The Victoria Magazine Ed By E Faithfull

Covering a wide range of magazine work, including editing, illustration, poetry, needlework instruction and typesetting, this book provides fresh insights into the participation of women in the nineteenth-century magazine industry.

Until the Chace Act in 1891, no international copyright law existed between Britain and the United States, which meant publishers were free to edit text, excerpt whole passages, add new illustrations, and substantially redesign a book's appearance. In spite of this ongoing process of transatlantic transformation of texts, the metaphor of the book as a physical embodiment of its author persisted. Jessica DeSpain's study of this period of textual instability examines how the physical book acted as a major form of cultural exchange between Britain and the United States that called attention to volatile texts and the identities they manifested. Focusing on four influential works”Charles Dickens's American Notes for General Circulation, Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World, Fanny Kemble's Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation, and Walt Whitman's Democratic Vistas”DeSpain shows that for authors, readers, and publishers struggling with the unpredictability of the textual body, the physical book and the physical body became interchangeable metaphors of flux. At the same time, discourses of destabilized bodies inflected issues essential to transatlantic culture, including class, gender, religion, and slavery, while the practice of reprinting challenged the concepts of individual identity, personal property, and national identity.

The Educated Woman is a comparative study of the ideas on female nature that informed debates on women’s higher education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in three western European countries. Exploring the multi-layered roles of science and medicine in constructions of sexual difference in these debates, the book also pays attention to the variety of ways in which contemporary feminists negotiated and reconstituted conceptions of the female mind and its relationship to the body. While recognising similarities, Rowold shows how in each country the higher education debates and the underlying conceptions of women’s nature were shaped by distinct historical contexts.

The Edwardian period experienced a particularly vibrant periodical culture, with phenomenal growth in the numbers of titles published that were either aimed specifically at women, or else saw women as a key section of their readership or contributor group. It was an era of political ferment in which a number of 'progressive' traditions were formulated, shaped or abandoned, including socialism, feminism, modernism, empire politics, trade unionism and welfarism. Organized around some of the central themes of political thought and utopian thinking, this impressive collection gathers together classic articles from key periodicals. The set presents a comprehensive sourcebook of readings on Edwardian/Progressive era feminist thought, exploring the intervention of the radical public intellectuals working in these traditions in North America and the UK from 1900-1918.