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Unhappy relationships are the stuff of fiction--or so Lynette Felber observes as she examines the lives and fiction of five modernist women writers whose lovers were also literary figures. Focusing on Anaïs Nin, Rebecca West, Zelda Fitzgerald, Radclyffe Hall, and H.D., she investigates the ways these female authors made use of their relationships in their fiction. Whether heterosexual or lesbian, these women struggled to assert the authority of their own literary voices and to achieve professional recognition distinct from their partners. The modernist period, when British and American women first began to exercise their newly granted political rights, provides a particularly interesting ba...
As a scandalized Victorian society looks on, Alice Vavasor, Lady Glencora, and the Widow Greenow continue their romantic entanglements with disreputable suitors. Trollope deftly explores the tensions in Victorian society between reform and tradition, and the interplay between money, power, and politics.
Until about 1986, feminists generally considered modernism a reactionary, misogynist, and hegemonic mire not worth investigating. Since then enough studies of modernism have appeared that 17 feminist critics can now review and debate their treatment of the period. They evaluate the progress and goals of the new era of modernist scholarship. As the authors in this volume suggest, instead of condemning writers for not practicing or portraying an acceptable politics of gender, we ought instead to show how their assumptions about the nature of the sexes inform their texts, both in their creation and in their reception. This also allows examination of the complex and changing relationship between human subjectivity and aesthetics. This volume is a highly reflective dialogue, introspective and evaluative, at a moment of crisis within modernist studies and feminist studies. The analysis of critical work on early-twentieth-century literature not only helps reread and redefine a definition of modernism; it also intends to redirect and reintegrate feminist theory.
George Eliot wrote that "man cannot do without the make-believe of a beginning." Beginnings, it turns out, can be quite unusual, complex, and deceptive. The first major volume to focus on this critical but neglected topic, this collection brings together theoretical studies and critical analyses of beginnings in a wide range of narrative works spanning several centuries and genres. The international and interdisciplinary scope of these essays, representing every major theoretical perspective--including feminist, cognitive, postcolonial, postmodern, rhetorical, ethnic, narratological, and hypert.
Ranging from the turn of the nineteenth century to the last few years of the twentieth century, The Swarming Streets explores the representation of London in the last century through some of the major writers who have made it the foundation of their work. The natural companion to recent major histories and biographies of the metropolis, students and researchers alike will find major new essays on Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, Storm Jameson, E. Nesbit, Julian Barnes, Iain Sinclair, Graham Swift, B. S. Johnson, and Andrea Levy and others. Drawing on a rich variety of critical approaches, each essay is distinct as well as contributing to an overall analysis of literary representations of twentieth-century London.
Recent criticism is now fully appreciating the nuanced and complex contribution made by Dissenters to the culture and ideas of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Britain. This is the first sustained study of a Dissenting family - the Aikins - from the 1740s to the 1860s. Essays by literary critics, historians of religion and science, and geographers explore and contextualize the achievements of this remarkable family, including John Aikin senior, tutor at the celebrated Warrington Academy, and his children, poet Anna Letitia Barbauld, and John Aikin junior, literary physician and editor. The latter's children in turn were leading professionals and writers in the early Victorian era. This study provides new perspectives on the social and cultural importance of the family and their circle - an untold story of collaboration and exchange, and a narrative which breaks down period boundaries to set Enlightenment and Victorian culture in dialogue.
In Victorian Reformations: Historical Fiction and Religious Controversy, 1820-1900, Miriam Elizabeth Burstein analyzes the ways in which Christian novelists across the denominational spectrum laid claim to popular genres—most importantly, the religious historical novel—to narrate the aftershocks of 1829, the year of Catholic Emancipation. Both Protestant and Catholic popular novelists fought over the ramifications of nineteenth-century Catholic toleration for the legacy of the Reformation. But despite the vast textual range of this genre, it remains virtually unknown in literary studies. Victorian Reformations is the first book to analyze how “high” theological and historical debates...
Laurie Langbauer argues that our worldview is shaped not just by great public events but also by the most overlooked and familiar aspects of common life—"the everyday." This sphere of the everyday has always been a crucial component of the novel, but has been ignored by many writers and critics and long associated with the writing of women. Focusing on the linked series of novels characteristic of later Victorian and early modern fiction—such as Margaret Oliphant's Carlingford Chronicles or the Sherlock Holmes stories—she investigates how authors make use of the everyday as a foundation to support their versions of realism. What happens when—in the series novel, or in contemporary th...
Based on the author's dissertation (doctoral)--City University of New York, 2014.
Scotland: Global Cinema focuses on the explosion of filmmaking in Scotland in the 1990s and 2000s. It explores the various cinematic fantasies of Scotland created by contemporary filmmakers from all over the world who braved the weather to shoot in Scotla