Female Performers In British And American Fiction

The female performer with a public voice constitutes a remarkably vibrant theme in British and American narratives of the long nineteenth century. The tension between fictional female performers and other textual voices can be seen to refigure the cultural debate over the ‘voice’ of women in aesthetically complex ways. By focusing on singers, actresses, preachers and speakers, this book traces and explores an important tradition of feminine articulation. Drawing on critical approaches in literary studies, gender studies and philosophy, the book conceptualizes voice for the discussion of narrative texts. Examining voice both as a thematic concern and as an aesthetic effect, the individual chapters analyse how the actual articulation by female performers correlates with their cultural visibility and agency. What this study foregrounds is how women characters succeed in making themselves heard even if their voices are silenced in the end.

This book is concerned with the figure of the female performer in nineteenth-century fiction. It explores the attitudes of Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Emile Zola towards women’s appearances on political daises and theatrical stages. Literature as a cultural force can either boost women’s participation in public life or bolster the patriarchal ideology. The book verifies Henry James’s feminist ideology that lies behind the positive representation of women’s political activism and acting, as two different modes of performance, through a comparative study between him and two of his contemporary novelists. It reflects the clash of opinions among nineteenth-century American and French authors on the issue of women’s public manifestation as caught between the spectacular and the political. While some writers have deemed it an exhibitionist demeanour, others have considered it a commitment to the feminist project. The first section shows how a feminist reading in the history of European and American female performers as emerging figures in the nineteenth century can help to understand the position of the figure in the literary works of the period. Nathaniel Hawthorne is shown to be an author who holds the same feminist temperament as James through his portrayal of a talented political rhetorician in his novel The Blithedale Romance, which is compared to James’s The Bostonians in the second section. The final part conducts a study in contrasts between James’s supportive rendering of the actress in The Tragic Muse and Emile Zola’s derogatory stereotyping of the female performer as a prostitute in his novel Nana.

This book examines how African-American writers and visual artists interweave icon and inscription in order to re-present the black female body, traditionally rendered alien and inarticulate within Western discursive and visual systems. Brown considers how the writings of Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, Paule Marshall, Edwidge Danticat, Jamaica Kincaid, Andrea Lee, Gloria Naylor, and Martha Southgate are bound to such contemporary, postmodern visual artists as Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, Kara Walker, Betye Saar, and Faith Ringgold. While the artists and authors rely on radically different media—photos, collage, video, and assembled objects, as opposed to words and rhythm—both sets of intellectual activists insist on the primacy of the black aesthetic. Both assert artistic agency and cultural continuity in the face of the oppression, social transformation, and cultural multiplicity of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This book examines how African-American performative practices mediate the tension between the ostensibly de-racialized body politic and the hyper-racialized black, female body, reimagining the cultural and political ground that guides various articulations of American national belonging. Brown shows how and why black women writers and artists matter as agents of change, how and why the form and content of their works must be recognized and reconsidered in the increasingly frenzied arena of cultural production and political debate.

This book examines school and college fiction for girls in Britain and the United States, written in the first half of the twentieth century, to explore the formation and ideologies of feminine identity. Nancy G. Rosoff and Stephanie Spencer develop a transnational framework that recognises how both constructed and essential femininities transcend national boundaries. The book discusses the significance and performance of female friendship across time and place, which is central to the development of the genre, and how it functioned as an important means of informal education. Stories by Jessie Graham Flower, Pauline Lester, Alice Ross Colver, Elinor Brent-Dyer, and Dorita Fairlie Bruce are set within their historical context and then used to explore aspects of sociability, authority, responsibility, domesticity, and possibility. The distinctiveness of this book stems from the historical analysis of these sources, which have so far primarily been treated by literary scholars within their national context. Winner of the History of Education Society Anne Bloomfield Prize for the best book on history of education published in English 2017-19

"By comparing 'ideologies surrounding women and books' on both sides of the Atlantic, it offers new interpretations of canonical texts in a series of fascinating pairings of British and American texts. . . . The most original aspect of the book is its examination of the woman reader as she appeared in illustrations in popular novels and the way illustration functioned as 'a vehicle for illuminating issues of gender.'"--Emma Liggins, coeditor of Feminist Readings of Victorian Popular Texts, Edge Hill College of Higher Education, Lancashire, U.K. "Argues persuasively that female reading practice was highly varied and hotly contested in this period and that this fact gave rise to a wide range of artistic representations. By examining visual as well as verbal material, she distinguishes her analysis and appeals to a wide scholarly audience."--Linda J. Docherty, Bowdoin College For Victorian women, danger lurked between the covers of a book. In an exploration of this controversial notion, Catherine Golden examines women and reading in literary and visual representations in Britain and America. Illustrated with 42 pictures by popular and renowned artists of the era, her book vividly brings to life the world of the 19th- and early 20th-century female reader. While industrialization was transforming print culture, Victorian women on both sides of the Atlantic made great strides in education, and reading came to be seen as a mark of gentility and a means to promote family unity. But at the same time, a perceived association between excessive novel reading and ill health raised alarm: the prospect of unchecked reading coupled with an overactive imagination led critics to debate if, what, when, where, and why middle- and upper-class women should read. Golden presents a concise historical framework of the topic and examines how authors and illustrators responded to the arguments for and against women's reading. She discusses heroines in both popular and intellectual works by writers such as Charles Dickens, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, George Eliot, William Makepeace Thackeray, Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Henry James, and depictions of the woman reader by prominent illustrators such as George Cruikshank, Jessie Willcox Smith, and Hablot Knight Browne. She also includes biographies of both authors and illustrators and analyzes how they used reading as a literary, expressive, or political device. With its focus on the power of reading and of book illustration as well as its attention to primary materials and gender issues and its discussion of texts widely used in college teaching, this book will be valuable across a range of disciplines that include literature, history, art history, women's studies, and the study of the book. Catherine J. Golden, professor of English at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York, is the editor or coeditor of four books, most recently The Mixed Legacy of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Text, Image, and Culture, 1770-1930.

Between January 1880 and December 1889, Harper's Monthly Magazine published 263 works of fiction; half of these were written by women. Judging by the popularity of contemporary mass-circulation magazines. women writers of the late nineteenth century enjoyed equal opportunity in the world of commercial publishing. Yet although they wrote best-sellers and won prizes, the institutions that keep writers and their reputations alive chose not to sustain these writers, and few are familiar today; Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton. Elsa Nettels suggests that this lack of parity is not surprising in a culture that for centuries has used" masculine" to describe all things strong and dominant, while "feminine" has signified weakness and inferiority. In Victorian America, the relation of literary style to gender became of increasing interest as women writers became ever more prominent. In the influential magazines of the late nineteenth century -- Harper's, Century, Scribner's, Atlantic Monthly, Cosmopolitan, and Ladies' Home Journal -- writers directly or implicitly reflected society's views of the sexes and the proper roles of men and women. In this intelligent and accessible book, the author examines how William Dean Howells, Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Willa Cather helped both to perpetuate and to subvert Victorian America's ideology of language and gender. All had fruitful careers as novelists, editors, and critics, and she demonstrates that each was in a unique position to affect popular language and gender stereotypes. To gauge their responses to the pervasive assumptions held by the magazines that published them, Nettels traces how these writersdefined "masculine" and "feminine" in their works, how they characterized women's speech and language, how they distinguished male and female discourse, and where they invested authority in matters of usage. Taking into account others engaged in the Victorian construction of gender such as grammarians, linguists, sociologists, and writers on etiquette, Nettels offers a compelling look at the cultural perpetuation of ideologies, as well as fascinating scholarship on four authors who manipulated social mores to establish their place in American literature.