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A fascinating, inspirational look at the relationships between some of our best-loved female authors and their little-known literary collaborators and friends
Focusing particularly on the critical reception of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot, Joanne Wilkes offers in-depth examinations of reviews by eight female critics: Maria Jane Jewsbury, Sara Coleridge, Hannah Lawrance, Jane Williams, Julia Kavanagh, Anne Mozley, Margaret Oliphant and Mary Augusta Ward. What they wrote about women writers, and what their writings tell us about the critics' own sense of themselves as women writers, reveal the distinctive character of nineteenth-century women's contributions to literary history. Wilkes explores the different choices these critics, writing when women had to grapple with limiting assumptions about female intellectual capacities, mad...
British Communism and the Politics of Race explores the role that the Communist Party of Great Britain played within the anti-racism movement in Britain from the 1940s to the 1980s. As one of the first organisations to undertake serious anti-colonial and anti-racist activism within the British labour movement, the CPGB was a pioneering force that campaigned against racial discrimination, popular imperialism and fascist violence in British society. The book examines the balancing act that the Communist Party negotiated in its anti-racist work, between making appeals to the labour movement to get involved in the fight against racism and working with Britain's ethnic minority communities, who often felt let down by the trade unions and the Labour Party. Transitioning from a class-based outlook to an embrace of the new social movements of the 1960s–70s, the CPGB played an important role in the anti-racist struggle, but by the 1980s, it was eclipsed by more radical and diverse activist organisations.
The first full-length study of Shakespeare's influence on Victorian women writers, actresses and readers.
Centering her discussion on two historical "ways of reading"--Which she calls the Protestant and the lettered - Barbara A. Johnson traces the development of a Protestant readership as it is reflected in the reception of Langland's Piers Plowman and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. Informed by reader-response and reception theory and literacy and cultural studies, Johnson's ambitious examination of these two ostensibly literary texts charts the cultural roles they played in the centuries following their composition, roles far more important than their modern critical reputations can explain. The reception of these two works, revealing as it does changing ideas concerning the nature and status of ...
This bold and compelling revisionist history tells the remarkable story of the forgotten lives and labours of Shakespeare's women editors.
Crammed with information, The Brontës in Context shows how the Brontës' fiction interacts with the spirit of the time.
Home and Away: The Place of the Child Writer is an important contribution to the fast-growing and rapidly evolving field of literary juvenilia studies. This collection of essays by fifteen scholars is the first in this area to be published in the past decade. To reflect recent developments, Home and Away both theorises the current state of this richly interdisciplinary academic field and exemplifies juvenilia studies in action. An authoritative review of the origins and future of literary juvenilia studies is followed by a collection of essays on individual authors. Wide-ranging in literary periods covered, geographical regions represented, and methodological approaches employed, the collect...
This book explores the intersections of gender with class and race in the construction of national and imperial ideologies and their fluid transformation from the Romantic to the Victorian period and beyond, exposing how these cultural constructions are deeply entangled with the family metaphor. For example, by examining the re-signification of the “angel in the house” and the deviant woman in the context of unstable or contingent masculinities and across discourses of class and nation, the volume contributes to a more nuanced understanding of British cultural constructions in the long nineteenth century. The central idea is to unearth the historical roots of the family metaphor in the construction of national and imperial ideologies, and to uncover the interests served by its specific discursive formation. The book explores both male and female stereotypes, enabling a more perceptive comparison, enriched with a nuanced reflection on the construction and social function of class.