The Female Reader In The English Novel

Author : Joe Bray
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 354 pages
File Size : 53,9 Mb
Release : 2008-09-25
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781134156139

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The Female Reader in the English Novel by Joe Bray Pdf

This book examines how reading is represented within the novels of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Contemporary accounts portrayed the female reader in particular as passive and impressionable; liable to identify dangerously with the world of her reading. This study shows that female characters are often active and critical readers, and develop a range of strategies for reading both texts and the world around them. The novels of Frances Burney, Charlotte Smith, Mary Hays, Elizabeth Inchbald, Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen (among others) reveal a diversity of reading practices, as how the heroine reads is often more important than what she reads. The book combines close stylistic analysis with a consideration of broader intellectual debates of the period, including changing attitudes towards sympathy, physiognomy and portraiture.

Author : Joe Bray
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 209 pages
File Size : 53,6 Mb
Release : 2008-09-25
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 9781134156146

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The Female Reader in the English Novel by Joe Bray Pdf

In the second half of the eighteenth century the female reader was a frequent topic of cultural debate and moral concern. This book examines the variety of ways in which women ‘read’ the social world in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century novel.

Author : Helen Taylor
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 299 pages
File Size : 40,6 Mb
Release : 2019-12-05
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780192562678

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Why Women Read Fiction by Helen Taylor Pdf

Ian McEwan once said, 'When women stop reading, the novel will be dead.' This book explains how precious fiction is to contemporary women readers, and how they draw on it to tell the stories of their lives. Female readers are key to the future of fiction and—as parents, teachers, and librarians—the glue for a literate society. Women treasure the chance to read alone, but have also gregariously shared reading experiences and memories with mothers, daughters, grandchildren, and female friends. For so many, reading novels and short stories enables them to escape and to spread their wings intellectually and emotionally. This book, written by an experienced teacher, scholar of women's writing, and literature festival director, draws on over 500 interviews with and questionnaires from women readers and writers. It describes how, where, and when British women read fiction, and examines why stories and writers influence the way female readers understand and shape their own life stories. Taylor explores why women are the main buyers and readers of fiction, members of book clubs, attendees at literary festivals, and organisers of days out to fictional sites and writers' homes. The book analyses the special appeal and changing readership of the genres of romance, erotica, and crime. It also illuminates the reasons for British women's abiding love of two favourite novels, Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre. Taylor offers a cornucopia of witty and wise women's voices, of both readers themselves and also writers such as Hilary Mantel, Helen Dunmore, Katie Fforde, and Sarah Dunant. The book helps us understand why—in Jackie Kay's words—'our lives are mapped by books.'

Author : Bernhard Schlink
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 226 pages
File Size : 48,7 Mb
Release : 2001-05-01
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780375726972

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The Reader by Bernhard Schlink Pdf

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • Hailed for its coiled eroticism and the moral claims it makes upon the reader, this mesmerizing novel is a story of love and secrets, horror and compassion, unfolding against the haunted landscape of postwar Germany. "A formally beautiful, disturbing and finally morally devastating novel." —Los Angeles Times When he falls ill on his way home from school, fifteen-year-old Michael Berg is rescued by Hanna, a woman twice his age. In time she becomes his lover—then she inexplicably disappears. When Michael next sees her, he is a young law student, and she is on trial for a hideous crime. As he watches her refuse to defend her innocence, Michael gradually realizes that Hanna may be guarding a secret she considers more shameful than murder.

Author : Susan Ostrov Weisser
Publisher : NYU Press
Page : 493 pages
File Size : 52,8 Mb
Release : 2001-07
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780814793558

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Women and Romance by Susan Ostrov Weisser Pdf

Weisser (English, Adelphi U.) writes that her anthology is "for anyone who is interested in understanding the conflicted but powerful female urge to experience the pleasure and endure the pain of romantic love." In particular, she explores the collision of pervasive media images of romance with feminist values of independence and self-assertion. Several dozen historic and contemporary works of criticism, personal essays, and letters, by feminist and anti-feminist thinkers, consider changing images of romantic love and whether romance, fundamentally, weakens or empowers women. Contributors include Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Charlotte Bronte, Karen Horney, Simone de Beauvoir, Rita Mae Brown, bell hooks, Vivian Gornick, and Carolyn Heilbrun. c. Book News Inc.

Author : Dorothee Birke
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Page : 267 pages
File Size : 46,9 Mb
Release : 2016-08-08
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9783110400069

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Writing the Reader by Dorothee Birke Pdf

The history of the novel is also a history of shifting views of the value of novel reading. This study investigates how novels themselves participate in this development by featuring reading as a multidimensional cultural practice. English novels about obsessive reading, written in times of medial transition, serve as test cases for a model that brings together analyses of form and content.

Author : Rachel M. Brownstein
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 374 pages
File Size : 52,5 Mb
Release : 1994
Category : Education
ISBN : 0231100000

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Becoming a Heroine by Rachel M. Brownstein Pdf

"Brownstein examines how the stories we read influence our notions of how we should live. In fresh, wonderfully nuanced readings of works by Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronté, George Eliot, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf, she considers woman-centered novels as rewritings of romance, and analyzes the thematic links and echoes that connect these works not only to each other but to women's lives. This splendidly provocative book shows how good novels, intelligent heroines, and careful readers are skeptical of the romantic ideal of a perfected, integral self"--Publisher's description, back cover.

Author : Kate Flint
Publisher : Oxford University Press on Demand
Page : 366 pages
File Size : 53,9 Mb
Release : 1995
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0198121857

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The Woman Reader, 1837-1914 by Kate Flint Pdf

This book is an original and fascinating look at the topos of the woman reader and its functioning in cultural debate between the accession of Queen Victoria and the First World War. The issue of women and reading--what they should read; what they should be protected from; how, what, and when they should read--was the focus of lively discussion in the nineteenth century in a wide range of media. Flint uses recent feminist analyses of how women read as a context for her detailed and readable study of these debates, exploring in a variety of texts--from magazines like Woman's World and My Lady's Novelette to works of literature like Jane Eyre and The Portrait of a Lady--the range of stereotypes and directives addressed to women readers, and their influence on the writing of fiction. She also looks at how women readers of all classes understood their own reading experiences.

Author : Amelia Dale
Publisher : Rutgers University Press
Page : 231 pages
File Size : 46,5 Mb
Release : 2019-06-21
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781684481026

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The Printed Reader by Amelia Dale Pdf

The Printed Reader explores the transformative power of reading in the eighteenth century, and how this was expressed in the fascination with Don Quixote and in a proliferation of narratives about quixotic readers, readers who attempt to reproduce and embody their readings. The collection brings together key debates concerning quixotic narratives, print culture, sensibility, empiricism, book history, and the material text, connecting developments in print technology to gendered conceptualizations of quixotism.

Author : Vivien Jones
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 348 pages
File Size : 48,5 Mb
Release : 2000-03-09
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0521586801

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Women and Literature in Britain, 1700-1800 by Vivien Jones Pdf

This book, first published in 2000, is an authoritative volume of new essays on women's writing and reading in the eighteenth century.

Author : Rachael Scarborough King
Publisher : JHU Press
Page : 272 pages
File Size : 49,8 Mb
Release : 2018-06
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 9781421425481

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Writing to the World by Rachael Scarborough King Pdf

Ultimately, Writing to the World is a sophisticated look at the intersection of print and the public sphere.

Author : Kate Flint
Publisher : Oxford : Clarendon Press ; New York : Oxford University Press
Page : 390 pages
File Size : 49,7 Mb
Release : 1993
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : UVA:X002523547

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The Woman Reader, 1837-1914 by Kate Flint Pdf

Why was the topic of women and reading so controversial for the Victorians and Edwardians? What was it assumed that women read, and what advice was given about where, when, and how to read? Kate Flint examines texts ranging from fiction, painting, and poetry, through medical and psychoanalytic works, advice manuals and periodicals, to autobiographies and contemporary social research, in her detailed and readable study of this central cultural debate in nineteenth-century society. Engaging also with debates in recent feminist theory, she explores the manipulation of the figure of the woman reader in well-known works like Charlotte Bronte's Shirley and Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out, in sensation novels and New Woman fiction, and in stories found in series such as The Princess's Novelettes. This is supported by evidence from actual readers - working women, as well as the privileged - as to how they understood their own highly varied reading experiences. This ground-breaking work provides an invaluable source for scholars and students of nineteenth-century culture, and will be essential reading for all interested in current critical debates on women and reading.

Author : Nora Gilbert
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 238 pages
File Size : 51,7 Mb
Release : 2023-07-03
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780198876540

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Gone Girls, 1684-1901 by Nora Gilbert Pdf

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' physical flights from home. The steady current of female flight coursing through this body of literature serves as a powerful counterpoint to the ideals of feminine modesty and happy homemaking it was expected officially to endorse, and challenges some of novel studies' most accepted assumptions. Just as the #MeToo movement has used the tool of repeated, aggregated storytelling to take a stand against contemporary rape culture, Gone Girls, 1684-1901 identifies and amplifies a recurrent strand of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British storytelling that served both to emphasize the prevalence of gendered injustices throughout the period and to narrativize potential ways and means for readers facing such injustices to rebel, resist, and get out.

Author : Caroline Lucas
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 200 pages
File Size : 51,7 Mb
Release : 1989
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : UOM:39015016936901

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Writing for Women by Caroline Lucas Pdf

Author : Rachel Cusk
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 54,8 Mb
Release : 2015-01-13
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780374712365

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Outline by Rachel Cusk Pdf

A luminous, powerful novel that establishes Rachel Cusk as one of the finest writers in the English language A man and a woman are seated next to each other on a plane. They get to talking—about their destination, their careers, their families. Grievances are aired, family tragedies discussed, marriages and divorces analyzed. An intimacy is established as two strangers contrast their own fictions about their lives. Rachel Cusk's Outline is a novel in ten conversations. Spare and stark, it follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing during one oppressively hot summer in Athens. She leads her students in storytelling exercises. She meets other visiting writers for dinner and discourse. She goes swimming in the Ionian Sea with her neighbor from the plane. The people she encounters speak volubly about themselves: their fantasies, anxieties, pet theories, regrets, and longings. And through these disclosures, a portrait of the narrator is drawn by contrast, a portrait of a woman learning to face a great loss. Outline takes a hard look at the things that are hardest to speak about. It brilliantly captures conversations, investigates people's motivations for storytelling, and questions their ability to ever do so honestly or unselfishly. In doing so it bares the deepest impulses behind the craft of fiction writing. This is Rachel Cusk's finest work yet, and one of the most startling, brilliant, original novels of recent years. A Finalist for the Folio Prize, the Goldsmiths Prize, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction One of The New York Times' Top Ten Books of the Year Named a A New York Times Book Review Notable Book and a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, Vogue, NPR, The Guardian, The Independent, Glamour, and The Globe and Mail