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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.
In Forces of Nature, the authors investigate the relationships between the natural world and gender and sexuality. The authors explore the frameworks within which femininity and nature have been constructed, as well as the impact nature has had on our understandings of masculinity, homosexuality, and heterosexuality. For some writers nature has restorative powers, for others nature embodies violence and destruction. Yet, one common thread runs across all of the chapters in this collection: nature and animals can not be separated from the human experience. Forces of Nature brings to light the intimate connection humans have with the natural world and provides students and scholars with innovative readings of both canonical and noncanonical texts.
Travel writing has, for centuries, composed an essential historical record and wide-ranging literary form, reflecting the rich diversity of travel as a social and cultural practice, metaphorical process, and driver of globalization. This interdisciplinary volume brings together anthropologists, literary scholars, social historians, and other scholars to illuminate travel writing in all its forms. With studies ranging from colonial adventurism to the legacies of the Holocaust, The Long Journey offers a unique dual focus on experience and genre as it applies to three key realms: memory and trauma, confrontations with the Other, and the cultivation of cultural perspective.
With Huckleberry Finn, American fiction changed radically and shifted its setting to the middle of the country. A focus on social issues replaced the philosophic and psychological explorations that dominated the work of Melville and Hawthorne. Colloquial speech rather than elevated language articulated these fresh ideas, while common folk rather than dramatic characters like Ahab and Hester Prynne played central roles. This transformation of American literature has been largely ignored, while during the 130 years since Huckleberry Finn the Midwest has continued to produce writers whose work, like Twain's, addresses injustice by portraying the decency of ordinary people. Since the end of the ...
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Despite dying in relative obscurity, Jane Austen has become a global force as different readers across time, space and media have responded to her work. This volume examines the ways in which her novels affect individual psychologies and how Janeites experience her work, from visiting her home to public re-enactments to films based on her writings.
This volume is the first comprehensive guide to current research on animals, animality, and human-animal relations in literature. To reflect the history of literary animal studies to date, its primary focus is literary prose and poetry in English, while also accommodating emergent discussions of the full range of media and contexts with which literary studies engages, especially film and critical theory. User-friendly language, references, even suggestions for further readings are included to help newcomers to the field understand how it has taken shape primarily through recent decades. To further aid teachers, sections are organized by conventions of periodization, and chapters address a range of canonical and popular texts. Bookended by sections devoted to the field’s conceptual foundations and new directions, the volume is designed to set an agenda for literary animal studies for decades to come.
Women Rewriting Boundaries expands the work of gender and literary scholars by offering fresh insights on how to read travel writing by women. It analyzes the connections between class, gender, physicality, and sexuality as found in nineteenth-century literature. The authors discuss the myriad ways in which women writers reinforced and challenged Victorian social norms. Inspired by a special topics panel, “Women Writing Boundaries,” presented at the 2013 Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association’s annual convention, this edited collection will be a thought-provoking resource for college- level humanities and gender studies students and their instructors.
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