Women S Writing Of The Victorian Period 1837 1901

This anthology brings together a selection of women's writings from the Victorian period (excluding fiction and drama). It covers a range of public and private genres from the period including poetry, critical essays, biography, travel literature, letters, diaries and journals.

This ground-breaking anthology brings together a wide selection of women's writings from the Victorian period (excluding fiction and drama), most of which cannot be easily found elsewhere.

Table of contents

Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1, Ernst Moritz Arndt University of Greifswald (IfAA), language: English, abstract: The Victorian Age is marked by enormous changes. Mark Twain expressed it this way: “and yet in a good many ways the world has moved farther ahead since the Queen was born than it moved in all the rest of the two thousand put together.” (Abrams 61993 : 891). Besides industrial and social changes, the era also saw a growth in literature, and great authors like Charles Dickens or Oscar Wilde who are still read today. Generally, the term ‘Victorian’ marks the time of Queen Victoria’s reign from 1837 till 1901, but it is often extended and for many historians it started with the passage of the first Reform Bill in 1832. Since the era comprises about seventy years, many drastic changes occurred during this time, and the distinguishing characteristics of the individual authors cannot be combined into a general mood. Consequently one cannot call it a homogenous period, and it is necessary to distinguish it into three different parts. Since the transitions were smooth, the exact division may differ between historians. The early phase is a period of changes and growth, but it also saw a depression and demonstrations of workmen. In the 1850s the Great Exhibition in 1851 and Darwin’s “On the Origin of the Species” in 1859 can be seen as the beginning of the middle period, a time of national prosperity. England was the leading industrial power, and English confidence was at its high point. The late Victorian period covers the last two decades of the century. It can be characterized by a general change of the Victorian mood: doubts and fear of decay dominated, and literature started to shatter into various very different forms. This term paper will give a brief overview over the conditions and the literature of the Victorian era. The diversity of the age will be shown and explained. Therefore each genre will be described separately. Furthermore I will summarize the works of major authors and while doing so show the contrasts between them.

The exuberant recovery from obscurity of scores of British women writers has prompted professors and publishers to revisit publication of women's writings. New curricular inclusion of these sometimes quirky, often passionate writers profoundly disrupts traditional pedagogical assumptions about what constitutes «literature». This book addresses this radically changed educational landscape, offering practical, proven teaching strategies for newly «recovered» writers, both in special-topics courses and in traditional teaching environments. Moreover, it addresses the institutional issues confronting feminist scholars who teach women writers in a variety of settings and the kinds of career-altering effects the decision to teach this material can have on junior and senior scholars alike. Collectively, these essays argue that teaching noncanonical women writers invigorates the curriculum as a whole, not only by introducing the voices of women writers, but by incorporating new genres, by asking new questions about readers' assumptions and aesthetic values, and by altering the power relations between teacher and student for the better.

Since the late twentieth century, there has been a strategic campaign to recover the impact of Victorian women writers in the field of English literature. However, with the increased understanding of the importance of interdisciplinarity in the twenty-first century, there is a need to extend this campaign beyond literary studies in order to recognise the role of women writers across the nineteenth century, a time that was intrinsically interdisciplinary in approach to scholarly writing and public intellectual engagement.

Deliberately excluded from this volume are fiction and drama but the anthology contains poetry, critical essays, diaries, travel literature, political commentary and journals. An introduction relates each text to the literature of the period.

Was the late nineteenth century 'Victorian' or 'modern'? Why did the New Woman disappear from literary history? Where did T. S. Eliot's poetics of the city come from? In this essential guide, Ruth Robbins explores an era often named an 'age of transition' which exists uneasily between the apparent certainties of the Victorians and the advent of a Modernist aesthetics of instability. Robbins considers some of the central literary categories and themes of the period (decadence, realism, nostalgia, New Woman writing, degeneration, imperialism and early modernism) in writings by both major and 'minor' writers, thereby creating a complex picture of transitions, continuities and breaks with the past. By examining this tumultuous era as an age in its own right, Pater to Forster, 1873-1924 offers the reader a rather different history of the late Victorians and Modernists, and retells that history from a new perspective.