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The ambiguities and paradoxes of domestic violence were amplified in Victorian culture, which emphasized the home as a woman's place of security. In The Marked Body, Kate Lawson and Lynn Shakinovsky examine the discarded and violated bodies of middle-class women in selected texts of mid-nineteenth-century fiction and poetry. Guided by observations from feminism, psychoanalysis, and trauma theory, they argue that, in these works, domestic violence is a crucible in which the female body is placed, where it becomes marked by scars and disfigurement. Yet, they contend, these wounds go beyond violence to bring these women to a broader state of female subjectivity, sexuality, and consciousness. The female body, already the site of alterity, is inscribed with something that cannot be expressed; it thus becomes that which is culturally and physically denied, the place which is not.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-61) was one of the most important poets of the nineteenth century and has recently undergone a major critical reappraisal. In this new study, Simon Avery examines a range of her poems, both well known and less familiar, drawn from across her career, in order to explore the concern with the search for a meaningful home which underpins much of her writing. In a series of interrelated chapters on Barrett Browning's religious poetry, love poetry, political poetry, and her major work, Aurora Leigh, he considers the ways in which the speakers and protagonists of her poems constantly search for a place of security and stability even though this often seems finally unattainable. Attention is also given to Barrett Browning's own search for a home in relation to inherited poetic models and traditions, and her establishment of an often radical poetics.
Suzanne Rintoul identifies an important contradiction in Victorian representations of abuse: the simultaneous compulsion to expose and to obscure brutality towards women in intimate relationships. Through case studies and literary analysis, this book illustrates how intimate violence was both spectacular and unspeakable in the Victorian period.
Publisher Description
Dwelling in Possibility cuts across conventional boundaries between critical and creative writing by featuring the work of both women poets and feminist critics as they explore and exemplify the relationship between gender and poetic genres. The contributors suggest new ways of thinking and writing about poetry in light of contemporary questions about history and identity. Most of the contributions are published here for the first time.
Offers a feminist theory of ignorance that sheds light on the misunderstood or overlooked epistemic practices of women in literature. An Ethic of Innocence examines representations of women in American and British fin-de-siècle and modern literature who seem “not to know” things. These naïve fools, Pollyannaish dupes, obedient traditionalists, or regressive anti-feminists have been dismissed by critics as conservative, backward, and out of sync with, even threatening to, modern feminist goals. Grounded in the late nineteenth century’s changing political and generic representations of women, this book provides a novel interpretative framework for reconsidering the epistemic claims of ...
In Gone Girls, 1684-1901, Nora Gilbert argues that the persistent trope of female characters running away from some iteration of 'home' played a far more influential role in the histories of both the rise of the novel and the rise of modern feminism than previous accounts have acknowledged. For as much as the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novel may have worked to establish the private, middle-class, domestic sphere as the rightful (and sole) locus of female authority in the ways that prior critics have outlined, it was also continually showing its readers female characters who refused to buy into such an agenda--refusals which resulted, strikingly often, in those characters' phy...
Writers of Indian origin seldom appear in the South African literary landscape, although the participation of Indian South Africans in the anti-apartheid struggle was anything but insignificant. The collective experiences of violence and the plea for reconciliation that punctuate the rhythms of post-apartheid South Africa delineate a national script in which ethnic, class, and gender affiliations coalesce and patterns of connectedness between diverse communities are forged. Relations and Networks in South African Indian Writing brings the experience of South African Indians to the fore, demonstrating how their search for identity is an integral part of the national scene’s project of conne...
Public debates on the benefits and dangers of mass literacy prompted nineteenth-century British authors to write about illiteracy. Since the early twentieth century writers outside Europe have paid increasing attention to the subject as a measure both of cultural dependence and independence. So far literary studies has taken little notice of this. The Non-Literate Other: Readings of Illiteracy in Twentieth-Century Novels in English offers explanations for this lack of interest in illiteracy amongst scholars of literature, and attempts to remedy this neglect by posing the question of how writers use their literacy to write about a condition radically unlike their own. Answers to this question...
This book re-locates Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘smaller stories’ in the literary and cultural context of the nineteenth century. While Gaskell is recognised as one of the major novelists of her time, the short stories that make up a large proportion of her published work have not yet received the critical attention they deserve. This study re-claims them as an indispensable part of her literary output that enables us to better contextualize and assess her achievement holistically as a highly-skilled woman of letters. The periodicals in which Gaskell’s shorter pieces were published offer a microcosm of nineteenth-century society, and Gaskell took full advantage of the medium to apply a consistent and barbed challenge to cultural and gendered constructs of roles and social behaviour. Although her eminently readable prose still flows easily in her short stories, it is less likely to elide the sharp corners of domestic violence, the disabling experiences of women, the pain of death and loss, and the complications of family life.