosenman and Claudia C. Klaver, offers a range of essays that open a conversation about Victorian motherhood as a wide-ranging, distinctive experience and idea. In spite of its importance, however, it is one of the least-studied aspects of the Victorian era, subsumed under discussions of femininity and domesticity." "Other Mothers joins revisionist approaches to femininity that now characterize Victorian studies. Its contents trace intersections among gender, race, and class; question the power of separate spheres ideology; and insist on the context-specific nature of social roles. The fifteen essays in this volume contribute to the fields of literary criticism, history, cultural studies, and history."--BOOK JACKET.
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction, wrote Virginia Woolf. Published in 1920, A Room of One's Own has often been heralded as the first modern work of feminist criticism. It remains one of the most widely read, quoted, and analyzed texts of its kind. Ellen Rosenman describes the book's genesis as the sense of exclusion Woolf and many women experienced when confronted with the sexism and elitism of the British university system of their day. Rosenman offers a balanced appraisal, refusing to ignore the difficulties with Woolf's argument and in particular, her inconsistencies and contradictions.
Mothers and daughters -- the female figures neglected by classic psychoanalysis and submerged in traditional narrative -- are at the center of this book. The novels of nineteenth- and twentieth-century women writers from the Western European and North American traditions reveal that the story of motherhood remains the unspeakable plot of Western culture. Focusing on the feminine and, more controversially, on the maternal, this book alters our perception of both the familial structures basic to traditional narrative -- the Oedipus story -- and the narrative structures basic to traditional representations of the family -- Freud's family romance. Confronting psychoanalytic theories of subject-formation with narrative theories, Marianne Hirsch traces the emergence and transformation of female family romance patterns from Jane Austen to Marguerite Duras.
Explores the journalism and fiction appearing in the early Victorian working-class periodical press and its influence on mainstream literature.
Originally describing language use and class position, vulgarity became, over the course of the nineteenth century, a word with wider social implications. Variously associated with behavior, the possession of wealth, different races, sexuality and gender, the objects displayed in homes, and ways of thinking and feeling, vulgarity suggested matters of style, taste, and comportment. This collection examines the diverse ramifications of vulgarity in the four areas where it was most discussed in the nineteenth century: language use, changing social spaces, the emerging middle classes, and visual art. Exploring the dynamics of the term as revealed in dictionaries and grammars; Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor; fiction by Dickens, Eliot, Gissing, and Trollope; essays, journalism, art, and art reviews, the contributors bring their formidable analytical skills to bear on this enticing and divisive concept. Taken together, these essays urge readers to consider the implications of vulgarity's troubled history for today's writers, critics, and artists.
She attempts to define and explore her value system using two fabricated measuring standards, the public psychometer of great art and the private psychometer of instinct or taste. These often conflicting standards, however, lead her into a maze of circular reasoning and contradiction. In order to escape her cultural context, Woolf needed an Archimedes point, some distant position and objective perspective from which to view and judge the whole of society.
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 fema...
An "exploration of how our society has commodified feminism and continues to systemically shut out women of color"--
Virginia Woolf identified the influence on her work of 'the Cambridge Apostles', the philosophical society which counted G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell and much of male Bloomsbury among its members, as one more 'capable of description' than 'the influence of my mother'. In this major study of Woolf's relationship to Bloomsbury and the aesthetic and philosophical developments of her time, Ann Banfield subjects that influence to a full treatment. The theory of knowledge Moore and Russell formulated, Banfield argues, profoundly affected Woolf's conception of reality, as it did Roger Fry's theory of Post-Impressionism, one source for Woolf's transformations of philosophical principles into aesthetic ones. The Phantom Table is a magisterial account of Woolf's engagement with this remarkable trinity of thinkers: Moore, Russell, Fry. It revises the epistemology of modernism, reconceiving the relation between realism and formalism to account for Woolf's dual reality of sense impressions and logical forms.