The Maternal Voice In Victorian Fiction

Author : Barbara Z. Thaden
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 180 pages
File Size : 52,5 Mb
Release : 2013-10-28
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781135814434

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The Maternal Voice in Victorian Fiction by Barbara Z. Thaden Pdf

This is the first full-length study to focus specifically on representations of motherhood in fiction by such Victorian writers as Elizabeth Gaskell, Margaret Oliphant, Caroline Norton, and Ellen Price Wood. These authors presented an idealized view of motherhood as part of a campaign to gain social and legal status for mothering in a society in which married women were not legal entities and children born in wedlock were the inalienable property of their fathers. These writers used dead mother plots which reversed New Testament parables so that the mother plays the leading role, and maternal circle plots, which portray adult daughters and their mothers raising children outside marriage. This fiction, which showed how children benefit from good mothering, was instrumental in married mothers eventually obtaining equal parental rights.

Author : Rebecca Styler
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 205 pages
File Size : 48,7 Mb
Release : 2023-07-10
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781000892994

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The Maternal Image of God in Victorian Literature by Rebecca Styler Pdf

This book is the study of a religious metaphor: the idea of God as a mother, in British and US literature 1850–1915. It uncovers a tradition of writers for whom divine motherhood embodied ideals felt to be missing from the orthodox masculine deity. Elizabeth Gaskell, Josephine Butler, George Macdonald, Frances Hodgson Burnett and Charlotte Perkins Gilman independently reworked their inherited faith to create a new symbol that better met their religious needs, based on ideal Victorian notions of motherhood and ‘Mother Nature’. Divine motherhood signified compassion, universal salvation and a realised gospel of social reform led primarily by women to establish sympathetic community. Connected to Victorian feminism, it gave authority to women’s voices and to ‘feminine’ cultural values in the public sphere. It represented divine immanence within the world, often providing the grounds for an ecological ethic, including human–animal fellowship. With reference also to writers including Charlotte Brontë, Anna Jameson, Charles Kingsley, Elizabeth Charles, Theodore Parker, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mary Baker Eddy and authors of literary utopias, this book shows the extent of maternal theology in Victorian thought and explores its cultural roots. The book reveals a new way in which Victorian writers creatively negotiated between religious tradition and modernity.

Author : Kate Mitchell
Publisher : Springer
Page : 373 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2010-07-16
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780230283121

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History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction by Kate Mitchell Pdf

A PDF version of this book is available for free in open access via the OAPEN Library platform, www.oapen.org. Arguing that neo-Victorian fiction enacts and celebrates cultural memory, this book uses memory discourse to position these novels as dynamic participants in the contemporary historical imaginary.

Author : Brigid Lowe
Publisher : Anthem Press
Page : 272 pages
File Size : 41,7 Mb
Release : 2007-03-07
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781843317746

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Victorian Fiction and the Insights of Sympathy by Brigid Lowe Pdf

This book explores the importance of sympathy as a central idea behind Victorian fiction, and an animating principle of novel reading generally. Sympathy, Brigid Lowe argues, deserves a much more important role as both a subject and a guiding principle for literary criticism.

Author : Nancy S. Weyant
Publisher : Scarecrow Press
Page : 506 pages
File Size : 54,5 Mb
Release : 2004
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0810850060

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Elizabeth Gaskell by Nancy S. Weyant Pdf

"A great deal has been written about Elizabeth Gaskell in the past decade, and Elizabeth Gaskell: An Annotated Guide to English Language Sources, 1992-2001 builds upon Weyant's 1994 work which covered some 350 sources published between 1976 and 1991. This supplement identifies almost 600 new books, book chapters, journal articles, dissertations, and master and honor theses on the life and writings of Gaskell. Contents include two appendixes of new editions of Gaskell's works in print and digital, audio, and video formats; a selection of websites; citations of many brief articles in the Gaskell Newsletter that are generally ignored in standard indexes; numerous sources that would otherwise be difficult to locate; and an author and subject index."--Quatrième de couverture

Author : Carolyn Lambert,Marion Shaw
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 218 pages
File Size : 41,8 Mb
Release : 2017-08-29
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781351855365

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For Better, For Worse by Carolyn Lambert,Marion Shaw Pdf

This interdisciplinary volume explores the fictional portrayal of marriage by women novelists between 1800 and 1900. It investigates the ways in which these novelists used the cultural form of the novel to engage with and contribute to the wider debates of the period around the fundamental cultural and social building block of marriage. The collection provides an important contribution to the emerging scholarly interest in nineteenth-century marriage, gender studies, and domesticity, opening up new possibilities for uncovering submerged, marginalized, and alternative stories in Victorian literature. An initial chapter outlines the public discourses around marriage in the nineteenth century, the legal reforms that were achieved as a result of public pressure, and the ways in which these laws and economic concerns impacted on the marital relationship. It beds the collection down in current critical thinking and draws on life writing, journalism, and conduct books to widen our understanding of how women responded to the ideological and cultural construct of marriage. Further chapters examine a range of texts by lesser-known writers as well as canonical authors structured around a timeline of the major legal reforms that impacted on marriage. This structure provides a clear framework for the collection, locating it firmly within contemporary debate and foregrounding female voices. An afterword reflects back on the topic of marriage in the nineteenth- century and considers how the activism of the period influenced and shaped reform post-1900. This volume will make an important contribution to scholarship on Victorian Literature, Gender Studies, Cultural Studies, and the Nineteenth Century.

Author : Carolyn Dever
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 255 pages
File Size : 42,6 Mb
Release : 1998-05-14
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780521622806

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Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud by Carolyn Dever Pdf

The cultural ideal of motherhood in Victorian Britain seems to be undermined by Victorian novels, which almost always represent mothers as incapacitated, abandoning or dead. Carolyn Dever argues that the phenomenon of the dead or missing mother in Victorian narrative is central to the construction of the good mother as a cultural ideal. Maternal loss is the prerequisite for Victorian representations of domestic life, a fact which has especially complex implications for women. When Freud constructs psychoanalytical models of family, gender and desire, he too assumes that domesticity begins with the death of the mother. Analysing texts by Dickens, Collins, Eliot, Darwin and Woolf, as well as Freud, Klein and Winnicott, Dever argues that fictional and theoretical narratives alike use maternal absence to articulate concerns about gender and representation. Psychoanalysis has long been used to analyse Victorian fiction; Dever contends that Victorian fiction has much to teach us about psychoanalysis.

Author : David Floyd
Publisher : University of Wales Press
Page : 272 pages
File Size : 46,8 Mb
Release : 2014-02-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781783160112

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Street Urchins, Sociopaths and Degenerates by David Floyd Pdf

From the notable emergence of orphan figures in late eighteenth-century literature, through early- and middle-period Victorian fiction and, as this book argues, well into the fin de siecle, this potent literary type is remarkable for its consistent recurrence and its metamorphosis as a register of cultural conditions. The striking ubiquity of orphans in the literature of these periods encourages inquiry into their metaphoric implications and the manner in which they function as barometers of burgeoning social concerns. The overwhelming majority of criticism focusing on orphans centres particularly on the form as an early- to middle-century convention, primarily found in social and domestic works; in effect, the non-traditional, aberrant, at times Gothic orphan of the fin de siecle has been largely overlooked, if not denied outright. This oversight has given rise to the need for a study of this potent cultural figure as it pertains to preoccupations characteristic of more recent instances. This book examines the noticeable difference between orphans of genre fiction of the fin de siecle and their predecessors in works including first-wave Gothic and the majority of Victorian fiction, and the variance of their symbolic references and cultural implications.

Author : Natalie McKnight
Publisher : Palgrave Macmillan
Page : 162 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 1997
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0312122950

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Suffering Mothers in Mid-Victorian Novels by Natalie McKnight Pdf

During the Victorian Era, women who became mothers faced unprecedented, unrealistic, and contradictory expectations from mainstream society. These expectations were expressed through a wide range of media including maternal guidebooks, popular periodicals, and Queen Victoria's maternal image. In Suffering Mothers in Mid-Victorian Novels, Natalie McKnight analyzes the influence of such cultural pressures on the fictional portrayals of mothers in mid-Victorian novels. Using a new historical and psychoanalytic approach, McKnight examines the climate created by a society that idolized mothers in theory but in reality positioned them to fail. The novels of Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Thackeray, and George Eliot are studied for their inclusion of mother characters who vary from the ambivalent to the monstrous, the angelic to the absent. In her thorough exploration of these novels, McKnight reveals the influences and the natures of characters who function more centrally in mid-Victorian fiction than has often been supposed.

Author : Kyra Wilder
Publisher : Abrams
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 42,7 Mb
Release : 2021-04-20
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781647001988

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Little Bandaged Days by Kyra Wilder Pdf

An emotionally charged, tautly composed debut thriller about motherhood, madness, and the myth of the perfect life A mother moves to Geneva with her husband and their two young children. In their beautiful new rented apartment, surrounded by their rented furniture, and several Swiss instructions to maintain quiet, she finds herself totally isolated. Her husband’s job means he is almost never present, and her entire world is caring for her children—making sure they are happy and fed and comfortable, and that they can be seen as the happy, well-fed, comfortable family they should be. Everything is perfect. But, of course, it’s not. The isolation, the sleeplessness, the demands of two people under two are getting to Erika. She has never been so alone, and once the children are asleep, there are just too many hours to fill until morning . . . Kyra Wilder’s Little Bandaged Days is a beautifully written, painfully claustrophobic story about a woman’s descent into madness. Unpredictable, frighteningly compelling, and brutally honest, it grapples with the harsh conditions of motherhood and this mother’s own identity, and as the novel continues, we begin to wonder just what exactly Erika might be driven to do.

Author : Anonim
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 322 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 1999
Category : Dialect literature, Scottish
ISBN : UCSC:32106015318972

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Scottish Literary Journal by Anonim Pdf

Author : Ellen Bayuk Rosenman,Claudia C. Klaver
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 368 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 2008
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : STANFORD:36105131673944

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Other Mothers by Ellen Bayuk Rosenman,Claudia C. Klaver Pdf

"Other Mothers, edited by Ellen Bayuk Rosenman and Claudia C. Klaver, offers a range of essays that open a conversation about Victorian motherhood as a wide-ranging, distinctive experience and idea. In spite of its importance, however, it is one of the least-studied aspects of the Victorian era, subsumed under discussions of femininity and domesticity." "Other Mothers joins revisionist approaches to femininity that now characterize Victorian studies. Its contents trace intersections among gender, race, and class; question the power of separate spheres ideology; and insist on the context-specific nature of social roles. The fifteen essays in this volume contribute to the fields of literary criticism, history, cultural studies, and history."--BOOK JACKET.

Author : Cecilia Wadsö Lecaros
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 328 pages
File Size : 46,7 Mb
Release : 2001
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : STANFORD:36105111395674

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The Victorian Governess Novel by Cecilia Wadsö Lecaros Pdf

An investigation of the Victorian governess novel as a specific genre. Based on a comprehensive set of nineteenth-century novels, governess manuals, articles and biographical material, it shows how the Victorian Governess novel made up a vital part of the governess debate, as well as of the more general debate on female education.

Author : Thea Tomaini
Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
Page : 255 pages
File Size : 52,6 Mb
Release : 2017
Category : History
ISBN : 9781783271948

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The Corpse as Text by Thea Tomaini Pdf

Between 1700 and 1900, the subject of disinterment (exhumation) attracted the attention of antiquaries, who constructed a comprehensive memory of the past by 'reading' corpses as documents describing an idealised past.

Author : Patsy Stoneman
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 212 pages
File Size : 51,8 Mb
Release : 2006
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : UCSC:32106019161105

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Elizabeth Gaskell by Patsy Stoneman Pdf

This pioneering study, described as 'a model of feminist criticism' (The Year's Work in English Studies) on first publication, revealed Gaskell as an important social analyst who deliberately challenged the Victorian disjunction between public and private ethical values, who maintained a steady resistance to aggressive authority, advocating female friendship, rational motherhood and the power of speech as forces for social change. This new edition presents the original text (except for bibliographical updating) together with a new and extensive critical 'Afterword'.