You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Examining the works of such Victorian writers as the Brontes, Dickens, Eliot, and Hardy, this study discusses codes and taboos about the female body and explores how female sexuality was represented in Victorian literary and non-literary genres, such as painting, etiquette books and pornography.
This study takes the notion of "otherness"--As it has traditionally been applied by Simone de Beauvoir and other feminists - to describe women's relationships with each other and to explain how these relationships have been textually and culturally represented.
While Victorian tourism and Victorian sexuality have been the subject of much critical interest, there has been little research on a characteristically nineteenth-century phenomenon relating to both sex and travel: the honeymoon, or wedding journey. Although the term 'honeymoon' was coined in the eighteenth century, the ritual increased in popularity throughout the Victorian period, until by the end of the century it became a familiar accompaniment to the wedding for all but the poorest classes. Using letters and diaries of 61 real-life honeymooning couples, as well as novels from Frankenstein to Middlemarch that feature honeymoon scenarios, Michie explores the cultural meanings of the honeymoon, arguing that, with its emphasis on privacy and displacement, the honeymoon was central to emerging ideals of conjugality and to ideas of the couple as a primary social unit.
Part biography, part detective novel, part love story, and part meditation on archival research, Love Among the Archives is the story of two literary critics' attempts to track down Sir George Scharf, the founding director of the National Portrait Gallery
A NEW COMPANION TO VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE The Victorian period was a time of rapid cultural change, which resulted in a huge and varied literary output. A New Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture offers experienced guidance to the literature of nineteenth-century Britain and its social and historical context. This revised and expanded edition comprises contributions from over 30 leading scholars who, approaching the Victorian epoch from different positions and traditions, delve into the unruly complexities of the Victorian imagination. Divided into five parts, this new Companion surveys seven decades of history before examining the key phases in a Victorian life, the leading professions and walks of life, the major literary genres, the way Victorians defined their persons, homes, and national identity, and how recent “neo-Victorian” developments in contemporary culture reconfigure the sense we make of the past today. Important topics such as sexuality, denominational faith, social class, and global empire inform each chapter’s approach. Each chapter provides a comprehensive bibliography of established and emerging scholarship.
Focusing on women's writing of the last two centuries, Scenes of the Apple traces the intricate relationship between food and body image for women. Ranging over a variety of genres, including novels, culinary memoirs, and essays, the contributors explore works by a diverse group of writers, including Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Toni Morrison, Tsitsi Dangarembga, and Jeanette Winterson, as well as such nonliterary documents as discussions of Queen Victoria's appetite and news coverage of suffragettes' hunger strikes. Moreover, in addressing works by Hispanic, African, African American, Jewish, and lesbian writers, the book explodes the myth that only white, privileged, and heterosexual women are concerned with body image, and shows the many cultural contexts in which food and cooking are important in women's literature. Above all, the essays pay tribute to the rich and multiple meanings of food in women's writing as a symbol for all kinds of delightful—and transgressive—desires.
From the cutting edge to the basics The latest advances as well as the essentials of feminist literary theory are at your fingertips as soon as you open this brand-new reference work. It features-in quick and convenient form-precise definitions of important terms and concise summaries of the salient ideas of critics working in the field who have made significant contributions to feminist literary studies, and points out how a feminist perspective has affected the development of emerging ideas and intellectual practices. Every effort has been made to include as many feminist thinkers as possible. Expanded coverage of key subjects Overview entries cover topics ranging from creativity, beauty, ...
In the early 19th century, Cuba emerged as the world’s largest producer of sugar and the United States its most important buyer. Barely documented today, there was a close commercial relationship between Cuba and the Rhode Island coastal town of Bristol. The citizens of Bristol were heavily involved in the slavery trade and owned sugarcane plantations in Cuba and also served as staff workers at these facilities. Available in print for the first time is a diary that sheds light on this connection. Mr. George Howe, Esquire (1791–1837), documented his tasks at a Bristolian-owned plantation called New Hope, which was owned by well-known Bristol merchant, slave trader, and US senator James De...
“A totally engaging read [and] a fascinating look at the diversity and range of female comics . . . by an author who herself obviously has a sense of humor.” —Joanna E. Rapf, coeditor of The Blackwell Companion to Film Comedy Women in comedy have traditionally been pegged as either “pretty” or “funny.” Attractive actresses with good comic timing such as Katherine Hepburn, Lucille Ball, and Julia Roberts have always gotten plum roles as the heroines of romantic comedies and television sitcoms. But fewer women who write and perform their own comedy have become stars—and often they’ve been successful because they were willing to be funny-looking, from Fanny Brice and Phyllis D...