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This book examines the popular publications of the Victorian period, illuminating the intricacies of courtship and marriage from the differing perspectives of the working, middle, and upper classes. In contemporary culture, the near obsessive pursuit of love and monogamous bliss is considered "normal," as evidenced by a wide range of online dating sites, television shows such as Sex in the City and The Bachelorette, and an endless stream of Hollywood romantic comedies. Ironically, when it comes to love and marriage, we still wrestle with many of the same emotional and social challenges as our 19th-century predecessors did over 100 years ago. Courtship and Marriage in Victorian England draws ...
Her analysis of images of influential women readers (in Harper's), intellectual women readers (in The Cornhill), independent women readers (in Belgravia), and proto-feminist women readers/critics (in Victoria) indicates that women played a significant role in determining the boundaries of literary culture within these magazines.
This clearly written and wide-ranging study identifies the main features of the sensation novel, analysing its broader cultural significance as well as looking at it in its specific cultural context.
The rhetoric surrounding Empire, freedom, and adventure are nowhere more striking than in nineteenth-century British women’s travel writing. The Right Sort of Woman charts the progression of British feminism in relationship to exploration of the Empire. Precious McKenzie introduces us to the lesser known writings of Florence Douglas Dixie, Mrs. Aubrey Le Blond, and Isabel Savory, and also revisits the more widely read travel texts of Isabella Bird Bishop and Mary Kingsley. Their travel writings explore the hotly debated Victorian ideologies of femininity, equality, and fitness. McKenzie contends that British women travel writers found opportunities for freedom when traveling abroad. Women travelers could participate in what were traditionally men’s sports – hunting, riding, canoeing, shooting, mountaineering – when far away from strict Victorian social codes of behavior. Because of their athletic pursuits while abroad, British women travelers found their health improved as did their self-reliance and self-confidence. McKenzie considers how sports shaped the British feminist movement and then became integral to the revolutionary image of the New Woman at the fin de siècle.
Literary and popular culture has often focused its attention on women readers, particularly since early Victorian times. In Reading Women, an esteemed group of new and established scholars provides a close study of the evolution of the woman reader by examining a wide range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century media, including Antebellum scientific treatises, Victorian paintings, and Oprah Winfrey's televised book club, as well as the writings of Charlotte Bront�, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Zora Neale Hurston. Attending especially to what, how, and why women read, Reading Women brings together a rich array of subjects that sheds light on the defining role the woman reader has played in the formation not only of literary history, but of British and American culture. The contributors break new ground by focusing on the impact representations of women readers have had on understandings of literacy and certain reading practices, the development of book and print culture, and the categorization of texts into high and low cultural forms.
Proposes feminist research principles to assist in making informed decisions to address ethical dilemmas that arise in research and teaching.
This book analyses the cultural and social subordination of women in American society as represented in the American novelistic tradition in the context of sociological, psychological, and historical perspectives peculiar to the period. The selection of the novels has been based on a wide range of different cultural and historical periods, which enables the reader to witness the general outcast position of woman as depicted in the American novel and her subordination in this society by way of some historical and cultural forces. The endeavor has been to illustrate how, from the earliest examples of the American novel depicting colonial life to the contemporary ethnic and minority novels, the persistent negative image as social stereotypes are imposed on women as an unavoidable and unalterable destiny.
Romance's Rival argues that the central plot of the most important genre of the nineteenth century, the marriage plot novel, means something quite different from what we thought. In Victorian novels, women may marry for erotic desire--but they might, instead, insist on "familiar marriage," marrying trustworthy companions who can offer them socially rich lives and futures of meaningful work. Romance's Rival shows how familiar marriage expresses ideas of female subjectivity dating back through the seventeenth century, while romantic marriage felt like a new, risky idea. Undertaking a major rereading of the rise-of-the-novel tradition, from Richardson through the twentieth century, Talia Schaff...
When beautiful Lucy Graham becomes Lady Audley, her future looks secure. But her past is shrouded in mystery, and the disappearance of a young man sparks an investigation that will reveal her dark secret... This new edition explores the novel in the context of nineteenth-century sensation fiction and the lively debates it provoked.
Women and Media is a thoughtful cross-cultural examination of the ways in which women have worked inside and outside mainstream media organizations since the 1970s. Rooted in a series of interviews with women media workers and activists collected specifically for this book, the text provides an original insight into women’s experiences. Explains the ways that women have organized their internal and external campaigns to improve media content (or working conditions) for women, and established womenowned media to gain a public voice. Identifies key issues and developments in feminist media critiques and interventions over the last 30 years, as these relate to production, representation and consumption. Functions as both a research case study and a teaching text.