The Victorian Woman Question In Contemporary Feminist Fiction

The Victorian Woman Question in Contemporary Feminist Fiction explores the representation of Victorian womanhood in the work of some of today's most important British and North American novelists including A.S. Byatt, Sarah Waters, Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter and Toni Morrison. By analysing these novels in the context of the scientific, religious and literary discourses that shaped Victorian ideas about gender, it contributes to an important inter-disciplinary debate. For while showing the power of these discourses to shape women's roles, the novels also suggest how individual women might challenge that power through their own lives.

This book was first published in 1999. This collection of essays by leading scholars from Britain, the USA and Canada opens up the limited landscape of Victorian novels by focusing attention on some of the women writers popular in their own time but forgotten or neglected by literary history. Spanning the entire Victorian period, this study investigates particularly the role and treatment of 'the woman question' in the second half of the century. There are discussions of marriage, matriarchy and divorce, satire, suffragette writing, writing for children, and links between literature and art. Moving from Margaret Oliphant and Charlotte Mary Yonge to Mary Ward, Marie Corelli, 'Ouida' and E. Nesbit, this book illuminates the complex cultural and literary roles, and the engaging contributions, of Victorian women writers.

This collection of essays explores the social and cultural aspects of steampunk, examining the various manifestations of this multi-faceted genre, in order to better understand the steampunk sub-culture and its effect on--and interrelationship with--popular culture and the wider society.

This book brings together for the first time nine groundbreaking historical novels by women from the United States, Canada and Latin America, united by their focus on female adventurers. These novels introduce the neglected women of history, real and imagined, who accompanied their menfolk to the New World, and enabled its settlement or colonisation. Familiar novelists include Isabel Allende, Audrey Thomas and Jane Smiley, but this book also introduces less familiar writers who have produced richly textured and densely historical novels. In addition to putting women back into history, these writers engage with the literature of the past, including the American canon of male fiction which dominated literary history before the intervention of feminist scholars. The book begins with an introduction to the history of historical fiction and provides a theoretical, historical and geographical context for the novels themselves.

By examining the way that novels influenced and were influenced by the domestic ideology of womanhood, this book demonstrates how Victorian novels contributed to the imaginative and ideological changes of that important aspect of female emancipation, women's work.

By comparing fictional representations with "real" New Women in late-Victorian Britain, Sally Ledger makes a major contribution to an understanding of the "Woman Question" at the end of the century. Chapters on imperialism, socialism, sexual decadence, and metropolitan life situate the "revolting daughters" of the Victorian age in a broader cultural context than previous studies.

Placing the popular genre of neo-Victorian fiction within the context of the contemporary cultural fascination with the Victorians, this book argues that these novels are distinguished by a commitment to historical specificity and understands them within their contemporary context and the context of Victorian historical and literary narratives.

This book maps the most active and vibrant period in the history of British women's writing. Examining changes and continuities in fiction, poetry, drama, and journalism, as well as women's engagement with a range of literary and popular genres, the essays in this volume highlight the range and diversity of women's writing since 1970.