You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
In nineteenth-century England, marriage between first cousins was both legally permitted and perfectly acceptable. After mid-century, laws did not explicitly penalize sexual relationships between parents and children, between siblings, or between grandparents and grandchildren. But for a widower to marry his deceased wife's sister was illegal on the grounds that it constituted incest. That these laws and the mores they reflect strike us today as wrongheaded indicates how much ideas about kinship, marriage, and incest have changed. In Family Likeness, Mary Jean Corbett shows how the domestic fiction of novelists including Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Vi...
Corbett's study explores the relationship between women's experience and the social institutions and cultural forms in which that experience is publicly represented. Challenging the assumption that middle-class Victorian and Edwardian women were confined solely to domesticity, Corbett examines the rhetorical strategies of self-representation by women who participated in public life. She argues that those strategies enabled such women writers as Harriet Martineau, Mary Howitt, and Anne Thackeray Ritchie to create an autobiographical and cultural paradigm privileging private life over public life, effectively redrawing the boundaries between those ostensibly separate spheres. Considering works...
"Inspired especially by feminist scholarship on the fin de siècle, this book rereads and revises Virginia Woolf's relation to the late-Victorian past, to writing by women who were her elder contemporaries, and to feminism and feminist movements around the turn of the twentieth century"--
The first comprehensive guide to the burgeoning field of women's autobiography. Essays from 39 prominent critics and writers explore narratives across the centuries and from around the globe. A list of more than 200 women's autobiographies and a comprehensive bibliography provide invaluable information for scholars, teachers, and readers.
None
Virginia Woolf and Her Female Contemporaries helps us comprehend the ways that women writers and artists contributed to and complicated modernism by contextualizing them alongside Woolf's work.
An overview of women's autobiography, providing historical background and contemporary criticism along with selections from a range of autobiographies by women. It seeks to provide a broad introduction to the major questions dominating autobiographical scholarship today.
Examines the constructions of feminine consumption in the nineteenth century in relation to capitalism and domesticity.
Imagining Women's Property in Victorian Fiction reframes how we think about Victorian women's changing economic rights and their representation in nineteenth-century novels. The reform of married women's property law between 1856 and 1882 constituted one of the largest economic transformations England had ever seen, as well as one of its most significant challenges to family traditions. By the end of this period, women who had once lost their common-law property rights to their husbands reclaimed their own assets, regained economic agency, and forever altered the legal and theoretical nature of wedlock by doing so. Yet in literary accounts, reforms were neither as decisive as the law implied...
This volume charts the rise of professional women writers across diverse fields of intellectual enquiry and through different modes of writing in the period immediately before and during the reign of Queen Victoria. It demonstrates how, between 1830 and 1880, the woman writer became an agent of cultural formation and contestation, appealing to and enabling the growth of female readership while issuing a challenge to the authority of male writers and critics. Of especial importance were changing definitions of marriage, family and nation, of class, and of morality as well as new conceptions of sexuality and gender, and of sympathy and sensation. The result is a richly textured account of a radical and complex process of feminization whereby formal innovations in the different modes of writing by women became central to the aesthetic, social, and political formation of British culture and society in the nineteenth century.